years late to this but holy fuck, this is one of the best games i have ever played. there is not a single thing i could nitpick about this. the only open world game to ever successfully make me feel like i'm really adventuring and exploring a fully realized and interesting world. great story, with great characters.
i love the choice to have hyrule castle and calamity ganon constantly looming in the background, reminding you of your end goal. it makes finally going to the castle feel so much more climatic and exciting.
so many things to say, but fuck it. i love this and it is undoubtedly in my top five games of all time. absolutely foaming at the mouth in anticipation of tears of the kingdom.

i want to do some sort of occult ritual to manifest the essence of this game as a human being so i can yell at it.
this is the most frustrating thing i have played in recent memory, because superficially it looks so fucking cool. the art direction is masterful, the enemies look scary, the weird dimension-bending shit they do is super interesting to look at, the animation of the hands is super stylish and satisfying, the music is serviceable, but BUT BUT
HOLY SHIT IS THIS THING EVER A FUCKING SLOG. remember how i said the enemies look cool? not cool enough to put up with seeing them what feels like a million fucking times over the course of every single excruciatingly dull hour of this stupid monolith of shit. there is not a single challenging or interesting enemy in terms of gameplay to be found. even fighting the bosses feels like the same mindnumbing bullshit you have to pull off the fight the weaker enemies. aiming feels like ass. the fighting is slow. the CONSTANT resistance on the dualsense trigger makes my finger ache. it just feels BAD. and whose fucking smoothbrain idea was it to give SUCH limited ammunition?? every single fight in this game comes down to "see enemy > move slowly backwards and fire at enemy > oh no i have no ammo > smack some ammo > fire at slow moving enemy while moving slowly backwards again". it sucks!! its boring and it fucking sucks!!!

the story BLOWS ugh the characters are so fucking bland and purposeless. the main character is a dumbass, KK is stereotypical HARDENED COP BUT REALLY HE'S A SOFTY, and every other character lacks so much personality its like they might not even be in the game to begin with. villain LOOKS INCREDIBLE but leaves about the same impression as a piece of lightly toasted white sliced bread. and don't even get me started on the parts where they take KK away from you and FORCE you to go and find him while using the limpest piece of shit bow in the history of video games.

everything about this thing visually screams at me to like it, and i wanted so badly to enjoy it. it has an extremely detailed recreation of one of the coolest neighborhoods in tokyo, has a wealth of japanese folklore and urban legends holding it up, mixes cyberpunk and horror in a supremely visually interesting way, but everything under the surface is a steaming pile of shit!! the only reason i opted to finish this was because i'm stubborn and i spent money on it. now it's free on PS Plus so play it if you're interested i guess FUCK

good good good great great great.
it is so rare that i plow through a game with the fervor and speed that i displayed playing through this thing, but i couldn't help it. it's just GOOD!!! it's fucking good!!! i could nitpick and say that it holds your hand a bit, or that the bit extended slow bit with two characters in the middle act was a little dry, but that all of that is completely overshadowed by a multitude of extreme positives. it's well acted, to the point that i felt as though i was watching an extremely well made film, and it's fun to play! the combat is so fucking good and responsive and all of the crazy abilities you get as you progress are so exciting and feel so good to use. nothing feels better than flawless tearing through a horde of enemies as kratos while atreus does some fucking crazy backflips.

the world they created here is so fascinating and so obviously well researched, and every inch of this thing is dripping with obvious passion. it feels so lovingly crafted and it so easily succeeds in pulling you into its world. the characters feel so real it's like you could reach out and touch them. and what this does for kratos as a character is just...... profound. very very very good.

there's a particular sort of atmosphere that some works of art manage to create which i call the "god is watching" mood. it's always hard for me to describe, but it's this sense that something big is going on just beyond what you're seeing. the feeling that every single action no matter how small is leading to some profound, grand climax. shows like evangelion, serial experiments lain, lost, etc do this very well. i love this feeling. and, of course this game, wherein the crux of the plot is that there is a huge catastrophic world ending event that has been foretold for generations looming on the horizon and our characters have to deal with that, succeeds in creating that atmosphere flawlessly. i don't think this will matter to too many people, but it's something i really adore and goddamn does this do it well. GOOD SHIT!!!!