Haven’t caught up on this thread but it sounds like other people are sharing my experience of having a mountain of nitpicks about this game while still generally enjoying it.
One thing I will point out that I think makes BotW a somewhat better game is that the player abilities, physics mechanics and the game’s nature motif are all tightly interwoven. Elemental properties of wood, metal, fire, water and wind all have unique mechanical meanings that interact directly with your ability set and affect how you perceive and act in each environment. The core properties are all preserved in TotK but the shift in mechanical focus to… verticality? Toy-making? …feels a lot more arbitrary and disconnected from the game world. As for that matter does all the narrative nonsense about ancient moose people from the sky who have never been mentioned in any previous game, but anyway.
Also, I badly miss when Zelda NPCs had actual personalities beyond being utilitarian tip dispensers and quest providers. Time was, they used to talk about petcare or complain about their family members or spout surreal nonsense or at least dispense flavor text that wasn’t directly related to the main story and objectives of the game they appeared in. All the people in this game feel like theme park animatronics. It’s an imagination killer.
Oh, and: this game feels way too generous and lax on challenge compared to BotW. Within the first 10 hours of the game I expanded my inventory enough to turn weapon degradation into more of a minor irritation than a tactical consideration. When it’s actually feasible to just save your best weapons for later rather than using them as they become available, inevitably you start to overthink the process and your means of tackling new situations shifts from creative use of limited resources to hoarding and OCD. This is like, high key bad design that seems like good design: the “upgrades” you “earn” so easily unbalance the whole game economy that they end up pressuring you to think more about choices that mean less. (All the upgrades in this game feel a little pointless considering how just-barely-feasible it is to simply navigate combat without getting hit, but anyway…)
Exploring and paragliding’s still fun though so what can I say!
