It’s hard to even parse my thoughts on all this because there is simply so much to go into.
I typically avoid comparing sequels to their older predecessors because I generally like to see games as their own work, however it is hard to ignore in this case. TOTK is more than anything an iterative work; it’s built in exactly the same way BOTW was but focused on expansion rather than fine tuning. BOTW itself was a great game that suffered from major issues. TOTK rather than fix those issues, preferred to just expand on them, making them more annoyingly present than ever. BOTW had one overworld filled with menial tasks to do that did not amount to anything meaningful beyond the intrinsic desire to do them; TOTK has three. Hyrule is basically the same as it was in BOTW, problems and all. You would go to an enemy camp and fight the same 5 enemy types to collect some useless gem, you could explore a cave that more often than not had nothing in it, brute force yourself up some mountains, and go to lookout towers to unlock more of the map. The truly meaningful things you do in the game while exploring, are doing shrines and visiting towns. The shrines are likely my favorite part of the game, while in BOTW they were mostly a drag, here in TOTK they were genuinely fun to mess around in. Presenting a series of puzzles in a controlled environment where solutions are plentiful and limited by player creativity is such clean design. Part of me wishes that the game would just be shrines. It helps that you always get something of benefit from them, which is more than I can say for most of the areas of the game. The towns are fun to explore and generally have plenty of side quests to do that are often fun little adventures into the lives of random NPCs. Outside of Hyrule, TOTK introduces two new overworlds which at first was very exciting. However, excitement grew to become disappointment as I continued playing. The sky world, literally the game’s main selling point and the key differentiator from its predecessor, is literally empty. Beyond the great sky island, all the islands are basically decorations. You would have small landmasses that essentially have weapons that are going to break or zonaite charges that are readily available everywhere else. The Chasm, on the other hand, provides a much different experience. It is completely pitch black and you have to go lighting it up little by little. The problem is the lightroots you use to illuminate the underworld does not reach very far, so you’ll find yourself going from lightroot to lightroot before you can feel like you can truly explore the Chasm. This is an incredibly tedious process that could have been mitigated if the lightroots just covered more space, similar to towers in Hyrule. Once you finally light up everything, you do get the best overworld out of the three. You’ll meet stronger versions of enemies and old bosses, as well as explore mines which actually lead to decent rewards. The best bosses, encounters and armor in the game are all located here. It's a shame that the onboarding process to actually enjoy The Chasm is so tedious. I would say it is worth the effort though.
A large part of TOTK’s enjoyment comes from Link’s new abilities. We got, fuse, recall, ultrahand and ascent. They are all fun to use, and the game does implement creative uses for all of them. Ultrahand is TOTK’s main gimmick and the singular characteristic that separates itself from BOTW. Ultrahand is quite literally central to TOTK’s identity. So, it's a shame to report that I personally did not care much for it. The game provides plenty of opportunities to use it and its “player choice” approach to its obstacles means that you can do whatever you want just as long as you clear said obstacle. However, the game's “obstacles” amount to either building a car, a boat or a plane. You build your vehicle to ferry an item or a person across a large distance. The main campaign, the side quests and the insufferable korok seeds have a million moments like this. It never really expands on this idea either. It was fun for a couple of hours but as the game drags on, it becomes annoying. Again, the shrines are the only area of the game where ultrahand and the rest Link’s abilities are really tested. Ultrahand has been the source of many memes and now iconic videos that have come out of the game. People sharing their ridiculous inventions that somehow work is vindication that this open form mechanic allows player expression. That's great, but personally I don't care about all that. Call me a boomer but I just care if the mechanic works well, is implemented well and provides a fun game experience. I'd say ultrahand provides 2 out of those 3 criteria.
Fuse was this game's answer to all the criticism on the weapon durability from the first game. You can fuse your weapon with another weapon/item/gadget to increase its power, durability and add unique properties. While I love this concept in theory, the execution is so flawed that I basically dreaded using fuse for most of the game. The issue is that in order to fuse anything you need to navigate so many menus that it slows the game down to a halt. You have to open the menu, select the item you want to fuse from a long inventory, place the item on the floor, menu to equip your weapon, menu to select fuse, and then finally fuse your equipped weapon with the item on the floor. It quite literally takes forever. And if you want to fuse more than one item? Forget it. Doing this in active combat is a quick way to get yourself killed so the game wants you to be constantly fusing prior to combat. And you can't simply skip it because the game had the ingenious of idea of making weapon durability even lower than it is in BOTW. So, you have to do it, and doing it sucks.
Ascent is genuinely cool and likely my favorite out of Link's new abilities. Being able to ascend from the pits of some cave all the way up to the surface never got old for me. Even cooler is when you can ascend from one overworld to another. I always gasped in surprise when I realized that Link essentially jumped 20,000 feet in the air, and I find myself in the sky world from Hyrule. It only really serves one purpose however, to go directly vertical. Which is fine with me to be honest, but the actual implementation is so finnicky that it is hard to use sometimes. I find myself twitching the joystick around to see if I can find a sweet spot I can ascend from. It's no big deal most of the time, but when asked to do it in battle it becomes incredibly stressful. One of the minibosses of the game, the battle talus, has a weak spot that can only be reached if you use ascent. However, being able to walk up under it, and find the specific area that allows for ascent is so annoying that you'll basically die if you don't get it under 5 seconds. I've started avoiding these minibosses after a while.
Last ability is recall, which is essentially a worse version of BOTW's time stop. Whereas in the first game you can stop things in time and manipulate their trajectory by hitting it in specific directions, TOTK's recall simply sends things back in the time, in the trajectory they came from. So, you can do things like send bombs back, open a door/bridge that has been closed, or send a piece of falling land back to the sky. It's neat but ultimately undercooked. It has no real value in combat, and it doesn't do much generally. The best thing about it, is that it can combine nicely with other abilities. Using ultrahand to raise something in the air, drop it, get on top, and using recall to raise yourself is a nice cheat to get some air reliably.
After all this, one can assume that I did not like that game but is not true. I liked Tears of the Kingdom. I think it's a good game; really good, actually. I just simply don't believe it to be the masterpiece in gaming that many express it to be. I've had too many frustrations with it to genuinely call it great. Rather than looking at making it bigger, I feel like the game would have benefitted from making it more compact. Expand Hyrule by providing proper dungeons, more town settlements, and a stronger focus on character writing. I believe that these were the elements that were missing in BOTW that needed addressing in TOTK. Instead, we got more of the same, quite literally, with mixed results. Despite all my frustrations, I would drop 6-hour plus game sessions during my playthrough so I can't truly say that it is bad. Maybe disappointing is the word I'd use.
I typically avoid comparing sequels to their older predecessors because I generally like to see games as their own work, however it is hard to ignore in this case. TOTK is more than anything an iterative work; it’s built in exactly the same way BOTW was but focused on expansion rather than fine tuning. BOTW itself was a great game that suffered from major issues. TOTK rather than fix those issues, preferred to just expand on them, making them more annoyingly present than ever. BOTW had one overworld filled with menial tasks to do that did not amount to anything meaningful beyond the intrinsic desire to do them; TOTK has three. Hyrule is basically the same as it was in BOTW, problems and all. You would go to an enemy camp and fight the same 5 enemy types to collect some useless gem, you could explore a cave that more often than not had nothing in it, brute force yourself up some mountains, and go to lookout towers to unlock more of the map. The truly meaningful things you do in the game while exploring, are doing shrines and visiting towns. The shrines are likely my favorite part of the game, while in BOTW they were mostly a drag, here in TOTK they were genuinely fun to mess around in. Presenting a series of puzzles in a controlled environment where solutions are plentiful and limited by player creativity is such clean design. Part of me wishes that the game would just be shrines. It helps that you always get something of benefit from them, which is more than I can say for most of the areas of the game. The towns are fun to explore and generally have plenty of side quests to do that are often fun little adventures into the lives of random NPCs. Outside of Hyrule, TOTK introduces two new overworlds which at first was very exciting. However, excitement grew to become disappointment as I continued playing. The sky world, literally the game’s main selling point and the key differentiator from its predecessor, is literally empty. Beyond the great sky island, all the islands are basically decorations. You would have small landmasses that essentially have weapons that are going to break or zonaite charges that are readily available everywhere else. The Chasm, on the other hand, provides a much different experience. It is completely pitch black and you have to go lighting it up little by little. The problem is the lightroots you use to illuminate the underworld does not reach very far, so you’ll find yourself going from lightroot to lightroot before you can feel like you can truly explore the Chasm. This is an incredibly tedious process that could have been mitigated if the lightroots just covered more space, similar to towers in Hyrule. Once you finally light up everything, you do get the best overworld out of the three. You’ll meet stronger versions of enemies and old bosses, as well as explore mines which actually lead to decent rewards. The best bosses, encounters and armor in the game are all located here. It's a shame that the onboarding process to actually enjoy The Chasm is so tedious. I would say it is worth the effort though.
A large part of TOTK’s enjoyment comes from Link’s new abilities. We got, fuse, recall, ultrahand and ascent. They are all fun to use, and the game does implement creative uses for all of them. Ultrahand is TOTK’s main gimmick and the singular characteristic that separates itself from BOTW. Ultrahand is quite literally central to TOTK’s identity. So, it's a shame to report that I personally did not care much for it. The game provides plenty of opportunities to use it and its “player choice” approach to its obstacles means that you can do whatever you want just as long as you clear said obstacle. However, the game's “obstacles” amount to either building a car, a boat or a plane. You build your vehicle to ferry an item or a person across a large distance. The main campaign, the side quests and the insufferable korok seeds have a million moments like this. It never really expands on this idea either. It was fun for a couple of hours but as the game drags on, it becomes annoying. Again, the shrines are the only area of the game where ultrahand and the rest Link’s abilities are really tested. Ultrahand has been the source of many memes and now iconic videos that have come out of the game. People sharing their ridiculous inventions that somehow work is vindication that this open form mechanic allows player expression. That's great, but personally I don't care about all that. Call me a boomer but I just care if the mechanic works well, is implemented well and provides a fun game experience. I'd say ultrahand provides 2 out of those 3 criteria.
Fuse was this game's answer to all the criticism on the weapon durability from the first game. You can fuse your weapon with another weapon/item/gadget to increase its power, durability and add unique properties. While I love this concept in theory, the execution is so flawed that I basically dreaded using fuse for most of the game. The issue is that in order to fuse anything you need to navigate so many menus that it slows the game down to a halt. You have to open the menu, select the item you want to fuse from a long inventory, place the item on the floor, menu to equip your weapon, menu to select fuse, and then finally fuse your equipped weapon with the item on the floor. It quite literally takes forever. And if you want to fuse more than one item? Forget it. Doing this in active combat is a quick way to get yourself killed so the game wants you to be constantly fusing prior to combat. And you can't simply skip it because the game had the ingenious of idea of making weapon durability even lower than it is in BOTW. So, you have to do it, and doing it sucks.
Ascent is genuinely cool and likely my favorite out of Link's new abilities. Being able to ascend from the pits of some cave all the way up to the surface never got old for me. Even cooler is when you can ascend from one overworld to another. I always gasped in surprise when I realized that Link essentially jumped 20,000 feet in the air, and I find myself in the sky world from Hyrule. It only really serves one purpose however, to go directly vertical. Which is fine with me to be honest, but the actual implementation is so finnicky that it is hard to use sometimes. I find myself twitching the joystick around to see if I can find a sweet spot I can ascend from. It's no big deal most of the time, but when asked to do it in battle it becomes incredibly stressful. One of the minibosses of the game, the battle talus, has a weak spot that can only be reached if you use ascent. However, being able to walk up under it, and find the specific area that allows for ascent is so annoying that you'll basically die if you don't get it under 5 seconds. I've started avoiding these minibosses after a while.
Last ability is recall, which is essentially a worse version of BOTW's time stop. Whereas in the first game you can stop things in time and manipulate their trajectory by hitting it in specific directions, TOTK's recall simply sends things back in the time, in the trajectory they came from. So, you can do things like send bombs back, open a door/bridge that has been closed, or send a piece of falling land back to the sky. It's neat but ultimately undercooked. It has no real value in combat, and it doesn't do much generally. The best thing about it, is that it can combine nicely with other abilities. Using ultrahand to raise something in the air, drop it, get on top, and using recall to raise yourself is a nice cheat to get some air reliably.
After all this, one can assume that I did not like that game but is not true. I liked Tears of the Kingdom. I think it's a good game; really good, actually. I just simply don't believe it to be the masterpiece in gaming that many express it to be. I've had too many frustrations with it to genuinely call it great. Rather than looking at making it bigger, I feel like the game would have benefitted from making it more compact. Expand Hyrule by providing proper dungeons, more town settlements, and a stronger focus on character writing. I believe that these were the elements that were missing in BOTW that needed addressing in TOTK. Instead, we got more of the same, quite literally, with mixed results. Despite all my frustrations, I would drop 6-hour plus game sessions during my playthrough so I can't truly say that it is bad. Maybe disappointing is the word I'd use.