There's a lot of thoughts rattling around in my head about this game, since I put so much time into it and spaced the play sessions out as much as I did due to playing it with a friend, so this will be a much more ramshackle writeup than usual, but here goes.
This whole game feels like a giant love letter to The Legend of Zelda as both a series and a concept, boiling down what makes things fun and interesting to the most essential of ideas and refining those ideas to the best they can be. The sense of adventure I had while playing this is second to none; I'm not the type to actively roam around an open world game without something to do, but I found myself doing that a lot playing this. "Oh, I see a thing in the distance, I'll go fly there!" It really unlocks a very pure, childlike sense of wonder that stays with you the whole game, at least in the open world sections.
Now, using that last caveat as a segue, I want to talk about where this game's fatal flaw for me: its main quest. It's not bad, not by any stretch, but playing this game knowing you have to "do something" accentuates the overly sparse open world to a fault. When you're exploring, it feels intriguing and mysterious. When you're traveling, it feels tedious and incredibly monotonous; one too many cases of "holding up on the joystick for 5 minutes". If the main quest was its own thing in the background, that'd be one thing, but every major area you go to mentions the Divine Beasts and how they're making things go crazy and whatnot. It feels like the game's constantly tapping on your shoulder to remind you of something you literally could not forget about, and it got really annoying when my tolerance wore completely thin (specifically around the desert area).
Said Divine Beasts are one of two contentious replacements for the traditional dungeons/temples in a Zelda game, the other being Shrines. I'm mixed on how I feel about both. I think the puzzles in both the Beasts and the Shrines are serviceable and give a nice feeling of satisfaction a majority of the time, and the act of discovering particularly hidden Shrines in the open world is an absolute delight that can not be understated, but I wouldn't be telling the truth if I said I'm fully okay with this change. The reason I love Twilight Princess so much is because of how long and winding the dungeons were; they felt like true hidden temples lost to time that you were peeling back the mystery of. Outside of TP, the temples in the other games still had a level of mystique and atmosphere to them that the Shrines and Beasts are almost entirely lacking; the Shrines with their identical visual and audio design and the Beasts with their much too repetitive gimmicks that lack the lengthy, puzzling feel from dungeons of yore. That being said, I believe the bite-sized nature of the Shrines works well for a game of this scale while still keeping the general vibe of Zelda, so in the end it's mostly a success.
I do have one major nitpick with this game, and it is certainly a nitpick, but it is also major enough for me to give its own paragraph. The warp points in this game feel completely unthought-out and, at worst, actively immersion-breaking. The two main places you can warp to are Shrines and Towers. Okay, that makes sense; Shrines act as little warps for your map to both give a sense of understanding the land more as well as act as encouragement to explore so you can return to where you are more often, and Towers act as vantage points to let you scope out a region more thoroughly. However, it bothers me to no avail that they place a Shrine near important locations such as villages or stables to act as a warp point, because it takes the discovery aspect of that specific Shrine away, and reveals too much of the "gaminess" in the design. That Shrine no longer feels like a secret meant to be uncovered, it instead feels like a checkpoint to make sure you could come back later with ease. If you're going to put a Shrine near areas of importance, why not just let us warp to those areas!!! It's not even that far away, it would preserve a lot more of the magic of Shrines while still letting the player get to important locations. Plus, there are random exceptions made with the Labs being warp points, so why can't villages and stables be too arrrahhaargggh this has bothered me the entire playthrough and it feels cathartic to finally get out let's move on!!!!!!!!!
Yeah, that's about all I want to say. I have more thoughts on the game but they're really not important enough to list off here, so I'll leave with a summary of what all this means. This game is special. No matter how many times I complained about the combat, no matter how many times the cracks showed and I put on my nitpicking cap, no matter how many times I got actively frustrated with some of the controls, it doesn't take away from the truly enchanting feeling of adventure that weaves its way through you at every step. Go, chop that tree. Ride that horse. Climb that mountain. Slash those monsters. Run through those plains. Be a kid again. Have fun.
This whole game feels like a giant love letter to The Legend of Zelda as both a series and a concept, boiling down what makes things fun and interesting to the most essential of ideas and refining those ideas to the best they can be. The sense of adventure I had while playing this is second to none; I'm not the type to actively roam around an open world game without something to do, but I found myself doing that a lot playing this. "Oh, I see a thing in the distance, I'll go fly there!" It really unlocks a very pure, childlike sense of wonder that stays with you the whole game, at least in the open world sections.
Now, using that last caveat as a segue, I want to talk about where this game's fatal flaw for me: its main quest. It's not bad, not by any stretch, but playing this game knowing you have to "do something" accentuates the overly sparse open world to a fault. When you're exploring, it feels intriguing and mysterious. When you're traveling, it feels tedious and incredibly monotonous; one too many cases of "holding up on the joystick for 5 minutes". If the main quest was its own thing in the background, that'd be one thing, but every major area you go to mentions the Divine Beasts and how they're making things go crazy and whatnot. It feels like the game's constantly tapping on your shoulder to remind you of something you literally could not forget about, and it got really annoying when my tolerance wore completely thin (specifically around the desert area).
Said Divine Beasts are one of two contentious replacements for the traditional dungeons/temples in a Zelda game, the other being Shrines. I'm mixed on how I feel about both. I think the puzzles in both the Beasts and the Shrines are serviceable and give a nice feeling of satisfaction a majority of the time, and the act of discovering particularly hidden Shrines in the open world is an absolute delight that can not be understated, but I wouldn't be telling the truth if I said I'm fully okay with this change. The reason I love Twilight Princess so much is because of how long and winding the dungeons were; they felt like true hidden temples lost to time that you were peeling back the mystery of. Outside of TP, the temples in the other games still had a level of mystique and atmosphere to them that the Shrines and Beasts are almost entirely lacking; the Shrines with their identical visual and audio design and the Beasts with their much too repetitive gimmicks that lack the lengthy, puzzling feel from dungeons of yore. That being said, I believe the bite-sized nature of the Shrines works well for a game of this scale while still keeping the general vibe of Zelda, so in the end it's mostly a success.
I do have one major nitpick with this game, and it is certainly a nitpick, but it is also major enough for me to give its own paragraph. The warp points in this game feel completely unthought-out and, at worst, actively immersion-breaking. The two main places you can warp to are Shrines and Towers. Okay, that makes sense; Shrines act as little warps for your map to both give a sense of understanding the land more as well as act as encouragement to explore so you can return to where you are more often, and Towers act as vantage points to let you scope out a region more thoroughly. However, it bothers me to no avail that they place a Shrine near important locations such as villages or stables to act as a warp point, because it takes the discovery aspect of that specific Shrine away, and reveals too much of the "gaminess" in the design. That Shrine no longer feels like a secret meant to be uncovered, it instead feels like a checkpoint to make sure you could come back later with ease. If you're going to put a Shrine near areas of importance, why not just let us warp to those areas!!! It's not even that far away, it would preserve a lot more of the magic of Shrines while still letting the player get to important locations. Plus, there are random exceptions made with the Labs being warp points, so why can't villages and stables be too arrrahhaargggh this has bothered me the entire playthrough and it feels cathartic to finally get out let's move on!!!!!!!!!
Yeah, that's about all I want to say. I have more thoughts on the game but they're really not important enough to list off here, so I'll leave with a summary of what all this means. This game is special. No matter how many times I complained about the combat, no matter how many times the cracks showed and I put on my nitpicking cap, no matter how many times I got actively frustrated with some of the controls, it doesn't take away from the truly enchanting feeling of adventure that weaves its way through you at every step. Go, chop that tree. Ride that horse. Climb that mountain. Slash those monsters. Run through those plains. Be a kid again. Have fun.