I found the teasing of the sky so misleading. There was about 2 different versions of island that were copy and pasted lazily in the sky. This may be bad but on top of this, there were hardly any islands in general. Nintendo made it out to be centred on the sky in development but there’s literally three different points that you have to be in the sky, two temples and the start. The depths were also pretty much pointless. It would have been cool to see more remnants of zonai civilisation underground aside from mines but instead we have miles and miles of grey floor and flat land with some copy and pasted trees.

In Totk is extremely fun to just run around and do stupid shit with the amazing new abilities, but I think BOTW comes together better as an overall experience with a vision that the developers wanted to give you.

this video perfectly summarizes why totk's exploration wasn't nearly as magical as botw's for me. amazing work!

This is super real! In my play through, I felt like the game’s two core mechanics (ultrahand and exploration) were in conflict with each other. Either I could make a cool traversal machine but miss all the content, tediously hop on and off of the machine at every point of interest making the machine useless, or just walk. I ended up walking most places, since I loved BOTW and its gameplay loop so much, but it’s not quite the same the second time around.

What I want to know is why do I agree with all of this analysis, and yet I still had fun and loved exploring TotK? I legitimately don't know but despite agreeing with the criticism none of those things hurt my experience with the game somehow...

It feels like you, as Soren Johnson put it in a seminal opinion piece, optimized the fun out of the game (at least to a degree). Essentially, for any mechanic that requires effort to get a reward, you risk players essentially figuring out the absolute best way to do so and turning it into grinding-even if the task itself is supposed to be part of the fun. Another really good example of this is the proliferation of The One Hoverbike-it’s good and efficient, but it also defeats the point of experimenting and using the different resources you can find around you to make something uniquely suited to the current situation or just something novel for its own sake. I think it’s especially hard to avoid this happening in a game with mechanics this expansive and powerful. Like your friend, I personally got lucky in how way my play style interacted with the game’s design in that I tend to enjoy the journey for its own sake even in the absence of the restrictions that made it necessary in BotW. One game I have fallen into this trap myself is Animal Crossing-there are so many ways to make Number Go Up and so many Numbers that it is kind of a grind for me.

Stumbled upon this video on my homepage and it is absolutely wonderful. I felt the exact same way you do about TOTK. I'm 20 years old, and have been playing zelda games for 12 years, nothing is closer to my heart than this series, on the night that TOTK released I felt excitement and glee that has yet to ever be rivaled. I played for 8 hours straight, as soon as it released, as I had called into work months in advance to be sure I had the time. Those 8 hours were fantastic, I got out of the tutorial and completed the wind temple. After the wind temple, everything went so downhill, so fast. Exploration felt boring and repetitive for the same reasons mentioned in the video, teleporting up to the sky islands and flying from tower to tower with nothing in between. Starting to see how quickly I was getting bored of the game the next day, I bee-lined for the water temple, as the wind temple had been the most fun I had in a Zelda dungeon in a while. When I got to the Water temple, it felt boring and uninspired. The disappointment I felt when I got to the Mucktorok boss is still burned into my memory. Colgera was one of the coolest Zelda bosses ever, and its theme was beyond fantastic. Mucktorok could not have been any further from that. Feeling my disappointment, I bee-lined to the rest of the temples, got the master sword, found the memories, and went straight to Ganondorf. Ganondorf's entire fight was the one thing that did leave a pleasant taste in my mouth afterwards, but once the final cutscene was finished all I really felt was disappointment. I waited 6 years for... this? TOTK is absolutely not a bad game, but playing it felt like ticking of a to do list more than playing a game. The final saving grace for me, I thought, would be the story. Most of the times I played Zelda games it was more for the story than anything else, and that still is one of my biggest critiques about BOTW, despite it being one of my favorite zelda games. The critique being there really is no story. Everything has already happened, though BOTW made that work very well. It tells a story of loss, and emptiness. There's a *purpose* for that emptiness. TOTK has no such silver lining. The same flaws of the story all having happened in the past, with no reason for it. After the first few hours of exploration everything is repetitive and uninspired and it breaks my heart knowing that this is likely the direction Nintendo is going to continue. I can only hope they realize their mistakes, and if they are dead set on this non-linear style of gameplay, they fix the many issues TOTK has. This was a fantastic video, and thank you for making it, and giving me another way to express my feelings towards the game.

this perfectly summarises my playthrough. First I flew to the castle and walked around it (I used a wing and realised I could create a wing while on the wing so basically wing hopped when it died and went streight to the castle). I then played a lot of the game flying down with the wing from tower to tower and eventually googled "what happened to the glider?" Once I got the glider I then just flew from the sky islands to each tower. I then flew to each of the doodles on the ground and did each of the memories in order. then I ticked off the main quest and did gannon. finally mopped up any shrines I didn't see. After playing I realised there's huge parts of the map I simply haven't even seen up close. It's a very empty feeling going aroud now given I finished the game. BotW I had no choice but to enjoy getting lost in exploring and being 'distracted' as I tried to go from key point to key point. Thanks for summarising why I found TotK not as good at BotW, I found it difficult figuring it out myself but you nailed it. If I ever find someone who's not played it yet, I'll tell them to not fast travel from sky to each point as it just ruines the experiance.

Agreed about the sky being too free of danger, this is the number one reason i think the game needs dlc and master mode, also i think they were WAY too conservative with Aerokuda, they should have made tiers and given the base one at least 2hp, when literally anything one shots them the monsters they carry may as well be glass, add to that how rarely they are by terrain moving their allies helps and they are only melee... They might as well be replaced by boko's on the ground or simple flocks of birds in the sky... Yiga pilots have the same weakness but at least there the vehicle can tank a shot and enemies be annoying. For the depths i feel they tried restricting too much with the branches yet... Nothing on them is interesting and the positions tactical importance is wasted. The sky has a few other good islands like the light puzzle islands but nothing big enough most transport isn't useless outside flying vehicles, and island size means even those have few optimal options outside smaller vehicles. A raceway for driving in the sky would have been awesome.

Absolutely agree. On the topic of the "path of least resistance" I would add that, even more egregiously than jumping from sky islands, once you learn how to make the famous flying motorbike it become the cheat-code-easy solution for everything, trivialising the game. I skipped the whole challenge of navigating the desert sandstorm to reach Gerudo Town by just flying over it. The motorbike is also the solution to every "bring the korok to its friend" puzzles. Exploring the depth and sky island becomes 100% done by flying from A to B on the motorbike.

Fantastic video essay sir. I hope the algorithm is kind to you as we need more creators like you. As for the contents, i wholeheartedly agree with everything you said. It didn't take long to feel OP in the game and trivializing the exploration. The story went in a cooler direction but could've been pieced together in a way that felt more organic, like specific cutscenes for each temple win. Overall still a great game but the mystique wasn't there like it was in botw. Being someone who isn't terribly creative, i didn't experiment that much when making creations with ultra hand but instead found a machine that was simple but effective and used it most of the time. The incentive to be creative in solutions felt like it had been stripped away.

I think why you think the sky islands were was the same for the depths for me. Idk now many other people are like me but most of my discoveries were from the depths. It all started when i saw a gloom covered well in great hyrule field and yes i kinda forgot where to go and definitely did not totally get lost on where to go and not go to lookout landing for the first 10 hours of the game. I fell down the well thinking it was gonna be like the recent cave that i kept dying in. Little did I know it just kept going into a whole new world. Eventually most of my playthrough was actually traveling the depths to get to more areas like zoras domain. I literally just stumbled into zoras domain from tye depths because i had no overworld map and only had tye depths map. It really felt like botw but the shrines help me get around the dark rather than be another tele spot. This was also before I even discovered that the hoverbike existed so i was doing it from the ground. It only lost its magic after i had basically all the lights roots but I was always enjoyable to just run in the dark and only getting new weapons from the ghosts which was very comforting to know i can always rely on getting stuff.

Never played botw, but when playing totk I find myself intentionally not flying over everything because of the content I would miss. Many times I would launch off a tower, fly towards a destination, only to immediately stop and dive down because there was a shrine nearby. Sky islands and the depths are repetitive, but unlike the sky islands, I found the gameplay loop of the depths pretty fun. Maybe due to the tougher enemies and zonite?

So the problem you facing is that you can choose for totk exploration to be easy. Also i really love the depths because it was so satisfying to reveal map and it was fun to find the nostalgia armor pieces from other games its like finding ancient fossils buried underground

I wrote a huge review myself in which I gave the game a 10, and yet I agree with much of what you said, although I see it very differently: in my opinion, most people who criticise TOTK focus on individual aspects (apart from the story, which has objective flaws no matter how you look at it) and lose sight of the overall design. For example, the underground is designed to be many things: it initially robs you of the clarity and grandeur of the surface, as well as your eyes, but it pushes you to use the Ultrahand and build vehicles to overcome obstacles, becoming autobuild and increasingly schematic as you clear the Yiga camps. At the same time, sooner or later you will begin to see the connections and similarities between the surface and the depths, leading to better navigation and quicker access to zonaite for the battery, not to mention the shrines.

I actually do prefer totk over botw, as I liked the further degree of freedom in the methods you can use to explore. That being said you make excellent points as to why you prefer the first one. I agree fully with many of them. Neither one is perfect, both are better suited to different styles of exploration, and discovering new things in botw can be more rewarding sometimes. More doesn't always mean better, which is a solid argument against the sky islands especially. Great video breakdown, keep up the good work!

I too felt like I played the game wrong, and I agree with most of what you said. However, I don't think it's an issue of playing the game right or wrong, the issue is more a disconnect between the choices presented to the player and the consequences of those choices. In Breath of the Wild, I felt that when I chose to engage with the game in a certain way, I got the experience I intended. For example, if I explored off the main quest, then I would end up doing side content that wouldn't spoil the main quest. In Tears of the Kingdom however, I found myself accidentally completing main quests when exploring what I thought was side content. I saw the path to the Wind Temple in the sky and, from a distance, thought that the challenge was to use ultra hand to build something to get there. So I did, and I succeeded, but there was nothing to do when I got there. Turns out it was a dungeon. I similarly skipped the whole path in the storm cloud sky islands because I accidentally went directly to Dragonhead island. How could I have known that my exploration decisions would cut me out of content? In Breath of the Wild, it's possible to skip the path to Zora's Domain, but the high cliffs need to be scaled in a way that requires intention in order to achieve this. Maybe some players took climbing those cliffs as a challenge that unknowingly had them skip that path, but I bet it was pretty rare. I felt these kinds of things were much less likely to happen in Breath of the Wild, and I think your complaint about sky fast travel very much falls along these lines. You picked up on the potential of ultra hand and used it the way the mechanic spoke to you, but it ended up giving you an experience where you were opting out of exploration altogether, completely unknowingly. I actually think it was intentional, so that players who wanted to go sky island to sky island would have a path, but unlike Breath of the Wild, they didn't gate it off behind intention.

THANK YOU! You know, it's funny, because I've been thinking about this exact same "path of least resistance" problem since the beginning. I was even pondering if making a video about of it, but now that you've made it, maybe I don't need to anymore. lol (Well, maybe I will if this point is still not talked about enough, although I'll have to work a bit harder to add something to the conversation so it doesn't look like I'm just parroting you. Haha) To be honest, I've thought since half way through my TotK playthrough that it is overall a much worse game than BotW, and that most initial praises the game received were just the usual case of reviewers having to release their reviews as quickly as possible to not lose the band wagon. Because there is no way TotK survives a thorough comparison with BotW when you stop to actually analyze then. Because when you analyze it, you realize that 90% of the 6 years of development went to the physics engine for Ultrahand and the seamless transition to all areas, leaving the remaining 10% to make the game as big and with as much content as possible. No wonder they had to resort to copy and paste content.

i definitely played both botw and totk wrong - but in a way that really worked for me. i spend prob 90% of my time in both games just running around and climbing mountains. i’ll ride my horse and let it steer so i can just enjoy the scenery. i rarely fast travel anywhere - i just like running around and collecting things on my way. i definitely agree that the depths was less enjoyable cause there was just less to see and enjoy, and i wish there were more sky islands to explore. but i love both and they worked great for my play style :)

ngl i played the game completely diffrent and it made my experience better, i never used the skyislands as a mean of travel and instead of farming zonite to upgrade my battery i killed as much minibosses in the debts as i could, guess im rly lucky playing the game that way, good vid tho

I’m a Libra. We love options. I love having the option to travel in so many different ways from place to place.

Totally see your point of view, but I thought the streamlined transportation options made the game easier and better to play for someone who had already played BOTW. So, I think it's important to play BOTW first for people who have never played either game. I agree that the zonai flying machines and sky islands cause players to skip most of the world in TOTK, which is unfair to new players.

I also played the game wrong. The moment I had the hoverbike, exploration and traversal became incredibly trivial. (At least it significantly cut down the time I would've spent in the depths... and I already spent the majority of playtime down there)

I never saw the battery upgrade tower in the beginning. I never had a way to increase my battery, for like 200 hours.

They may be underwhelming from a gameplay perspective, but holy fuck do the sky islands make awesome looking landscapes. I have way too many pictures of the islands up against the sunset

I had similar problems with you about exploration, Sky and Depths and I have settled to some conclusions. (it's kinda huge but couldn't write less) The Sky Islands where marketed like they would be the next big thing to explore using footages only from the Great Sky Island (the only explorable island). At the end, the Skies are one unchangeable, monotonous environment acting mainly as a traversal puzzle with you trying to go from a tower to a shrine or from a shrine to the green shrine-stone and back. And after you solve them they act as quick travel points to access the surface. Nintendo underestimated the ultrahand creations limiting only wings and hot air balloons. But by using long lasting builds like hover-bike, upgrading your battery, doing the Recall trick, using Zonai charges or cooking mid-air you can bypass EVERY obstacle in the Sky. Something that indicates the puzzle-soling nature of the Skies and not exploration are the collectable items. A few flowers, mushrooms, fruits, insects and only one (1) animal. Even chests are mostly either the end goal or locked behind a puzzle. The Depths on the other hand initially are all about traversing the hostile darkness but it gets boring quickly with the sameness of the environment and the unvarying pace of gameplay. After that, they have three purposes: combat, crystal charges and zonait. All in strictly defined places. Soldier ghosts with strong weapons, monster camps, colosseums, Lynels, Yiga basses, Master Kohga arenas, Frox areas/arenas, Hinoxes, Taluses, Flux Constractors arenas, one King Gleeok arena and main-story bosses arenas are for those three purposes and all in clearly defined areas. The abandoned mines are for crystal charges and zonait. Aside those, there is NOTHING in between. Most of the map is empty space. Not like BOTW or TOTK surface-map that you have "nothing" to do but are full of small things. Again, that's indicated by the collectables. 3 mushrooms, 1 insect, 0 animals and poes. Chests are tide to combat or abandoned mines with few exceptions. That's all about the Depths. Exception is the Death Mountain. It's also the only part with chests that are not tied with combat or abandoned mines. So, to recap: Depths are for upgrading your battery, finding powerful weapons and zonaits for autobuild, helping with Sky puzzles and Surface exploration. Skyes are for big elaborate traversal puzzles and to have access everywhere in the Surface. And finally, the Surface itself. With a plethora of caves, collectable items, chests, points of interest, Korok puzzles, Adisson signs, changing environment, settlements, NPC, almost every main quests and side adventures/quest, more evenly distributed enemies and countless enemy camps variations (we even have pirate ships!). The game is still the Surface. Sky and Depths are designed as quick breaks for your on Surface gameplay . I WISH Skies and Depths were more… But unfortunately that's the case. I'm still in my first playthrough. I did the mistake after the final boss to go first to the Skies (with an object map at some point) to finish them and then to the Depths to take everything from there as well (without object map but sensor on for chests) and that got me really bored of the game and made me take a break for some months. After that, I went to the Surface. I decided to close HUD and sencor and explore EVERYTHING in the map. The game gives enough tools to find everything you want. I also limited my usage of hover bikes to not fly over things and miss them and teleportation mainly because I don't like it in hero's path. I'm still exploring and is the best time I had in the game.

I prefer BOTW to TOTK in general. Does a much better job committing to what it wants to do. Damn near none of the reuse was worth it for me. And the depths and lack of sky content just isn't enough of a draw.

I do think these issues lean more into subjective territory rather than objective design flaws for the most part. I imagine the easier ways to traverse the surface were intentional, as the developers knew players had already explored it in the first game, jumping from a sky island or using a tower isn't the only way, there are also rocks falling that you can recall to explore easier, however these shortcuts are not available in any of the new areas, sky, depths and caves. Take this as a suggestion, but I think maybe you could try paying more attention to the caves, for me they were the best exploration part of the game, very varied and fun. I think for me some of the best motivators to explore the sky and depths was the reward system these have, exploring the normal sky islands give you access to sundelions and Zonai parts, the caves give you a light source, you can use these to explore the depths with more ease and find items like bombs, puffshrooms and most importantly zonaite, that can be used to upgrade you batteries and allows you to explore the higher skyislands, that can lead to some good rewards. The depths are also very useful once you realize their relation to surface, you can plan your way using the map of the surface and the lightroots will mark shrines in the surface, it made finding all the shrines doable, where in botw I ended up resorting to internet maps. Not to say they have no issues, the depths and skyislands having so little variation in atmosphere definitely should have been improved, but it kind of varies from person to person how much of an issue this is, I can definitely see it being very annoying for others but at least for me it was tolerable.

I quite honestly didnt like the game at all. Its a long list, but the lack of original music, the mobile game tier story. I dont care whatsoever for building mechanics in a Zelda game. The serene landscape from BotW being littered with piles of scraps for said building mechanics and grey sky blocks thrown randomly everywhere detracted from the sense of natural beauty of the enviroments. The constant menuing just to make usable weapons or shoot specialized arrows. I did all the dungeons, beat Ganon, and havent been able to play it since. But thats just me.

The easy response: this game is made for creative people. You played the game wrong

I felt like I played the game wrong too. Generally I prefer to do most of the things in a region before moving onto the next, maybe leave a small bit to come back to. Tears doesn't really seem to support that style of play. It sucks because it seems like what I was supposed to do was study the game beforehand to make my gameplay more efficient. Instead I wanted to go in blind to maximize my excitement but this just made the game more of a chore.

Yeah, the sky could have been better, but Tears is just so much more game. The powers are better, the aesthetics are better, the quests are better, story is infinitely better, the overworld is more dense, the caves are an amazing addition, the depths are great, the armors look better, the fact there are actual dungeons is better. To be fair, my first thoughts after the first gameplay trailer were "Oh, Breath of the Wild: Nuts and Bolts, lets see how this goes." but go it did, and it was all around a better experience than Breath of the Wild. Nintendo seem to have learned a lot from FROMsoftware during that extra year delay. Elden Ring of the Wild, if you will. Breath of the Elden Ring?

I play like you but just don’t use any fast travel and I don’t use auto build unless I have to parts. It is self limiting but it makes the game way more fun it’s harder to break it

watched the video twice now and still struggling to find the bit where you say what's 'good' about the sky islands (what makes them the 'best' part of TotK)... ?

It didn't ocurre to me traveling that way to unlock the map, I just walker/run/glide from one place to another, I left the sky island for after I unlocked the tower... That and my control have a bit of drift and making the bike felt useless to me.

at first i thought Tears made Breath almost obsolete, like why go back when new version is better? no other Zelda has done that to me.... but after sitting with it for a while and thinking it over a few months after finishing Tears.... i think when i do another playthrough in a few years im gonna go for Breath again, mainly for the same reasons you prefer it. The sky was neat... but lifeless. and the depths were ok.... but soul-less. the thing i like most about Tears was that the stuff on the ground felt like a real continuation to Breath. like if it had just been the ground and been Breath 2 it would almost be just as good. and i mainly played it like that, used horses instead of hoverbikes, and tried not to overuse the "teleport to high place and glide to new area" technique. seeing how the story of the 4 regions continues on from Breath are my main likes, so in a way, after thinking about it a while.... Breath is almost required first for me to enjoy Tears. and i enjoy Tears in spite of the sky islands/depths not because of them. ultrahand is a fun gimick and building contraptions is fun, and combining items is interesting.... but i almost always felt like i was "cheesing" my way through shrines.... never knowing if i was "doing something the intended way" or just cheating. it was fun at first, but at a point i felt like "am i missing out on the intended experience i am supposed to be getting?" (which ironically, i think, IS the intended experience) but another like i have is the little things that improve on Breath,... better enemy variety, quality of life improvements, dungeons have a touch more "soul" than the first game. honestly, i would have preferred to have a VERY large interconnected cave system with different biomes/ecosystems that was about half the size of the depths and just not had a depths at all. and had a few sky islands scattered around like the town island in Skyward Sword (that place just felt SO ALIVE, but only that ONE island did. they should have had several Sky towns. and possibly brought back flying mounts, i always said before Tears comes out i hope Link can catch and tame Pegasuses) the least they could have done is make the depths not be so lifeless...

assuming your botw footage is from cemu, how did you get such smooth fps? the fps hack just makes it run too fast or has a negligible effect for me

I disagree about most of the points regarding BoTW, for me the exploration was pretty lackluster, yes you can go anywhere you can see, in any direction at any time, but... why? Exploration for exploration's sake? What's the difference between the shrine next to me than the one halfway up a mountain? Nothing, probably both are combat challenges If I'm extremely lucky I might find one of the very few shrines that give you a piece of an outfit but like 95% of the time it will be the same thing as every other shrine What else can you find? A Lynel that no matter its color you will face it the exact same way only difference is how long it will take Maybe find a random minigame that will reward you with a couple rupees, which in the time it took you to play the gane you could've gathered more worth in parts to sell Durability for me is much more lf a pain in the end game than in the start where it is actually fun to have some "survival" elements, but as soon as you stop getting 1-2 shot by enemies all challenge goes out the window since you can spam fairies or stupid amounts of food In totk the sky is much more inviting since you can see the island shapes and start recognizing familiar elements you enjoy like the free diving challenges, the boss arenas or the ancient tablets Making it much more inviting to plan a route instead of "wow I walked for 20 minutes to find shrine no.87 and a random skeleton for a useless quest

Best way I can put it for me is ToTK was formulaic and underwhelming. It basically overhypes itself and promises too much with things like the opening sequence teasing a more involved story, only for that to be almost as boring and repetitive as BotW. The opening area of the Great Sky Island shows off a huge cluster of unique and tightly designed sky islands, only for most of the others you find throughout the game to be the same little copy-pasted platforms with huge swaths of the sky map being empty. You get the reveal of a whole additional map under Hyrule with the Depths, only for 90% of it to be the exact same environment with nothing unique to distinguish it. New set of shrines? Half of them are blessings with nothing of substance inside. How do you get a satisfying sense of exploration when you already know exactly what you're going to find almost anywhere you look?

The sky felt pretty underdeveloped in Skyward Sword. You only really had the one big sky island that was well thought out. A few interesting spots outside of that, but a lot of it was just a few random little rocks that weren't worth the effort. (This kinda goes back to Wind Waker's ocean as well. 47 big grid spaces with islands contained somewhere within the central 1/9 of each space... and only some 5-10 of those islands were big interesting locations while most of the rest were tiny trivial filler that made the whole map feel that much emptier.) And it seems like they barely learned any lessons from that when they got to Tears of the Kingdom's sky. Still one major location, a few points of interest, and a bunch that feels like filler. At some point before TotK came out, when we were all speculating on how they might handle the map and just had the one trailer to work from, I was kinda guessing that a major factor could have been lifting several Great Plateau sized chunks of land up out of the BotW map (I thought the castle would just be the first of many things to get affected) to both form sky islands and (because of the craters left behind by the removed chunks of land) uncover cave networks running beneath all of the ground as an underworld. (The "underworld" I was imagining would have been an interconnected mess of caves and forgotten buried ruins of temples, shrines, dungeons, sewers, etc. Nothing like what we actually ended up getting with "the depths".) Granted, the sky islands I imagined wouldn't have been new terrain to explore. It just would've changed up the context of how the returning map is used. Anyway... Hmmm, what if...? Imagine that the next time they attempt a sky map that they do feature more large islands comparable to my pre-release TotK speculation, but they make use of a compromise between SS's isolating cloud layer (which was claimed in-game to effectively move things around at random unless those three specific portals were used) and TotK's open sky. I mean, suppose that some layer of the air space in between the islands and the surface is a region where random air currents can activate and deactivate. Like the little wind tunnels that Tulin creates, but the position / angle / speed / duration / etc. would all be randomized and there could be a bunch of them active at the same time. Key areas where the devs don't want us approaching from the sky could be coded to have these winds always spawn blowing away from the location. For any other location, it'd be up to luck where the winds push you as you try to glide wherever you've decided to try to go.

I spent a good 2 hours dicking around on dragonhead isle (and the condtruct factory for that matter) not knowing it was part of the story because i thought that the storm was just it's challenge, just like the depths being dark. I even did the entire newspaper questline to get the frog armor to make climbing around easier. fuck the frog armor btw, doesn't stop you from slipping on shit.

I agree so much. TotK just doesn't hit the same way as BotW did, and it's such a shame. :( I am trying to get into the game how I did with BotW, but I just can't. (For reference, I've spent 3k+ hours playing BotW but I've spent 315 hours playing TotK.) The hover bike ruined the fun of exploration and challenges, too. If it wasn't for that bike, I would still be trying to get all lightroots and actually exploring the depths properly, rather than just... flying over everything and completely missing key areas because its just too dark to see. 🙁

I never fast traveled so I found it very fun

I think this was intentional, not a flaw, and done as a part of reusing the map. I don't get paid to play video games, I'm 35, I work well over full time every week and then have a life. I would not have been able to justify another 250 hour exploration of Hyrule, TOTK would have gotten a rage review about making me hike all over the same fucking map again, if they hadn't significantly sped up exploration. I can still wander around in a magical fantasy land for as long as I want, dense with shit to do and things to see (yeah, they C/Ped that shit everywhere to make sure ya had building supplies, at least they TRIED to justify it), and yet I might never hit 100 hours in it, and I'm happy with that. Did the story, did the stuff, enjoyed the hell outta the game... at whatever pace I wanted, when I wanted that pace. I get what you are saying, but not everything that hurts YOUR enjoyment of a game is a flaw, either, sometimes they are design choices you disagree with, and there is a good chance reversing them to suit you would hamper other people's enjoyment.

Hard disagree man. I tried using the islands to get to shrines and towers and unless I unblocked shrines in the sky (which are already hard to get to and discover) I never found it that a sky island was too close to an area of interest

great video :-)

I think being able to repair your weapons with materials that you find would make the game suck. At the start, you’d end up hoarding weapons you didn’t want to break, probably filling up your inventory. At the end you’d probably have so much repair items, that weapon durability would lose its incentive as a reason to explore. Instead, repairing your weapons would just become a pointless nuisance. Having to commit to the fact that the weapon is going to break whether you like it or not, makes you commit to the gameplay loop. You have to accept it, and as such use the weapons you have. The incentive to explore continues all the way into the late game as a result.

ToTK is a direct sequel, not a new game. You're going to forever be chasing that high from BotW, probably for the rest of your life. Nostalgia is the strongest drug, understand that now. Part of life is managing unrealistic expectations and ToTK is *exactly* what I expected it to be. Folks waiting for some groundbreaking, mind-blowing, revolutionary experience out of a direct sequel on the same platform.... yea... over-expecting, but I get it, they fell in love with BoTW.

You can repair weapons in the game lol

I didn’t need BoTw part 2. Tears feels bloated and unfocused because of it, just like LoadField.