Breath of the Wild was one of the best games I’ve ever played. Tears of the Kingdom is simultaneously even better and less perfect. Pretty much everything about the game feels great - the movement through the world, the powers, the combat (even if it’s still pretty simple), and especially the exploration. They’ve packed so much stuff into this huge world , and in my whole time playing I felt like I could always see multiple things in the distance that I wanted to check out. And any time I set off to do one thing I’d always get distracted by something else, like an unexpected cave or sky island. Because of this I often found myself getting into a flow where exploring one area led organically to exploring another. This happened to me in the skies and on the surface and in the depths, and that flow felt very different to me in each location. I think it’s some of the best exploration I’ve seen in a game.

At the same time, the world is possibly too big. There’s so much stuff to do, and a lot of it is very fun, but it can definitely be overwhelming. Particularly in the earlier parts of the game, I felt like I had so much freedom and so little guidance that I constantly suspected I was missing something or doing something wrong. I knew it was possible to miss the glider; what other key items or abilities might I have missed out on by going the wrong way? Was I going to ruin the pacing of the story for myself by collecting all of the memories as soon as possible (it turned out I kind of did)? The sky and the depths are both very cool but I felt like there could have been more to them. The sky islands especially ended up feeling kinda same-y. The rewards for exploration and major side quests are also largely underwhelming (mostly armor that came from DLC or amiibos in BOTW). The quests and exploration are rewarding enough by themselves, but it felt like a weird choice to give these types of things as rewards.

I enjoyed the story a lot, especially Zelda’s part in it. I really appreciated how much agency they gave her this time. I do wish they gave us more of Ganondorf, partly because he is very hot but mostly because giving him a human form allows for more exploration of who he is as a character and what his motivations are, beyond just being a giant monster who wants to destroy/rule the world. We didn’t really get any of that here, beyond one or two scenes. It’s a shame because overall I thought the writing and characters were very good.

For all the flaws I mentioned and others (e.g. dungeons were hit or miss), I still had such a good time with this game. As always I can’t wait to see what’s next for the Zelda series.