my hot take is that they genuinely don’t care about particularly good english VA for most japanese media. part of that is probably the inherent distance of my not speaking japanese contributing to my perception of the quality of the japanese VA, but still. I tend to dislike the performances in “good” anime english dubs, and the english dub of botw was fucking awful. first thing i did in booting totk was to change over to reading subs with the japanese VA track. not that any of that changes the poor writing of the story, or made me actually try to finish this game, but i at least didn’t suffer every time any character talked.

This is the best scene in the entire game, however.

In addition to the points you made, one thing that really annoys me and something that has also become a trend since BOTW, is these massively open world games that are just…empty. What’s the point of having a giant map that you can explore every inch of if it’s just the same thing copy + pasted with slight variation? This might be why I keep coming back to Skyrim/Fallout NV after all these years because in every inch of that game’s world is something happening. You are rewarded for exploring the world with more than just a special item. There is a unique character or event that happens, or some NPC living their own life, or a book that delves more into the world’s lore.

I would much rather have a smaller, more linear map but with more interesting things to discover or interact with, but I guess that’s not really a selling point to most people.

TOTK (and BOTW)'s problem is exactly that in removing most of the dungeons & Castle Town/settlements across Hyrule in general, they also got rid of half of the charm. I don’t need Lon Lon Ranch recreated or Castle Town, but damn TOTK still felt largely empty to me - as if the BOTW timeline really is the cursed one and Hyrule’s just boned for good. Shrines are alright - but damn I miss having dungeons designed around the equipment you’d find in one of the chests inside or in the prior dungeon. Snowpeak Ruins from Twilight Princess? Earth Temple from Wind Waker? Ancient Ruins from Oracle of Seasons?? Gimme that - not 20 test of strength shrines, a few unique 5 minute shrines like the build a machine to traverse the lava one or the racetrack one, and then a bunch of annoyingly tedious shrines that after I do the first half I am already sick of it.

The best parts of TOTK were imo: Mattison’s quest in Tarrey Town, the entire Stable Trotters’ questline & crew, and the Lurelin Village restoration.

But yeah, hopefully the next mainline Zelda game is not in the BOTW universe/setting and they ease back a bit on the ‘look you can do anything with the runes/ultrahand but don’t get bored of this cause otherwise you’re only gonna find puddle-deep gameplay’ open-world theme. I say this with like 200 hours in TOTK and having done all the shrines/sidequests except for the koroks.

this just reminded me that I never beat TOTK lol. I loved all the new mechanics and the depths are fun to fuck around in but it all felt more like a “remix” of BOTW instead of a whole new game. the big thing that pissed me off was how so many of the treasures and sidequest rewards are just armors from other Zelda games that don’t have any stat bonuses or any benefit whatsoever apart from “WOAH THATS FROM OTHER GAME ” like that shit turned me off from delving into side content after a certain point. i don’t want emo wolf link’s dirty t-shirt, I want good useful shit for THIS game goddammit!

Oh yeah speaking of unpolished I forgot to talk about one other thing: the sage companions. It is so funny to me how all over the place they are in quality.

Tulin is the only one who actually works, full stop. He’s the only one who can keep up with the player and he’s the only one who uses ranged weaponry. (For some reason, in a group of elemental magic users, no one can shoot a magic missile or anything) He stays out of Link’s way in a fight and actually contributes damage and openings for you. More importantly, his sage ability flows perfectly into traversal, to the point that I advise getting him last since it’s so strong it can trivialize a lot of puzzles and challenges.

On the complete opposite end of the spectrum you have Sidon, who is completely useless in every way besides being a warm body to throw at enemy camps as a distraction. His sage ability (already a nerfed to shit version of Daruk’s ability from BOTW) is virtually unusable, You can’t even proc the shield ahead of time before going into a fight since it has a fucking timer attached to it.

Yunobo at least has a niche with his attack that attaches to the front of your vehicle, but the damage doesn’t scale to be worth the effort for the late midgame imo.

Riju’s ability isn’t bad but it’s a nightmare to hunt her down in the middle of a combat encounter to activate her ability on purpose. Man, if only the sage’s abilities were added to some sort of radial power menu that already existed in the game! That would have been really helpful! But no, it’s so much more important that the world map(???) and the amiibo gacha system have dedicated spots on there 😊

It’s fun but the story was so ridiculous I largely just ignored it. Only good part is hot catwolf lady

I tried very hard to like BOTW and TOTK given how much people seem to love them. I generally like Zelda games, but I just could not gel with either of them and I beat them both. TL;DR they took out a ton of what I like about Zelda and added in a bunch of what I hate about open world games.

There are also some baffling design decisions that I can’t explain. Like every boss in BOTW is a ___blight Ganon and how every pseudo-dungeon in TOTK has the exact same unlock-four-locks-to-open-the-boss-room design. And your reward for finishing those? A cutscene with one of the sages that repeats the same thing all the others say. But the geoglyphs? You can get those WAY out of order like I did. Or the underground. I thought it was neat at first until I realized it was literally just a mirror of the overworld. It’s all very strange.

Yeah I more or less agree. It has some great additions, and has few real drawbacks, however for how much BOTW had going for it this was a let down for me. I enjoyed myself, but I don’t think about how much I want to boot it up and start from nothing and go in a random direction like I did with BOTW.

Ceave Perspective’s video on the game does a good job praising it while explaining the sense of personal disinterest https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4ldmt3eU2I&t=3639s

I really liked botw, and I think I ruined totk for myself by replaying botw (with the Linkle mod) right before the newer game came out, because I booted up totk, fucked around for about two hours, and then never played it again.

Luckily I haven’t paid for a nintendo game in many years, but still.

I happened to Banjo-Kazooie glider down to this one geoglyph with a cutsceene that made it

so I glued a joystick to two fans and

noggin. So I made that my priority. After achieving that, I stopped playing.

I really disliked the idea of the teardrop cutscenes. You’re not an independent actor in a story, you’re basically reliving a story (out of order) that happened thousands of years ago. The culmination of the cutscenes isn’t even that impactful to the game, I think you can literally finish the main story quest and not do tears. It’s weirdly important to the story since it focuses on Zelda and is the the titular aspect of the game, and weirdly completely unimportant. And that’s not saying anything about the quality of the cutscenes themselves - the big “showdown” where the demon king gets sealed away by all the old sages is so ugly I thought I was transported back in time to 2004. Compare it to cutscenes and even regular in-game scenes in Genshin Impact, and you’ll be confused on why TotK was even so awaited.

The story was so lazy (from what I know of it).

Ganondorf is barely in it or present and seems to barely do anything.

Demon king? Secret stone?

The best thing about TOTK is that it just categorically doesn’t fucking care what BOTW haters think about it. I genuinely believe the people who made BOTW and then TOTK did not read a single fucking sentence of often too-online fan criticism and the game is all the better for it. The game has a ton of flaws, but the core that is there is such a joy it doesn’t matter. It’s the purest display of playing to your strengths in a video game I’ve probably ever seen. To me no part of TOTK feels forced or born out of anything other than the joy of making and playing it. The recall and ascend abilities feel like such playful and inventive out-of-nowhere additions that I can’t believe we have them in such an open and free-form game as TOTK and not in some random one-person indie game on steam.

Sure, they could have done more to fix the flaws of BOTW and tried to make a more well-rounded game, but I feel like this game is them completely adopting a “rather more good than less bad” mantra and I couldn’t be more excited where that’ll lead them, especially after TOTK already feels like a pretty wild departure from what fans expected.