A brilliant experience of exploration and puzzle solving. There are some "firsts" during your playthrough that stay with you.

To me it feels like a space game should be. I do not want to explore a whole universe made up of empty places. I want to explore a place that tells me something.

The DLC I feel it's even better.

After almost 125 hours I've completed what I understand as my main end goal with Tears of the Kingdom - All shrines, all roots, and the story is complete.

First point, Tears of the Kingdom is better and improves aspects of Breath of the Wild. But we are not yet at a perfect game.

Tears of the Kingdom is at the same time a real sequence to Breath of the Wild while it is sometimes too shy to make the world recognize Link's actions from the previous game. Aside from the support characters, the rest of the world doesn’t act like they know you. This is a minor grip that I have, but it is of course to make it playable by new people joining the Zelda series with TotK.

While BotW presented us with new abilities to Link, I feel like TotK vastly improved what is available to us. At the trailers that showed the building aspect of TotK I was afraid that I wouldn’t like the mechanic, but I’m happy to say that I was wrong. The learning curve is simple, and the game isn’t afraid to give you all the pieces you need in order to avoid frustration. Not having an infinite source of bombs was strange but there are so many new items to fuse that it is rare to find yourself without resources. Recall and Ascend hugely facilitate how you move in the game, especially vertically, something that is sometimes a chore in BotW.

I was never as angry as other people with the weapon system of BotW. I think it worked okay, but you definitely avoided battling enemies to save your weapons. TotK solves this letting you fuse absolutely anything to your weapons. Weapons are decayed, so you absolutely need to find something to make them better, and there is always something. Enemies will drop great materials so fighting them becomes an incentive this time, and the enemy variety is much more interesting this time.

The main criticism about BotW might be the lack of “True Zelda Dungeons” because the Divine Beasts were too similar between each other. I believe the Temples of TotK are a step in the right direction. The quests to get to them and themselves are better handled, with better puzzles and they are more unique. I still think they are too fixed on the same ideas of finding the five different points to reach the boss, but we do get different bosses which is a big improvement. I feel we do need limitation at the temples/dungeons, maybe items/powers we are only able to use there?

This relates directly to a problem that was true at BotW and remains in TotK. The progression feeling is limited. You basically have all the tools right from the start, gaining only some help from your companions/summons after each temple. It is a trick problem to solve in an open world game and I don’t have the solution, but I would love to be presented with other mechanics and powers throughout the game.

120 shrines in BotW, 152 in TotK. They were improved and combat shrines have a gimmick to them instead of a banal fight. They are still too short and too many. I did them all, I had fun, but most are not memorable. Could we have half of that but maybe make them a bit longer? There are shrines where you solve it all in under 3 minutes. Are we trying to make a game that lets people play by small bits and at the same time making it gigantic? I think that is a conflict of ideas. After a while there isn’t dopamine for solving those small puzzles.

The Depths were a cool addition but once again, maybe too much. Your first journeys there are awesome, but it ends up being pretty repetitive. I was opening map for the sake of opening map (which does help with the surface goals), and I even had to stop playing for a couple of days just to stop myself from being burned out.

I feel like the world is more alive with some many things present on it and that was a great improvement. I think there is space for more things happening in the world that are not necessarily some puzzle we need to solve.

Now with story… BotW told its whole story through flashbacks. I liked it because Link was asleep for 100 years and you were remembering key points of his past through the memory system. It was able to make me care about the Champions but at the same time it didn’t make us active actors of what was happening. There was room for improvement. I’d say that TotK tried to tell a cooler story but barely made it better.

Relying in the same aspect of flashbacks does not work the same way here. Link wasn’t at those scenes in the past, he is merely learning something new. And unfortunately watching the memories does not make Link act like he knows what happened to Zelda. At no point your interaction with other characters acknowledges that you already learned where Zelda is. It feels wrong.

The memories at the end of Temples were so repetitive it is difficult to understand why we had to watch that everytime. And why we do not see the faces of the Old Sages? So silly.

I do think the history told at the past here is more exciting than in BotW. But I wish we were active participants of that. I think there isn’t enough Ganondorf which is a pity, it had a cool design and could be a great villain. Even at the memories there isn’t enough of him. I wish we could have the memories but also bigger story points happening at the present. Some highs and lows happening throughout your journey would be great. We end up again victims of having too much freedom about the order we do things at the game.

And maybe some consequences would be great. Just a little bit of things that can’t be saved or the loss of an ally could take some things to another level. But I’m probably asking too much of a leap of Nintendo’s view for the series.

Musically ToTk is better. I felt the music present this time when comparing to BotW. But we are not at Ocarina of Time music level, unfortunately.

Visually I love it. The only problem is the limitation of the hardware. I stopped playing in a big TV because it was feeling bizarre and played most of the time in a 21” monitor. Frames suffer if you are handling too many items with your powers, but I don’t think that brings any problems to the gameplay, but it wouldn’t happen if we weren’t running the game on a 6-year-old tablet.

In the end, I loved Tears of the Kingdom and since I’ve finished my main goals, I’ve played 20 more hours to do more stuff, collect more things, and simply walk through Hyrule and I want to keep playing it but in a more controlled pace.

I feel that I’m ready for a new chapter of the Zelda series for the future, even if BotW and TotK were amazing experiences. My final score for TotK would be 9.0/10.0.