Oh FOMO, what a devil you are.

I was stupid, truly. This is my cross to bear. Hearing people say, 'It's like BOTW but it has a lot of the bad things removed!' 'It's BOTW but better!' 'Look, you can make a gingerbread man with a dick and get 10k retweets!'. The temptation, it got me to try a game I knew, KNEW I wouldn't like, but I felt some horrible urge to try nonetheless.

Largely, I find TOTK to be a project made from hubris. That you can generate a ton of hype and a huge amount of time on a development cycle to do absolutely fucking nothing, and still turn a profit. It's the same world, the same boring design, the same shrines, the same korok seeds. Except now, you have the option to play fortnite in the middle. What a concept. Give players the opportunity to make elaborate but ultimately pointless shit to do the marketing for you.

Dare venture into the depths or the sky, and it will feel briefly like a true sequel to the original BOTW, with new ideas and concepts being thrown around, but don't stay too long or else you'll discover that they are completely devoid of anything meaningful besides their novelty.

When people say this is BOTW but more polished, I have to wonder what people are talking about. This has -EVERY- issue that BOTW has, down to the bone marrow. It's almost like it's the same game, and the extra content was previously planned DLC or something! Same garbage item degradation, same green expanse of nothing of which most of your time is spent holding up, same repetitive shrines. Is Fortnite really that impressive to people? Am I the insane one here?

This game somehow feels more like a demo than the first game did, an idea sold not on the game it is, but what iteration on a formula could produce. Which, considering the long dev cycle this game had, isn't something I'm looking forward to.

Honestly the most baffled reaction I've had to a game in while. The lead up to the release and the demo I was sure this game was an easy 5 stars GOTY.

Biggest problem is absolutely the pacing, the game alternates with huge epic set piece fights and then has you wandering around a village doing fetch quests for generic NPCs for hours. Those boss fights are incredible but by the time I quit (After the post-titan slog) I felt like they made up a tiny chunk of the overall story.

Gameplay wise it's also very strange. It feels amazing to play at first but after unlocking the second eikon it felt like I'd seen everything it had to offer. All combat encounters started to feel like a slog of the same combo into eikon abilities into dodge over and over. It's make me think of a game like metal gear rising, which also has not the deepest combat and is kind of weak outside of the boss fights. But that game's only 5 hours long, not a 60 hour epic, which stops it from ever feeling tedious.

RPG mechanics are also non-existent. Clive can upgrade his gear every now and then for a tiny increase in armor. I know the team was more interested in making an action game then an RPG but there needs to be some kind of significant progression system with a game this long. It felt like I was the same at hour 30 as I was at hour 5.