Aonuma feels that Breath of the Wild’s freedom needs to be maintained in future Zelda games

[nemo37]

BoTW brought the open world overworld in Zelda games that I had been waiting a long time for. However, they also took certain things away that they ought to bring back in addition to the open world overworld:

1. Themed dungeons with better puzzles: the divine beasts didn't really have the puzzle solving elements that we typically receive in Zelda games. Instead they felt more like fetch missions. Similarly, the shrines, while quite fun in and of themselves as mini dungeons, were not large enough to replace traditional Zelda dungeons. Another issue was that both shrines and divine beasts generally looked the same and lacked the interesting themes found in previous Zelda dungeons.

2. Enemy and boss variety: there are a great number of enemies that exist in the world of Zelda, so it was quite sad that in this game we only got a handful and mere stronger variants of them. The next Zelda games should bring back different types of enemies. Similarly, the bosses were not very memorable nor where they particularly different from one another with regards to design or attack tactics.

3. Better music score: A game the size of BoTW deserves a fantastic score. While this game had a few great pieces of music (Hyrule Castle and Fantastic Beast music stood out as being quite good to me), the big overworld was largely filled with the same few piano notes being played again and again.

4. Better NPCs: The towns and cities did not have particularly memorable residents (at least any that Link extensively interacted with), so they all felt very generic.

5. Better ending: Going through this big adventure only to end up in front of Hyrule Castle again with nothing changed is a bit of the let down. This was an issue I had with Mario games like Sunshine and Galaxy, which were later remedied in Galaxy 2, 3D World, Odyssey with the addition of post-game content. I hope a future game gets structured in a way where once you save the world, there will be profound positive change in the game and one that will lead to post-game content.