Ok so what i liked. It looks cool (that’s the part everyone talks about with this game and they’re right). The music is great besides the one track that’s a 10 second loop that plays in mementos. I think that might be it. It’s a deeply badly written game made for deeply unintelligent, lonely people who want the media they consume to look into their eyes and tell them that theyre special.
The game is a power fantasy where you, the player, can finally get all the women you want like you wish you could in real life while also having cool powers. There is nothing else of value in this game.
Its very badly written. It’s the stereotype of anime writing where half of it is bad exposition where every time someone says something two different characters repeat the subject of the sentence and act shocked and then they continue like this for an hour (theres an especially bad one after I think the casino) and the other half are extremely bad anime jokes you’ve seen 1000 times where you’ll have for exemple a hot girl and a guy think shes hot and it makes the girl angry and then she hits the guy and then the guy overreacts and then the girl calls him a bakka and then you contemplate killing yourself in real life using a gun like in the bad game persona 3 (I never played persona 3).
None of the characters are interesting. Some side stories can be interesting. There was one with futaba about what I believe was one of her friends that was a victim of abuse that I thought was well done. But I think that might be the only one??? There is stuff I missed but theres no way im ever going back to this game. I was hearing people say that morgana is annoying and while this is true I do not understand why they don’t also complain about every single other characters in this game.
The combat is fine. Ill even go as far as to say that its good. Its standard turn based jrpg combat. Really the worst part is that if you want your character and your party members to get better in combat you need to endure the bad writing.
The real world part that’s used to enhanced your character in combat is almost good but because every character sucks it lacks the sustenance you can find in something like stardew valley for exemple (in terms of a game where you can do activities with other people and have events with them because in sv the events are actually something I look forward to).
The palaces also arent interesting. Design-wise theyre just bad zelda dungeons. The only thing they offer are cool visuals sometimes. Even then the game still feels the need to overexplain because it thinks you're stupid. On the pyramid one theres a painting representing the trauma one of the characters felt, which is something you instantly get right away, but then they game spats out a minute of bad dialogue to explain what you're looking at and what it means.
The worst part is that the whole time while you play it the game feels like its gonna do anything interesting soon but then when the credits roll after slugging through it for 100 hours theres just nothing.
Rarely seen so much effort wasted on a product this bad. The fact that people have been gassing this game up for years now makes me worry about whats in the water supply.

Maybe everyone just thinks the first Persona game they play is the best- for me that was Persona 4. I was massively hyped for 5 at its release but was disappointed to find that despite its incredible sense of style and overall fantastic visuals and sound design combined with fun gameplay... it kinda sucks. Entirely because of the story, which makes up a huge chunk of the game. The characters are, by and large, the same goddamn characters from 3 and 4 but with way less depth. Persona 4 used its dungeons to explore the psyches of its main characters, forcing the game to write at least some nuance and depth into all of them (Kanji is a really fantastic standout character). Persona 5 instead uses dungeons to explore the minds of its villains, but it has nothing interesting to say about them. Every villain for most of the game is essentially the same person- just an egomaniac sociopath who does bad things because they have no moral compass and only care about themselves and that's all you really need to know. Shadows, established previously in the series as the worst aspect of oneself that characters are forced to face, are almost always in P5 just the same exact person as their already-villanous owners whose mind-dungeon you're exploring, rendering the whole concept beyond pointless. The result is a story about a bunch of bland characters going on a moral crusade against a bunch of bland villains (then the story suddenly comes to life for one chapter when it switches back to the persona 4 forumla... oh well).

Worse yet, there's absolutely baby-level social commentary (sure, yes, adults screw over young people- but like, why? the game wants to comment on society and Japanese society in particular but it's so broad as to be meaningless). Even worse, the game floats the idea of investigating whether what the main characters are actually doing is moral- after all, if they're stopping evildoers by fundamentally altering their souls such that they repent for their crimes, are the people they are now (after being radically transformed on a base level by magic) even really culpable for the crimes of their past selves? It's a fascinating question that the game poses but seems to basically discard as insignificant. I suppose I could've suspended disbelief if the game were wholly disinterested in the question but it seems self-aware enough to have the characters discuss it but, again, the game has nothing interesting to say. Why does evil exist? Because some people have bad souls which need to be fixed, then also after they're fixed they should be thrown in prison for life as punishment for their formerly inherently bad nature. (If the game were actually brave enough to full-throatedly posit this it might actually be worth investigating but it's really just an unintended consequence of its refusal to explore its own themes).

I'd probably have a much higher opinion of this game without a basis for comparison for how its characters could have been handled, but it does itself no favors by basically borrowing its entire cast for the second time now then doing those same characters worse than ever.

The first time I'd ever been disappointed by a mainline Zelda game. While I wasn't a fan of Breath of the Wild (I'm not big on open worlds), it was so fresh and novel that I could respect and love what it did differently despite its slew of flaws. This time, however, ToTK came through the door expanding only on what makes open worlds so incredibly lackluster and tedious. This game peaks at the Great Sky Island and then never picks up again afterwards.

In many ways, ToTK feels like the definitive version of BoTW, it's the game that BoTW should have been, in my opinion. I actually had fun with the shrines here unlike its predecessor, and while there were still too many repeats, most were actually interesting and head scratching while remaining open-ended. The abilities Link has are usable almost everywhere, feeling less limited and useless than BoTW's for most parts of the game. The temples appear unique again! Though, practically, they fall through worse than BoTW's and feel like one shrine stretched far too wide.

But where it takes steps forward, it takes 10 steps back. The world feels incredibly empty, most of the time you're just walking around without actually exploring. The worst offender of this is the Depths, which are essentially just an emptier inverted mirror of the surface world. It's cool for the first 30 minutes, then it just becomes Minecraft's Nether back in 2010: dark, open, with nothing to find but the occasional large enemy. Once you've seen one corner of the Depths, you've seen the entire thing. And the saddest part is that if you do explore the Depths out of a sunk cost fallacy, you're rewarded with zonaite and......... DLC armor from the first game.

The sky islands and the Zonai are the biggest tragedy of this game, and I don't say that lightly. As I said earlier, the Great Sky Island is the best designed area in the game, and is also the only well designed sky island overall. There are only maybe 3 or 4 "types" of sky islands to find which all repeat themselves over and over. Similar to the depths, once you've found a few islands you've found them all. A shame given how unique and underutilized the idea of "sky islands" are to fantasy and video games in general, but also how beautiful and fun actually getting to these lands are.

I grieve for how the Zonai were treated here, truly grieving. Zelda has always had such wonderful and fantastical races, and the Zonai are no exception. They are magnificently designed, and have such an incredibly enchanting lore basis... and yet they are essentially nonexistent in their own game. It'd be interesting if you learned more about the Zonai, how they lived, how they influenced Hyrule, and key actors of their society as you play, similar to the Nomai in Outer Wilds (a game that I think does what ToTK wanted to do but vastly better), but that doesn't happen. The Zonai only serve as a way to give link new toys to play with and a new ability wheel to interact with the world.

Even Rauru, a fantastic character concept, is absent after patting you on the back and saying "have fun!" in beginning of the game. If the next Zelda games move on from the BoTW world as interviews imply, we may never see the Zonai again similar to the Minish or the Twili, which feels terrible given how they didnt have any time to shine. Despite that, I don't want to spend another minute in this world and want to get out of this Hyrule as soon as possible.

And do I even have to mention how awful the story is here? While the series has never had the prose and depths of a good novel, "Zelda has never had story" mfers show their ass that they've never played a Zelda game before BoTW because the old games at least try to support the feeling of adventure that the games offer, but through dialogue and cutscenes. Scenes like the desperate ending of Twilight Princess, the heartbreak of leaving Outset Island, these scenes couldn't happen without a story to give them meaning and ToTK offers a "story" but doesn't understand why the old games had one. There's nothing to feel watching the Zonai memories here, and the singular twist of the game is absolved and neutered by its ending. This game tries to have its cake and eat it too, and it feels so undeserved.

I could go on and on about how many things this game brings up, giving me hope for fun, and then drops the ball immediately. This game was just everything I didn't want in a Zelda game. Interviews with Aonuma released after ToTK's launch where he stated he didn't know how people could enjoy the old games anymore, and that makes me understand why ToTK feels so nothing as a game, the developing studio doesn't know what makes things fun.

When I asked friends of friends IRL, what they all loved about this game is that they could build things and blow up enemies. They all said they didn't care about the characters or world, and just loved that they had "freedom." None of them had played Zelda, and none of them wanted to know more about the series, they just wanted to play in the sandbox. And really, I think that's why this game had so much success: it didn't blow up because it's Zelda, it's great to most people because it's not Zelda, because it's shed so much of its identity for a common denominator, and that hurts as a longtime fan.

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I teetered on the edge of being done with Zelda after BoTW, and now I'm fully convinced. I won't be returning to this series, and will be happier that way than being disappointed and edged for a good game for over a decade. There is so much wasted potential in ToTK, and Zelda as a series' corpse is ripe for indies to scavenge off, and I want to be there to see it. Now, if only anyone wanted to make a 3D Zelda or could even make a good 2D one, that's another topic on its own. But even if it's bad, I'd love to see people try.