The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom 7.5/10
Great game but… very disappointing.
The gameplay is great and some of the best in the series, I loved the Zonai tech, getting to build things, the Depths, Sky, etc. I liked the sidequests and exploring with stuff like finding caves and such. Characters like Tulin in the game are awesome, and the companions (sages) are very cool to travel with and do the dungeons with. Speaking of, we got dungeons (sorta) and that is nice to see back.
However, the game falls short in lots of categories, mostly story. This is the worst story in a 3D Zelda yet, with how the game advertised it, it really isn’t a dark or deep or crazy story, and certainly a terrible sequel to BotW. Hardly anything about what happened in BotW is mentioned much here like the calamity or champions, Link just seems like some complete stranger to people who should know him (like the hateno residents) and Zelda is reduced to really nothing, outside of turning into a dragon… only for her to turn back which ruins the sacrifice, especially when the game several times stated that once you become a dragon you can’t turn back
The game is very unsubtle and awful with the story presentation, it feels like things need to be spoon-fed to you. The biggest example of this is the sages who tell you the same thing after each regional phenomena, have no face shown, no name, and just repeat the same imprisoning war/demon king speech, which feels like they didn’t even try with them. It’s so… lazy and easily my least favorite part of this whole game. Or “oh my god, Zelda’s constantly acted suspicious, I think that’s not Zelda”(turns out it’s not Zelda and just a puppet, which couldn’t be more obvious with how shady she acted throughout the game and if you did the geoglyphs before Hyrule Castle) not to mention this is probably the weakest version of Gannondorf who feels so underwhelming and wasted potential.
It feels like some fanfic of the actual story of what TotK could’ve been. It could’ve been a gritty, serious, gripping story but all the potential is basically wasted on a poor continuation of BotW’s story and repetitive dialogue and how far fetched everything about it is. I hope this isn’t the last game of the BotW games, cause this is a really poor way to end off the BotW games and story of it all.
So yeah, gameplay is incredible, story and presentation leaves a lot to be desired