There were a lot of reasons Epona was annoying in OoT, thank god she was strictly optional there but doing the extra course for Malon after freeing her was a pain. I don’t know if they actually changed anything about how she controls, but I recently played through Majora’s Mask again and found I got caught on geometry far, far less of the time than before. Always seemed to do exactly what I told her.
It’s been forever since I’ve played Four Swords Adventures, so just going off vague memory here, but I recall Epona being relatively inoffensive at least. There wasn’t much to it, though, and you only got to use her once or twice? Interesting to try in a 2D game but can totally see why it wasn’t worth it as an idea to go back to for them.
Twilight Princess…meh. Naming it is fun, decent for the first few hours of the game, but after you can warp I basically never used Epona again. It’s kind of really ridiculous that you get the instrument to call her not only at the end of the most boring main quest in the entire series, but so late in the game that you’ll likely only be warping to the few spots you’ve got left to go. It would be like getting the boat in Wind Waker once you’ve finished the Triumph forks hunt.
For Breath of the Wild, I found all the new horse stuff really neat and definitely closer to how it should all be handled in the future, but found them almost kind of similarly useless after reaching Kakariko or Hateno. There were just too many places I’d want to climb right over rather than going around, and Hyrule Field in particular I felt was too dangerous to just ride out in the open in with all the guardians roaming about. One area I feel horses could have helped were in Gerudo desert tbh, no idea why they couldn’t other than to push sand seals. One thing I was impressed with was, at least with higher bond level, what they’ll tend to avoid automatically and things like staying on paths, making me feel it was more inspired by Shadow of the Colossus or Red Dead and that Skyrim was only name dropped for how popular it is.
Arguably no control difference in Tears of the Kingdom (that I know of) but I actually found myself engaging a bit more with them this time around. Definitely helps to have more quests with them involved, and wish there’d been a few more other things like the traveling music group where you had to use them to carry stuff around between towns or wherever. It’s kind of a weird dichotomy but I’d found that since I could just fly to most any huge landmark, horses were actually far more useful for finding all the smaller stuff between everything. So I had fun catching at least a few, giving them musical names a la Jojo, and was a nice surprise to see they can carry over from BotW. So far this is my favorite iteration of the feature.
