Great game but a mixed bag of a sequel. The dungeons are a straight upgrade over the divine beasts and they even fleshed out the story aspect quite a bit. The boss fights aren't all great but I'm very glad that it's not just different flavors of blight ganons this time. While the dungeons are an improvement, I found the shrines to be a lot weaker this time around. The vast majority were incredibly simple and I can count on my hand the number of shrines that actually stumped me.
The building mechanic is interesting, but you're rarely forced to use it in creative ways. The crazy twitter videos are fun but as far as my experience goes that mechanic is mainly just used to stick fans and wheels on objects over and over again for the same handful of results. When it comes to using it for shrines, any solution beyond the basics is typically just shown to you and the challenge is fumbling with the controls to stick it together correctly. Fuse was also fairly underwhelming since it doesn't significantly change combat and usually just grants an attack buff or common status effect. Ironically Ascend ended up being my favorite ability due to how forgettable it was and it led to some fun moments where I got stuck wondering what to do, and suddenly remembered I can just shoot straight up through half a mile of rock.
The world certainly feels different enough, but the exploration largely lacked novelty since it's built on top of BOTW and you're still mostly doing the same things. Shooting up in the sky is pretty fun just due to the sheer verticality of the world design but there's really not much interesting going on up there. The depths are cool conceptually and at least contain some dungeons but the drab aesthetic and constant darkness get tiring if you're down there for a substantial amount of time.
The story isn't going to win any awards, but there are plenty of cool scenes this time around and they do a decent job of giving Zelda herself more significance as well as making some kino master sword and final boss sequences. I am very annoyed at whichever nintendo employee in the sound department keeps forgoing basic volume controls because I could barely hear anyone speaking over the music and sound effects.
Despite this just sounding like a laundry list of complaints, I really did have a good time and I'm just judging it in comparison to BOTW. It certainly ended up being better than I expected given how similar it looked to BOTW pre-release. I'll be very weary if they go for a 3rd game in this exact style though.
The building mechanic is interesting, but you're rarely forced to use it in creative ways. The crazy twitter videos are fun but as far as my experience goes that mechanic is mainly just used to stick fans and wheels on objects over and over again for the same handful of results. When it comes to using it for shrines, any solution beyond the basics is typically just shown to you and the challenge is fumbling with the controls to stick it together correctly. Fuse was also fairly underwhelming since it doesn't significantly change combat and usually just grants an attack buff or common status effect. Ironically Ascend ended up being my favorite ability due to how forgettable it was and it led to some fun moments where I got stuck wondering what to do, and suddenly remembered I can just shoot straight up through half a mile of rock.
The world certainly feels different enough, but the exploration largely lacked novelty since it's built on top of BOTW and you're still mostly doing the same things. Shooting up in the sky is pretty fun just due to the sheer verticality of the world design but there's really not much interesting going on up there. The depths are cool conceptually and at least contain some dungeons but the drab aesthetic and constant darkness get tiring if you're down there for a substantial amount of time.
The story isn't going to win any awards, but there are plenty of cool scenes this time around and they do a decent job of giving Zelda herself more significance as well as making some kino master sword and final boss sequences. I am very annoyed at whichever nintendo employee in the sound department keeps forgoing basic volume controls because I could barely hear anyone speaking over the music and sound effects.
Despite this just sounding like a laundry list of complaints, I really did have a good time and I'm just judging it in comparison to BOTW. It certainly ended up being better than I expected given how similar it looked to BOTW pre-release. I'll be very weary if they go for a 3rd game in this exact style though.