This might be nostalgia speaking but I think on the whole I prefer smaller, tighter Zelda games. There’s a certain point where exploration loses a bit of that exciting new sheen. Also, while I appreciate that the Gerudo have had more emphasis placed on their heroic characters and the Hylians themselves are more racially diverse than they’ve been in the past, I’m still not entirely sure that puts to rest the thornier aspects of Ganondorf as a character, a brown, hooked nose, brutal foreigner come to take over Hyrule. The fact that Ganon was the villain in the last game as well just meant that I wasn’t super interested in seeing his human form in the immediate next game. Maybe it’s because my in to the series was the handheld titles but my attitude is that we really don’t need the Same Guy to be the villain in every game.

That’s a lot of complaining but at the end of the day I did like this. I liked the additions to the BoTW formula (fuse especially was my friend, making weapon durability less annoying because even if all you had were sticks you could do something with them). I liked being able to be an intrepid reporter (tho I suspect I’m being underpaid at 100 rupees per story given I almost died for a fair few of them - where are Hyrule’s unions when you need them?) I liked that the dungeons and bosses were more varied in aesthetic than the last game (tho I always thought the map manipulation technique there was neat and I was sad to see it go entirely). At the end of the day, I like Zelda, and I haven’t ever played a Zelda game I disliked. If there are others I liked more than this it just means there are a lot of good video games out there.