There are dungeons and unique bosses.

Indeed, it's basically BOTW but better, in every aspect.

Like Pokémon Gold is to Pokémon Blue.

I mean, after BOTW sold 4 times more than the previous highest selling Zelda, it was only natural they'd double down on the new direction rather than going back to a style of game that never netted them this level of success.

Yeah, Gleeock's back, and there's some kind of ancient robot from what I remember.

Oh, it was certainly expected that they would continue in BotW direction - after all they are most interested in sales. Then again, I have no problem imagining in my mind Zelda that is open world AND has a lot of designs that defined Zelda for decades. Not that I actually expected they would fully listen to people that were dissatisfied with BotW, but I was hoping they would listen to at least some of the critique.

But, I haven't seen that much, maybe some 10-11 hours, and that only in bits and snippets. It is possible there are things later in the game that are much more like classic Zeldas that I don't know nothing about at the moment. As I said, knowing there is underground is enough for me to decide to play it, though I would probably try to play it with as little as possible usage of crafting/physics shenanigans - akin to that guy that played BotW without climbing.

How did they not listen to any critique? The weapon durability can now be increased and make weapons break less, there are bigger dungeons now, with more variety than the divine beasts and bosses that actually stand out and are unique and the enemy variety is significantly higher now with both classic returning and new enemies. Those were literally the three biggest complaints people had with BotW.

The usage of ultrahand is mandatory for traversal between islands. It's not meaningless like you say. And fuse is in big part to make combat more interesting and fun.

I really don't get how you can say that these things are meaningless. The game revolves around them.

Well, hopefully they are not like BotW "dungeons", aka Divine Beasts. From what I understand there are

we're yet to see do they lean more toward classic Zelda dungeons/temples or half-hearted attempts like Divine Beasts.

I have not seen them in detail, but I've read impressions and they are that the first dungeon already is significantly better than any divine beast and a ton of fun.

Classic Zelda dungeons usually had puzzles with only one possible sollution, which is something I hope never ever returns in any future Zelda game. A mixture of Hyrule Castle and puzzles like in the shrines and the divine beasts in BotW is what I hope it will be like.

While the divine beasts were very samey and short, they did have some great puzzles. Something bigger, with a mini-boss in the middle and more intricate level design and genuinely great bosses would be what I'd want. That huge golem shown in one of the trailers apparently is an incredible boss fight early on, but I haven't seen it myself.

It wasn't just the open world that made BOTW so insanely popular though, the physics stuff and freeform approach to gameplay were a big part of it too. The lock and key progression style of classic Zelda would run counter to that and would risk not appealing to the new players who made BOTW so successful.

Played a bit of BotW yesterday. I'm still taken aback by how gorgeous the landscapes look.