I had written a much longer review for this but it was lost when I left the site. as a shorter summary (not what this ended up being) I think the story in the memories is interesting and it’s where the game really should’ve taken place. if we were an active participant in the most interesting parts of the story then i’d like it much more. it’d also require nintendo to get more creative with the map of Hyrule instead of just re using BOTWs map. The new maps they’ve added aren’t good and serve as a big ol distraction. The depths is bloated with reused enemies and ideas, and it’s pressed across one singular biome, making the aesthetic get very boring fast. The sky island is the worst of the new content in my opinion, and I did not have fun with a single part of it that wasn’t main story. All of the shrines follow the same formula of getting the green crystal, where there may be a flux construct boss (you’re going to fight 478 of these things) , then building a vehicle to deliver the green crystal from point A to point B. The vehicle you need to build is always dead obvious which leads me to my next complaint. Building vehicles is boring. When I build a vehicle I don’t feel good about myself because it’s always obvious what you need to build for a given situation . It requires no brainpower to execute any of the vehicle puzzles, you build something, and hold the stick forward to your destination. I don’t really care for the sandbox freedom the game gives you, but if you do that’s fine.I still feel like you can’t deny some of the other glaring flaws of the game. Enemy variety is still severely lacking. Even with the addition of the new enemies this game has added you definitely still feel it. The new enemies, for the most part, aren’t really any good either. Most of them can be beat by shooting them with an arrow and then beating them up if necessary (like-likes, horriblins, the bat thingies in the sky, the hand monsters, and the gibdos). Combat in these games is most fun when you have to utilize enemy attack patterns and get a well timed flurry rush, and none of these enemies utilize this. The constructs aren’t horrible but feel like watered down versions of the bokoblins. Anyway let’s talk minibosses. The new ones introduced were the frox, flux construct, gleeok, and phantom ganon. The frox isn’t fun at all, the flux constructs are copy and pasted everywhere and aren’t a particularly good fight, phantom ganon is pretty good and the gleeok is a lot of fun when you aren’t brutally under leveled. Other then that it’s the same hinox’s and stone talus’, etc. from the last game. In fact I think one great level of a souls game has better enemies then the entirety of this game. It’s not fun, fighting the same things over and over again, and I don’t know why Zelda gets a pass here. It’s lazy. In terms of the combat itself it isn’t anything special but I enjoyed it in BOTW. Playing tears has made me realize some of the glaring flaws in the combat. 1. Flurry rush is broken 2. The infinite menu healing system gets rid of any tension a fight may have had 3. Weapon durability is still a stupid unnecessary feature, and I think it’s pretty agreed upon. I don’t want to go too in depth on those because they’ve been talked about quite a bit, but i’d rather talk about something that hasn’t been talked about enough. There are only 3 and a half actually weapon moveset animations. Honestly bullshit. This game had been in development for 6 years and there are only 3 and a half weapon moveset across EVERY SINGLE WEAPON. Also the bindings for sprinting and jumping are horrible, and still after 6 years, don’t allow you to change the bindings. Anyway let’s move on to the world. I have some positives and negatives. To start with the positives this game is undeniably more alive then BOTW. There’s a lot more people in the world, and most of them have an actual personality. The NPC dialogue is much better, and the quests they offer are meh. It really depends on if you got lucky or not. Most of them are pretty bad but some can be decent. More side content that was introduced were the caves, and yeah, they’re boring. I did 46 of them and I couldn’t find anything truly special about a single one. This gets me to my main point about the world and this game as a whole. QUALITY OVER QUANTITY. This games world is much more dense then BOTW, but not really to its advantage. The new content taking up the world isn’t making it better, rather it’s bloating it. Speaking of things that bloat a game let’s talk about the shrines. They’re the same as the last game. Some of them are really great and some of them are just horrible. I think something that would’ve been nice would be to make the shrines more visually interesting, maybe fitting to the area they’re in. Some shrines I really like were the ones where they strip you of your items and make you fight the robots. They were well designed and fun. The other shrines were a mixed bag, but the main flaw of shrines is that their format isn’t really fun, so the shrines are consistently not good. You wanna know something else that’s consistently shit. All of this games main story dungeons. I could go in depth on each but i really don’t want too. Each dungeon has only 4 puzzles and that’s including some of them which require no brainpower whatesoever. Even the ones that are more involved get boring fast. The dungeon in the depths felt like it had much more than 4 but they were mostly obvious, and making the vehicles was the hardest part because of how tedious it got. The main bosses at the end of them were fun but lacked complexity and memorability. Queen gibdo was definitely the highlight of these bosses, and was honestly a big difficulty spike. My main problem with these dungeons is how samey they feel. You do the 4 puzzles it asks you to do, you fight a boss, then you watch the exact same cutscenes with slight alterations every single time. I can’t imagine this shit in any other game. Let’s talk about the end of the game though. The final dungeon was dead boring and was just more reskinned enemies. Then you get to the bosses. THE DEMON KINGS ARMY, sounds way cooler than it is in reality it’s just more reskinned enemies i guarantee youve fought hundreds of times by now :(.Oh shit though, it’s ganondorf time bitch. This final fight was pretty great and was honestly a tease, because I just wish there was more bosses like this. It utilizes the combat perfectly and has great spectacle. Even the dragon gimmick fight which I thought might be similar to the final gimmick of BOTW was done very well. Anyway let’s end this long ass review. I felt so special when playing BOTW when i found so many new biomes and areas. TOTK has the exact same old map from BOTW with the addition of the depths and the sky island, which each only have basically a singular environment and aesthetic. With this game I don’t feel the excitement of the traditional zelda game nor do I feel the excitement of playing BOTW, and it still hasn’t fixed many of the major problems BOTW had. All of this is why i’m so shocked every single rating for this game is a 10/10. Am I a crazy fucking alien or something? Are we playing the same game? I just don’t understand how this game is PERFECT. 🤷‍♂️
Additional things
1. Zelda is the reincarnation of the goddess hylia and becomes an IMMORTAL DRAGON to restore the master sword to great power, and it still gucking breaks after fighting a big pig for 3 minutes.
2. I wish there was a single optional hidden dungeon in this game. God it would be so cool to see.
3. Even if this game was a perfect 10/10 I don’t think there’s any reason Nintendo should be charging $70 for it, especially when their hardware is so far behind.
4. This is just my opinion and experience. If you’re gonna reply say your own opinion respectfully and we can talk.