I still haven't finished this but I'm nonetheless ~200 hours into it and counting so like. I feel like that's fair to just do a little text review of it. Especially minding at this rate I might not even get to finish it before 2023 is over lol.
This game is nice in that it boldly acknowledges it objectively cannot have the same magic BotW did and just decides to be to BotW what Pokemon Black 2 and White 2 were to the original Black and White, and for the most part I mean that as a compliment. It's a bigger, better, ultra deluxe version of BotW with far more to do.
The game is at its peak when you're doing the various things like shrines and temples and various other environmental puzzles that have a frankly ridiculous amount of possible solutions. Every TotK run is personalized, you're just given what are essentially a fistful of Legos and told to build whatever you'd like that you think would solve the problem.
I just think the game suffers from DK64 syndrome where it's just bigger than it knows how to handle. The Depths and the sky islands are impressive on paper, but in execution they very much just turned into boring globetrotting where I just built that one machine that's just a steering stick and two fans (you know the one) to just get em done and over with. There's a lot of interesting things in the Depths, but a lot of it still amounted to a lot of walking, and the atmosphere wasn't as oppressive as I think they thought it was.
I love this game still, and maybe I'll come around to it on a repeat playthrough where the pressure to experience it all as fast as possible is off and I can just take it in as it is. I'm just glad the next open-world Zelda won't be for another half-a-decade.
This game is nice in that it boldly acknowledges it objectively cannot have the same magic BotW did and just decides to be to BotW what Pokemon Black 2 and White 2 were to the original Black and White, and for the most part I mean that as a compliment. It's a bigger, better, ultra deluxe version of BotW with far more to do.
The game is at its peak when you're doing the various things like shrines and temples and various other environmental puzzles that have a frankly ridiculous amount of possible solutions. Every TotK run is personalized, you're just given what are essentially a fistful of Legos and told to build whatever you'd like that you think would solve the problem.
I just think the game suffers from DK64 syndrome where it's just bigger than it knows how to handle. The Depths and the sky islands are impressive on paper, but in execution they very much just turned into boring globetrotting where I just built that one machine that's just a steering stick and two fans (you know the one) to just get em done and over with. There's a lot of interesting things in the Depths, but a lot of it still amounted to a lot of walking, and the atmosphere wasn't as oppressive as I think they thought it was.
I love this game still, and maybe I'll come around to it on a repeat playthrough where the pressure to experience it all as fast as possible is off and I can just take it in as it is. I'm just glad the next open-world Zelda won't be for another half-a-decade.