Everything that made Breath of the Wild great, but more. More quests, more NPCs, more unique areas to explore thanks to the sky and underground areas, more substantial temples and puzzles, more interesting shrines, more varied and versatile abilities.

I loved Breath of the Wild for its desolate atmosphere, but TotK is so full of More that BotW now almost feels like the dry run for the real deal.

There's plenty to say about TotK, but what's truly incredible is how anything you want to do just works. In my 180 hours I never once encountered a physics glitch. Never did something I build not operate the way I could predict.

I put a steering stick on a single fan and it wouldn't fly straight due to improper balancing. So I popped on a spear and some korok leaves as a makeshift tail and... it fucking worked. The added weight and air drag of these pieces made the single fan device balance and fly perfectly.

I put some springs on the bottom of a slab and attached wheels to the springs. The springs then acted as shock absorbers for the wheels.

A lesser game would have systems too rigid for this type of experimentation. A spring would just be a device that launches you in an arbitrary direction. In TotK, it's just a spring and it can be used in any way that would make sense in the real world.

It's insane. It all just works. And that crafting exists in a world so full of unique NPCs to talk to, quests to complete, unique items to find... It's hard to avoid calling TotK just plainly one of the best open world games ever made. The only reason I could pull myself away from it is was that I ran out of game to play.

Absolutely loved this game.

I haven't been on this kind of emotional rollercoaster ever since the Mass Effect trilogy. The art is beautiful to look and, along with the score and sound effects, the game really makes you feel immersed in a 16th-century Bavarian book.

Andreas Maler my beloved.

Did not fully complete my first replay since the 2000s (I did a lot of grinding to gain Cloud, but then got bored and too overleveled for the final stretch) but still I had a great experience. One of the top tier RPGs and Final Fantasys. The sprites are an eyesore for the first level or 2, until your eyes adjust and it becomes beautiful, and consistently are belied by the dramatic story with great twists and death scenes. The soundtrack is truly one of the greats.

Peak: the library chapter. If you watch those levels on YouTube and aren’t convinced immediately that you want to play it, there is no other way.

I finally beat it! Great game, I played it so many times before, but I would always get lost in Gruntilda’s Lair. Click Clock Wood and Rusty Bucket Bay are classically hard Rareware levels in the best ways. It didn’t end up being as long as I thought it would be, Super Mario 64 probably still has the most content for best platformer but the quality here is even better.

Has one of the greatest final levels I’ve ever played in a game. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Rareware games are of the best ever.

Onto Tooie! (Next year) 9.8/10

Wingspan is a game that I want to like more than I actually do like it. It's incredibly charming–the art of the birds, all the little sounds, the way the menus move, the factoids about birds you can read, all the aesthetic choices in the UI are all wonderful. But actually playing it feels a little... dull? Not exactly dull but it's a little un-engaging? While the gameplay is satisfying on its own, the biggest problem I have is that you have almost no interaction with the other players. Which, for a board game, I think is a pretty big negative! There's very few card effects that let you interact with the other players and even the ones there are are relatively minimal (and most of them are pretty simple things like "if a player does X then you gain Y"). The deck of card and the dice are shared and so you could potentially maybe strategically take things to try and deny them from other players but that is either not a great strategy or a strategy that goes way over my head because I couldn't really see a way to make it work.

To me, board games are largely about the ways in which the game makes you interact with the people you play with. Maybe you broker alliances or make deals with people or choose to backstab them. But there isn't really any of that to be done here. So it's a little disappointing to go into a board game and then not get the thing I expect out of them. But, hey, at least there's cute birds.

There is one interesting mode, though, where you play against a single AI opponent with a set RNG seed and compete against other players to see who can use the identical setup to score the most possible points. It let's you play the game (fun) and optimize strategy (also fun) so it seems like it's kind of the best way to play.

Did I mention the birds are cute? Because the birds are cute.

Builds on it's predecessor in interesting ways, stacking the world into 3 zones that all have their own unique feel and methods of navigation. The combat and weapon systems are the same, but bolstered by the fuse system that adds a new layer of improvisation. If it's not broken, don't fix it. The sandbox style of play is the real winner in Tears of the Kingdom and while most of the time I think the game gives you the exact tools for the job, the game is totally open to you playing how you want to and building what you have in mind. The sky is the limit.

As far as issues, it's really all the same things I have issues with in most open-world games: a massive world with a set of collectibles you need to get in order to improve your character, side quests that don't feel that meaningful which is certainly not always the case, and a world so massive that it really doesn't fully use the ability to create vehicles when the glider is the best mode of transportation.

Narratively this is a more satisfying game, especially in it's climax that is as thrilling as any I've seen in a game of this scope. I think Nintendo has this aspect down pat where their games always build to something truly spectacular. It's an especially awesome finale. I'm not really here for the narrative but it does the job, sometimes excelling, and rarely gets in the way.

Overall I really enjoyed my time with Tears of the Kingdom. It doesn't feel as refreshing to the medium as Breath of the Wild did, but it is a better game on every level. I think something like Elden Ring is now more my speed, where the exploration is its own reward and a more robust combat system keeps me engaged consistently. I'm glad there are still open-world games like this that can keep my interest, ones that are attempting to build on the genre in ways that compliment video games as a medium. I'm excited to see where The Legend of Zelda goes from here, and how Tears of the Kingdom's sandbox style is emulated just as Breath of the Wild made waves.