Tears of the Kingdom had an enormous game to live up to. There are few games as acclaimed as Breath of the Wild; for better or worse it dramatically changed the industry. So many other companies tried to recreate what made Botw so good, and all of them failed. When Nintendo announced as direct a followup as you can get, the question quickly became whether even they could recapture the magic. In my opinion... they mostly do. Mostly.
Let's start with the good. The Zonai tech and Ultrahand stuff are phenomenal. I cannot believe just how much creativity a player is able to exhibit with all these devices and ways to snap together different contraptions. I have never been a real creative type when it comes to customizing a game, but the tools in Totk are so easy to use and the possibilities so gargantuan I found it so easy to try everything at least once. It doesn't take much effort at all to make Looney Tunes contraptions of any kind and the amazing thing is they almost always work. The amount of technical wizardry going on behind the scenes to make all these devices intuitively interact with each other, I mean, the control stick alone understanding exactly how to pilot whatever you've slapped up is ridiculous. You can see the results from so many players expressing their creativity in boundless ways. I'm kinda surprised Nintendo never released a sandbox mode to just play with this as a toy forever.
Those zonai devices lead to another strong element of the game: Puzzle solving. While I have some trepidation on the concept of making your own puzzle solutions, I found that Totk really doesn't have that for the most part. the shrine puzzles in particular are very authored, and have a specific solution in mind, while giving you a little bit of leeway on the exact track to get there. Meanwhile, the dungeons themselves are pretty open, and while they do have intended solutions, you're free to use whatever tools you have on hand to cheese them any way you like. I find this to be a really good balance; the shrines were easily my favorite part of the game, but I also enjoyed the looser style of the dungeons, especially because I had a companion with me for all of them. It's a good mix, and I can see Nintendo trying this particular mix of puzzle design again in the future, or at least refining it in a different way down the line.
As for the exploratory part that Botw made central, I think Totk does a pretty good job maintaining that air of something new over the horizon. While the games share a map, the world has changed a lot over the years (ingame and out), to the point that the familiar can become unfamiliar, and part of the intrigue is seeing how a location you know and love has become different either through time or the upheaval. This is the first time Zelda games have specifically shared a map like this before, and as long as it doesn't strictly become the norm, I think this was a good shot at it. Plus, even if they're not as fleshed out as I'd like, the depths and the sky are fun additions to the overall world, and make a hell of a contrast in environments, both visually and gameplay-wise.
It's the story where the cracks first start to show. I like the idea of the story here, but the execution is all over the place. The Zelda memories are, unlike Botw, not a story meant to be experienced out of order. Unless you luck into the right order (and I sure didn't), you are going to experience a jumbled mess that hurts the intended reading. They should have made them unlock in order regardless of which one you found. Combine that with the extreme repetition that comes with the sage quests, and you get a story that borders on a farce sometimes. However, I do love the individual characters that come with all of the sages, and the shonen energy that the bosses (especially the final bosses) bring to the table earns me over in the end, not in spite of but because of the ridiculousness. Really, it's a Zelda game, I don't expect an amazing story. If this was the only issue There wouldn't really be a problem at all.
However, the big sticking point with Totk is that there's just too much. There's simply too much of everything. There's too many fuse materials. There's too many sidequests. There's too many collectables (poes, shrine lights, bubbul gems, sage lights, crystals, probably some i'm missing). There's too many chests. There's too much of everything! And the bigger problem is that it's just not really worth it the majority of the time. This isn't a classic Zelda game where you'll find a high value prize at the end of a curated quest. In Totk, you'll get a weapon (which breaks), rupees (which you could make easily), a consumable (rarely good enough to be worth it), or very rarely, some armor (actually worth it). With so many of these and so little reward most of the time, you end up just ignoring them a lot of the time. Some of them are fun just intrinsically, and some of them do offer interesting glimpses at the world... but most don't. You compare this to Botw, which was much better about giving you rewards that were worth it, and also held back on shoving them into you constantly. That emptiness in Botw was not just there for no reason! It had a purpose! And Totk failed to understand that.
That's ultimately my main issue with Totk, one I admit I don't think it ever could have truly overcome given how it was made. Botw was the bestselling Zelda game ever, it brought in so many new fans to the series. Nintendo had a blank check to make any Zelda game they wanted, absolutely anything could have come out next and would have had an audience for it. The fact that that chose to make Botw But More is such a letdown, regardless of anything else on display in Totk. I can't pretend I'm not a little fearful for the franchise's future if this was their first choice as a followup to their biggest success.
By itself, Tears of the Kingdom is a good game. A great game, even. It's a game I know I'll play again someday, I know I missed a ton in it even with 70+ hours on it. In the grand scheme of things though, I ultimately can't look at the game without a pretty heavy dose of disappointment.
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