I remember my Mom buying me this game at Toys”R”Us in the summer of 2002 when we lived with my Grandmother for the summer. For whatever reason something about this game freaked me out and I could never get past the opening movie. I was an interesting child….

Anyway now that I’m 28 instead of 6 or 7 I decided to face my fears, and yeah I wasn’t missing much. The embedded classic cartoons are a neat touch (not that there is any reason to watch those in PS1 quality in 2023, but in the early 2000s it would of been neat), but rest is very much the epitome of the licensed bargain bin bad game you would play as a young kid and be wistfully nostalgic for. Alas, I was too scared at the time to get that nostalgia so I was left with only the bad game.

I just don't think this game is for me. This is coming off of about 15 hours of gameplay, with me just finishing one dungeon and then running around for a while before deciding I'm not having enough fun to warrant putting a hundred more hours into this game.

I feel like this game is in a great conflict with itself, in terms of not knowing whether or not it wants to be nonlinear. The greatest example of this that I can think of is right at the beginning, where TotK decides to release you into the world without giving you the paraglider. Compared to BotW's treatment of the paraglider as the keys to the world, this is an extremely interesting decision. The paraglider is optional now? Something that I have to find in the world?

Well, not really. See, exploring without the paraglider is not fun or easy. I think this is fairly self evident, but an easy example is how if you ever ride one of those rocks up to a sky island you'll quickly run into the conundrum of getting back down. You'll also have a rather difficult time entering the Depths. Even if you want to do a challenge run of sorts, you'll find out that there is at least one dungeon in the game that requires the paraglider, both to access it and to explore it. So in order to unlock this essential part of my kit, I eventually asked a friend what the deal was and was told I had to go to Lookout Landing. It was also at this point that I discovered that Lookout Landing is also how you unlock the ability to actually use the towers, and that if I hadn't come here I'd have been unable to update my map upon reaching one of the towers.

I hate this! My instinct when I start up an open world game is to run in the opposite direction as the main quest indicator. In fact, when I played BotW I did exactly this, going to Gerudo Desert before I even met Impa. And you know what? That first bit of blind exploration was one of my favorite parts of the 100 hour playthrough, as I challenged myself to just barely survive exploring this dangerous region and take out Thunderblight Ganon with a measly 3 hearts. I can't do that in this game; my ability to explore is actively held hostage by the main story.

This pattern of excitement followed up by disappointment would be a recurring theme for the rest of my short playthrough. Take the Depths as another example. I love horror. When I found out that there was an entire map in this game full of darkness, corruption, and more danger than the rest of the overworld, I was incredibly intrigued. I spent an hour or two wandering around in the Depths and felt completely bored. It turns out that, while it makes for a cool atmosphere, an extremely dark overworld is a bad move. What it does is essentially remove any element of "ooh, what's that over there?" that serves as the baseline for the flow of most open world exploration, leaving nothing but going from point A to B for most of my time in the region.

Shrines were often unsatisfying. I'll go into that in detail, because I think the change in shrines is actually the most significant change between BotW and TotK. In BotW, Shrines were (assuming you didn't get one of the dreaded Tests of Strength) entertaining puzzles. I think shrines in BotW hold a more subtle purpose as well; they are changes of pace. While exploration is fun, there is only so much running and wall climbing one can do before it starts to feel tedious. Shrines serve as a reward for exploration. They give the quantifiable reward of an Orb and a fast travel point. More importantly, they give the intrinsic reward of a fun, mentally stimulating experience that leaves you refreshed and ready for more exploration when finished.

I would hesitate to call the shrines in TotK puzzles. Some would argue with me here, but I think putting a balloon, a source of fire, and a few wooden platforms in a room with nowhere to go but up to be a set of wordless instructions, not a puzzle. To me, this is what most shrines in TotK are. They provide you with the tools needed for you to set up a physics demo. This isn't to say they're badly designed. Doing this allows the player to invent things in the shrines and then recreate those same things in their overworld exploration. In that sense, shrines in TotK are covert tutorials on this game's physics engine. However, in terms of providing fun or mental stimulation, they are lacking. To me, this makes shrines less appealing. The quantifiable reward is still there, but I was left feeling more "oh, I have to do that shrine over there" than "Oh good, a shrine!". Having the main reward for exploration in this game be a tutorial on how to do better exploration is something that, to me, doesn't work out. Another thing with how the shrines are designed is that, as mentioned previously, the tools needed to "solve the puzzle" are almost always clearly presented before you. In this way, the famous "you can come up with a hundred unintended solutions for any given puzzle" attitude from BotW is barely present. Don't get me wrong, you can pull out Zonai capsules and hijack the puzzle all you want, but there's never a reason to spend resources when the game gives you perfectly functional ones. I don't envy the developers, because the alternative is no better; when a solution is obvious but the player has no way to achieve it without pulling things from their inventory that they might not have, it's even more unsatisfying. Also, slightly unrelated, I found that the game would often arbitrarily limit my efforts to move through the skies. Platforms or wings just disintegrating after long enough, despite me actively spending resources to make these things functional, feels like Nintendo personally saying "no, not like that" whenever I try to use them to get somewhere.

This is a lot of words. A lot more than I'd usually write for a 6/10 score. While a lot of this was just venting into the void, I do want to sum it up by saying that, more often than not, the game is still passably fun. It's like going bowling when you can't think of anything better to do. Like, sure , we can go bowling for a couple hours, I don't have anything going on tonight and we'll probably have a decent time and then go months before we ever think about going bowling again. But I wouldn't wanna go bowling for 100 hours.

Amazing graphics and art style, with an engaging plot.
Good music and pretty cool voice acting, fitting of any 90's sci-fi movie.
But it feels like you are trying to find combinations of options to make the game realize you know what you need to do, instead of going directly to the solution. In some instances you feel like a detective, but a lot of times you are more like "lets see how to tell the game to advance by clicking on all the options available 'till it realizes where we need to go", which sometimes requires to press an option several times to make it work, becoming all the process even more unintuitive. Very often I had to look for a walkthrough just to realize I ignored an insignificant "LOOK" or "INVESTIGATE" at some point and thus, the game just won't let me go on.
Cool game from an artistic perspective, and also THAT opening. But gameplay can be tricky, making you doubt of what you already know.
Also Seed is a real dick. I rather be the little robot buddy than him.