This might be the most conflicted I've felt about a 2023 release.

Like what a lot of people have already said, the mechanics are tough to wrap your head around with the mixture of Trials/Excitebike traversal and 2D twin-stick shooter combat with one-hit kills. It's incredibly thrilling and satisfying to pull off some of the motorbike bullet-time acrobatics, but this game also gave me two of the most frustrating combat sequences I've had all year. There are unnecessarily difficult mechanics that make some sections just tedious and aggravating.

Still, I admire the boldness in the direction that really clicks when you get into a weird stop-and-start flow state a la Hotline Miami. Closest thing that plays like it is Rollerdrome, which I ultimately prefer on a mechanical level, especially with its decision to not punish the player for not landing on your feet. While there's a practical reason for the growing homogeneity of video game control schemes, I can't help but respect a game that bucks that trend and comes up with its own set of controls to create unique moment-to-moment gameplay.

It's up there with Alan Wake 2, Hi-Fi Rush, and Season: A Letter to the Future for delivering the best aesthetic experiences in 2023 video games. Just a fantastic cartoony visual style reflected in the memorable character designs, striking background art, and the bombed-out brown and bloody red color palette.

The soundtrack is appropriately somber yet has this driving undercurrent of pent-up emotion brought to life by the beautiful breathy reverb-heavy feminine vocals, soft and sometimes relentless percussions, clean plucky melodic guitars, and melancholic keys.

It's a fuckin' mood biking through the desert wasteland of your war-torn home country devastated by avian colonizers with evocative place names like "Where the Doom Fell", "Where the Waves Die", and "Where Iron Caresses the Sky".

The narrative goes to some real dark places that aren't in any way softened by the cartoon animal characters. It's a game about dealing with the burdens of motherhood and the different ways of surviving and resisting under the brutal cruelty of imperialist forces. The cast goes about dealing with these challenges in very human ways, some of which are selfless and self-serving, all of which are written to be understandable if not relatable. The dialogue in particular is cutting in its raw honesty. It's not without moments of levity, but by and large it tells stories of suffering with a sense of poignancy.

All in all, it really is a special kind of game that I have a hard time recommending to just anyone. It's uncompromising in its vision, both in its mechanics and in its narrative. You need to have a ton of patience for its difficulty, and you need to have a strong stomach for its storytelling turns.

It's pretty much Breath of the Wild but better in every single way.

The new set of abilities and the addition of the Sky Islands+Depths are so transformative with how you engage with the world on all levels, whether it's through exploration, traversal, puzzle-solving, and combat, to the degree that my enjoyment for all four aspects has significantly increased compared to BOTW.

I only really enjoyed exploring and some of the moment-to-moment traversal mechanics in BOTW, while I thought the puzzles were too rudimentary and gimmicky, and the combat I actively avoided because it was either boring or frustrating.

In TOTK, the exploration and traversal are best-in-class for open world games, the puzzles are a lot more interesting to solve (although there are still some annoying shrines that feel too gimmicky with the cartoon physics bullshit), and I can now tolerate doing some combat. I also think the temples are a clear step up from the Divine Beasts because of the implementation of the new abilities.

Thought the story would be more substantial this time around, but even though there were some cool scenes here and there, it's still nothing to write home about like BOTW's story. Voice acting still sucks like it sucked back then! I guess Ganondorf sounds appropriately evil in that intimidating way.

I have some nitpicks like how finicky manipulating stuff and ordering the sages can be, how clunky some of the controls are, and how it's still very much an open world game that falls into patterns of content types that eventually saps the sense of wonder from the experience. I can be quite the completionist with big games, but I didn't get that itch with TOTK. In the end though, it's all minor stuff that doesn't take away from the largely good time I had.