I still feel conflicted about this one. It lacks the sense of discovery and originality of Breath of the Wild. The game is bloated full of "content" that does not really enhance the gameplay, and in many cases distracts from what I am doing moment-to-moment. When I got into a flow state with the game, it was great, but my overwhelming memory is just kinda going through the motions.
The star of the show is the game's new abilities, and my first 5 hours with Ultrahand were surprisingly satisfying, but as the game went on, I grew to dislike the feature. The ascend ability similarly was great when it worked, but I found myself searching for opportunities to use it far more then when it came up organically. Fuse similarly felt like a solution in search of a problem. The Rewind feature is a downgrade from stasis. All of them lack the elegance of their BotW counterparts.
I have mixed feelings about the game's zones. I enjoyed what they did on terrestrial Hyrule, it felt familiar and different at the same time. The sky area being so fragmented and disconnected, yet sometimes requiring platforming was about as good in practice as it sounds on paper. Not terrible, but not terribly well integrated. Finally the underground went from being a very pleasant surprise to a big disappointment. I find myself not enjoying the design of the underground, it didn't feel much like I was exploring new areas. Once I saw enough of the underground, I saw all of the underground, and that includes the secrets.
As someone with no investment in the Zelda story, the story-driven portions of the game did nothing for me. I found the non-chronological storytelling to work against the game, as I did not feel grounded in the world. I understand why they designed it this way, but I think linking the story to the location was a mistake -- they should have kept it in chronological order.
The biggest tragedy of this game is that it brought the flaws of Breath of the Wild into greater focus for me. In hindsight BotW benefited tremendously from the switch library being empty for a year, because I would think about my backlog every time I turned on Tears of the Kingdom. The reward for exploration was simply not as novel as it was in Breath of the Wild.
The star of the show is the game's new abilities, and my first 5 hours with Ultrahand were surprisingly satisfying, but as the game went on, I grew to dislike the feature. The ascend ability similarly was great when it worked, but I found myself searching for opportunities to use it far more then when it came up organically. Fuse similarly felt like a solution in search of a problem. The Rewind feature is a downgrade from stasis. All of them lack the elegance of their BotW counterparts.
I have mixed feelings about the game's zones. I enjoyed what they did on terrestrial Hyrule, it felt familiar and different at the same time. The sky area being so fragmented and disconnected, yet sometimes requiring platforming was about as good in practice as it sounds on paper. Not terrible, but not terribly well integrated. Finally the underground went from being a very pleasant surprise to a big disappointment. I find myself not enjoying the design of the underground, it didn't feel much like I was exploring new areas. Once I saw enough of the underground, I saw all of the underground, and that includes the secrets.
As someone with no investment in the Zelda story, the story-driven portions of the game did nothing for me. I found the non-chronological storytelling to work against the game, as I did not feel grounded in the world. I understand why they designed it this way, but I think linking the story to the location was a mistake -- they should have kept it in chronological order.
The biggest tragedy of this game is that it brought the flaws of Breath of the Wild into greater focus for me. In hindsight BotW benefited tremendously from the switch library being empty for a year, because I would think about my backlog every time I turned on Tears of the Kingdom. The reward for exploration was simply not as novel as it was in Breath of the Wild.