(Note: I played about 40 hours before dropping the game. Might finish in the future.)

Instead of making an effort to improve on all the issues with the base BOTW, Nintendo instead opted to just add a bunch of stuff on top of it and hope you don't notice. And even then, the new content itself isn't particularly great. It focuses too much on adding "more" instead of adding anything with substance of depth. The sky islands? Starts out good, until they quickly start reusing the exact same islands over and over again to fill out space, with puzzles even more shallow than shrines. The depths? Very cool to drop into for the first time, until you realize it offers nothing new in terms of enemy variety and is just a blander version of the overworld with a dark atmosphere.

Both the depths and the sky suffer from a major issues of spread out, bland content. Personally, I really think they should've cut out one and expanded on the other. Or hell, cut out both and give us a new map, with small underground and sky areas to explore.

Speaking of that, the reused map removes one of the best aspects of the original BOTW; the feeling of an undiscovered world. While I had many issues with BOTW, the pure feeling of running around this open space for the first time, not knowing what to do or where to go and discovering the content and mechanics was an incredibly unique feeling I've never felt in another game before. Reusing the map inherently removes the potential for bringing back this feeling for any returning player. And as I said, the two new sides of the overworld suffer too much from reuse and lack of variety to feel like you're exploring anything new.

The building mechanics are probably the best part of the game, yet they're still mishandled. It's very technically impressive and you can do a lot with it, but the game actively demotivates you from using it. To build actual machines, you have to use parts. Parts are a limited but renewable resources that you have to use a material found in the depths for. However, since this resource is also used to upgrade battery space, I ended up wanting to conserve this material, and so I stopped using parts out of worry of needing them in the future. This caused me to stop experimenting and having fun with the mechanic designed to experiment and have fun with due to this arbitrary restriction.

I think a much better solution would be having parts act as an upgrade of sorts. You can unlock parts and use them at any time with no cost, however you start with only one each at a time. You have to upgrade them using materials to use more at the same time. Keep the battery and its upgrading system the exact same as well. This both still gives incentive to collect materials from the depths and encouraging more experimentation due to reduced risk of wasting resources (there still is a slight issue about worrying about which part to upgrade, but I'd take that over TOTK's system any day).

A lot of the games other issues boils down to the reused or unchanged content. Despite the shrines having a lot more to work with and generally being more creative, the actual puzzles in them are still unbelievably shallow. Korok seeds have some new variety, however the way they work is completely unchanged. The backpack one just sucks too. It's fun at first to make machines, but the game always gives you the pieces you need. There's no puzzle solving or trying to find the right pieces, you're effectively told the answer. The sign guy isn't really worth mentioning; another thing neat at first that is ran into the ground.

Overall TOTK is just a bad sequel, if you can even call it that. I wasn't expecting much from this game already, but it irks me so much to see so little issues from the base game actually addressed. You could say "oh if you already didn't enjoy BOTW much of course you wouldn't enjoy the sequel", isn't that what a sequel should aim to do? To improve on the issues of the previous game while offering something new? Because if that's the case, TOTK fails at being a sequel.