Nintendo are just showing off at this point.
With Breath of the Wild they already reinvented the open-world genre pioneered and iterated on for years by other game companies well after Nintendo was founded. Now they're flexing by further refining and improving on an already great foundation in creative ways, such as 'solving' the fast weapon degradation in BOTW by letting you stick two flimsy weapons together here. Travelling is faster but only when you use a new ability you have to work for, or work to unlock shrines on the sky islands. You have to 'fix' what might have started to grate you in BOTW yourself, they just give you the tools here to do it.
What they do give you upfront are much more varied and interesting temples, which feel a lot more exciting than what felt like bigger shrines in BOTW. You can tell they used the resources freed up from having already created the engine and world from the last game to greatly improve the content of the game outside of it's systems, which is seen the most in it's story.
The cutscenes here are almost Ghibli-level good, especially in the latter half of the game. Playing with the English voices is a crime when the voice acting serves everything this well.
My only gripe is how drawn-out the first half of the game can feel at times, especially if you've come to this not long after BOTW (which I beat maybe over a year ago), the improvements don't immediately feel all that fantastic and the boredom can start to set in. I was massively surprised at how much more enjoyment I was getting the further I got, sort of the opposite of BOTW where I just wanted it to end. In that game I got a disappointing final boss after a fantastic introduction, here I felt I was going through the motions until I ended up with tears (OF THE KINGDOM LOL) in my eyes by the credits.
The depths are kind of annoying considering how long you have to spend in them but this doesn't stop Tears of the Kingdom from being the best open world game ever made.
With Breath of the Wild they already reinvented the open-world genre pioneered and iterated on for years by other game companies well after Nintendo was founded. Now they're flexing by further refining and improving on an already great foundation in creative ways, such as 'solving' the fast weapon degradation in BOTW by letting you stick two flimsy weapons together here. Travelling is faster but only when you use a new ability you have to work for, or work to unlock shrines on the sky islands. You have to 'fix' what might have started to grate you in BOTW yourself, they just give you the tools here to do it.
What they do give you upfront are much more varied and interesting temples, which feel a lot more exciting than what felt like bigger shrines in BOTW. You can tell they used the resources freed up from having already created the engine and world from the last game to greatly improve the content of the game outside of it's systems, which is seen the most in it's story.
The cutscenes here are almost Ghibli-level good, especially in the latter half of the game. Playing with the English voices is a crime when the voice acting serves everything this well.
My only gripe is how drawn-out the first half of the game can feel at times, especially if you've come to this not long after BOTW (which I beat maybe over a year ago), the improvements don't immediately feel all that fantastic and the boredom can start to set in. I was massively surprised at how much more enjoyment I was getting the further I got, sort of the opposite of BOTW where I just wanted it to end. In that game I got a disappointing final boss after a fantastic introduction, here I felt I was going through the motions until I ended up with tears (OF THE KINGDOM LOL) in my eyes by the credits.
The depths are kind of annoying considering how long you have to spend in them but this doesn't stop Tears of the Kingdom from being the best open world game ever made.