Botw and tears are my personal hated games.....couldnt finish them properly... they werent zelda!!!
Zelda is combat, puzzles and exploration (power, wisdom, courage). BotW and TotK have these three elements in SPADES, more than almost any game every created; what is this Joseph Anderson-tier argument?
Well, I agree with both of these, even though they are contradictory. 4 days ago I was thinking about how BotW and TotK were Zelda in name only, trendy blandified limp actiony games with poorly integrated massive scapes that just confuse and rearrange the core game into many parts.
Then I thought about how why I got an N64 instead of a Saturn even though I liked Sonic and Mario, I wanted to play Zelda. I think Zelda originally overthrew the barriers to always having to be alert and react to everything and just get immersed in the world more in A Link to the Past and Ocarina, and that overcame any sharply defined fun reactive arcadey experience other games could make in the 90s. It's also why I played a lot of PS1 RPGs, big interesting things where it just felt open.
Now, I'm a millennial so I didn't play NES Zelda really, my only vague memories are getting as angry as possible at Zelda 1 and watching a neighbor beat it for me and Zelda 2 being just unplayable, but I think many older fans saw A link to the past and the era of kind of "theme park" zelda as contrary to the weird hardcore exploration mode of the original Zeldas.
Miyamoto doesn't really seem to be hands on with any games anymore, but Wikipedia at least says he was involved with TotK and BotW, and it feels like they tried I think not to make a trendy bland big game, but just a modern Zelda 1 game. It's still packed with action, but it's presented in a highly immersive big universe.
It's the same with Breath of Fire vs Dragon's Dogma, I couldn't really stand Dragon's Dogma but now I feel like I get it there's something to just having a really exploration, unsure/unclear method to the game. It's an opportunity to relax and just have things happen, and it scales with the story being more Disney and expansive.
So considering most of Zelda has been a theme park kinda Zelda, Breath of the Wild doesn't really belong, I feel like it was made for like Gen X fans of Zelda 1 who can make sense of it, but as a game it seems it's actually quite an achievement in terms of scale and softening the game to make it appealing to all players. If Nintendo was known for making games more accessible in the 80s, then Zelda in the 90s and 2000s was even more accessible, and BotW and TotK are max accessible, it's the "correct" path so to speak, that's what's been proven to win in the marketplace.
So I guess if I stop thinking in terms of, how video gamey addicting fun is this game like a Mega Man for BotW, and more, is this some kind of enjoyable artistic experience? I think it's really good. Also, Sony games like Final Fantasy and Souls games are even more open ended IMO than BotW or TotK. If there's hope for classic gaming or classic Zelda, it's to actually want a very un-classic comparatively more straightforward action game like BotW to succeed, since Sega and Capcom and the others aren't as much at the forefront anymore.
In no universe do I feel like the classic action elements of BotW (dodging, aiming, the actual puzzles) are actually done very well at all compared to like any modern game, but that's just not the point. There a light very supplementary addition to the main point of getting into the big universe, in which case they are sort of nice to have actually.
So BotW and TotK betray the spirit of Zelda and are a shock to the system, but given a fair judgment in terms of "how badly do I want to play and finish this" they are quite good I guess somehow, only a recent feeling I have.
Well that was all not the topic question, but it was a way for me to actually explain somehow what I think about Zelda as a whole anyway.
So most hated is a strong word, don't really hate any, but I got some distance in Majora's Mask for 3DS and I basically don't get it, I don't hate it, but it's pretty confusing and frustrating in a lot of unsatisfying ways.