Depending on who you ask, this game was either overrated or underrated, either an improvement to Breath of the Wild in every way or a travesty that kept all the bad things about Breath of the Wild like the combat and the terrible stats system, and maintained very little of the good (the exploration and environmental storytelling.) Honestly I think it's somewhere in the middle. I enjoyed some of the new mechanics, hated others (Fuse doesn't "fix" durability, it mostly just gives weapons about the same durability they had in BotW, but Ultrahand is just Magnesis but better,) enjoyed seeing how the world map had changed but longed for more "new" content (since the new areas that did exist were very samey, copy-paste type stuff with not a lot going on), and as for storytelling, well, the plot itself is better, but the way it's told is worse, so make of that what you will. This is going to be the future of 3D Zelda for years to come, whether you like it or not, since Nintendo spent so much money on the engine after all. Might as well learn to enjoy it.

This game thinks it's way funnier than it actually is, and thinks its gameplay is way more enthralling than it actually is. What we actually have here is a game that obviously draws inspiration from Earthbound and WarioWare (and is aware of, but trying not to be, Undertale or Deltarune), but doesn't understand the appeal of those games. It thinks Earthbound's appeal is just "JRPG but it's set in a fantastical version of our modern world with zany antics galore" and it thinks WarioWare's appeal is just "minigames with zany themes that may or may not be related to the setting." The end result is a JRPG with slow, annoying combat that relies on regular enemies being huge HP sponges so you have to see all the cool wacky minigames that the dev has made, often with them getting a free turn on you even when you outspeed them. In between, you have mostly-uninteresting overworld exploration that has a snail's pace even when you're running, which wrings out more gameplay hours from you despite using an overworld that's smaller than most GBA RPGs (and some GBC ones!), with lots of annoying unskippable cutscenes of unfunny characters saying zany stuff and then prompting you to laugh at it by either just saying stuff like "WHAT." or "WOAH!" or "well, that was weird/that just happened/that was confusing, anyway let's move on" or just looking directly at the screen as a 4th wall break, like it's begging you to clap, all while teleporting around the room instead of walking because the creator thinks that visual gag is really funny and won't get stale after several hours. Speaking of visual gags, the game uses the patheticness of your protagonist and his obvious signs of suffering from chronic depression as a visual gag; in fact, much of the humor is bursting with "person who never grew out of their 'lol so randum xD' phase and is now making games about young adult life and depression" vibes.

It's not like there aren't some funny jokes or interesting concepts going on. There are some genuinely creative puns that got a chuckle out of me. I like action prompts in my turn based RPGs, usually, and with a couple exceptions, at least when it comes to your own attacks they're actually pretty good in this game. The RPG combat in this game is bad because of the enemies and the way encounters play out in practice: enemies getting a free turn on you way too often, having huge health pools, doing tons of damage to you sometimes, the presentation having lots of fanfare and animation padding that makes every encounter slower to play out, plus lots of the minigames taking longer than WarioWare's healthy tempo of 3-6 seconds per game. You could take (most of) the player's side of the equation and put it up against a different entire combat system design and it would actually be pretty good; ironically, it would work well in Deltarune.

Incidentally, for a game that prides itself on having lots of minigames, its fishing minigame is among the worst in the entirety of video games. I don't get the internet's obsession with fishing minigames; personally, I hate them, the only one I've ever remotely enjoyed was in Link's Awakening and that's one that you can 100% in like 2-3 minutes. But even people who will unironically say "it has fishing, 5/5, GOTYAY" will find this one disappointing. It is barely more involved than fishing in Pokemon, it's entirely luck-based, and it requires you to find fishing bait (a rare item) and the fishing NPC (who moves around and isn't even available until midgame) to even play. Oh yeah and if you play it and fish up something bad, the bait still gets used up, even if you fished up a boot. It seems like this is the one minigame that the dev intentionally made bad.

There's also just basic RPG stuff being fumbled. You have a tiny inventory, so tiny that the dev had to patch in an "extra pocket" but that barely helps. Even with the extra pocket, it's less inventory space than the original Pokemon games, AND it doesn't have inventory stacking. Much of the early game is an exercise in tedious inventory management, and you better not throw away any non-consumable items, because most of them are needed for side quests or easter eggs or just straight up actual main quest content later in the story! So you're gonna be handed tons of consumables that you have to just toss out. Undertale used its small inventory space as a way to make the game more challenging, but it didn't expect you to hang on to all early game items forever. The inventory storage computers you get access to later don't categorize or sort items, it's just FIFO, so you'll be scrolling through dozens of items just to withdraw the thing you put in there last. There are also plenty of permanently misssable encounters and items. Probably worst of all, it commits the cardinal sin of having party members join and leave with no warning, and taking everything they had on them with them, and not giving you the party member back for 5+ hours of gameplay. You don't even get a proper "party" until you're about 2/3rds of the way through the game. Let me put this in perspective: I try my hardest to finish games that have something going on for them, even if they're mostly crap. It took me over 10 hours to get to the point where I was given an actual party where you could swap members. During that time, I think I enjoyed maybe 1 out of 10 of those hours of gameplay. Now, it is more of a mixed bag, I'm enjoying it a bit more, but if 2/3rds of the game is mostly annoying and barely enjoyable, can you really give it a good rating?

Other complaints: unless there's something I missed, I think you need audio to be able to hear a bunch of attack telegraphs for dodge timings, and a couple attacks also require you to not be colorblind to dodge them, which are sensory accessibility issues. Some attacks also require button mashing, which is a mobility accessibility issue. I don't think the dev can fix their terrible sense of humor or their awful script, but maybe they can at least fix this.

I plan to finish this game eventually because I'm just like that, but man, it is really disappointing. I had high hopes for it. It's trying so hard, but fumbling everything.

Edit: finished it. Ending was serviceable. I'll add half a star.