I'm very conflicted. While I love a lot of the mechanics, I am not sure if I love the GAME...? One note is that I am one of those unicorn people who loved Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, & I 100% it back in the day, so it's NOT that aspect.
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What I do love is fusing. Love how it adds durability & lets me pick & choose aspects like elements with my weapon rather than running around to grab the same flame swords & dump chuchu jelly around in BotW. What I don't love with it is the "quick" menu very quickly becomes... not quick the moment you have one of every type of item. A solution I suppose is to not hoard, but with armor upgrades, you gotta. Very annoying.
Honestly very underwhelmed with the Depths. Too safe. I thought it was very cool the first time I went down there, but now after exploring about 80% of it, it just feels weirdly too empty? Dunno. Can't explain this well, it just feels like a missed opportunity, especially with the certain-someones always being in camps & not really encountered outside of them. Please, make me more paranoid, have them everywhere down there. The depths should have been far more deadly & "end game" to me, I dunno. It's just floor is lava too much, & even that is super easy to avoid & mitigate early on. I was really, really hoping for more UNIQUE life down here, you know?
Now for the general bits. I honestly think this Zelda has had some of THE best boss fights in a long time. Are they perfect? No. Many are rather short or very easy, but the presentation of some of them, & the build up to get to some of them was EXCELLENT. Now the dungeons themselves disappointed me at times, but that is entirely more about length & general graphical presentation with most of them, over the puzzles which I found fine. The lead-ups into those dungeons were super fun for me, & I especially liked some of the puzzles just to get INTO them. My beef with the LOOK of them will have to come elsewhere.
And now the major story of TotK. It. Bad. I will not go into details here, but some reveals had me screaming (in a good way), but others had me screaming from the sheer massive let-down of more than one character feeling wasted or fridged again. There also was major, major issues with every. Single. Temple just... repeating the same lore dump flashback in a "let me copy your homework & change a few words..." feel, which I guess is a side-effect of being able to beat any temple in any order. Awful. THAT is what killed them all for me & made me have 0 urge to go further once I had done my second. Still, I think each temple should have had an introductory flashback speech if you reached it first, or one that instead would reveal a new chunk of information based on what you've already done. Reason being is that these all were monologues played over a cutscene, & most of that easily can be a different recording rather than summing up the SAME event 5 times. I can go on with this, but I was MAJORLY disappointed with that part of the plot. The dragon tears I guess were okay, but the fact that they all can be played out of order is... a decision, I guess. Did not do it for me & the repetition of some segments of those scenes felt rushed & weird. I don't want to quote major things here.
So after all that did I ENJOY the game?
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I am honestly not sure! It's bananas. The game has jumped leagues & miles ahead of BotW, both in scope, mechanics & general quality of life changes you'll immediately notice. The armor. Weapons. Just... MAN. It needs more time to bake in my head, but I'm so far leaning on "No, I didn't enjoy TotK due to the story". Sadly. I didn't like BotW either! I don't know what it is, just these open world games so far have just had very... TINY stories despite the massive scope they have. Half of it is missable, or repeated, etc. Like? There's just no time to get attached to anything, & if you want to, what you hope is there just... isn't? Oh I hope they'll go more into the royal family, Ganondorf's motivations with some of those scenes, etc (nope!). One of these days I will go off in even more detail, but I'm going to end this here. I don't think I enjoyed TotK overall, but it is fun I goof around in, that I suppose is the major thing for me.