I get that the Depths were supposed to look hellish to contrast sharply with the more heavenly feel of the Sky Islands, but when you find out there are special roots that can light up your surroundings, it makes you think that it wasn't nearly as awful as it has been since Ganon's uprising.

I have the full miner's glowing set now, so I don't need bright bloom seeds anymore for getting to the next root. They are still useful to throw down cliffs to see where the bottom is. At least the 'towers' down here are actually useful :) If the game had auto map I would never use the towers up top. But I guess they map the sky islands as well? The first mandatory tower revealed the sky above Hyrule castle as well I think.

Anyway apart from the gloom, slowly turning it into a nice place to visit :)

Got a big session yesterday where I finally got to visit the Depths for the first time. Quite the hunting theme that plays out when you descend throught the chasm ... The place is dark as hell but then I got through with a light root and it became much more livable until I had to trek through for the next one.

Once again, incredible how they're litteraly doing another Hyrule under the original Hyrule. No wonder this needed more time in the oven.

Also got to explore a few more expansive caves like the indredibly long winded Royal Hidden Passageway. Got the full armor set from it but there was no way to link it back effectively with Lookout Landing weirdly enough ... Yet

Okay just unlocked the big automata you can... ride

And this is the first gameplay aspect of the game thst I find really bad. The thing is too big and clunky, totally not fun to fight and even dismounting it is a bit cumbersome 

The Sages following you are a great addition for sure, but I'm not a fan of how to activate their skills. We need to be close to them at the right time, sometimes they keep running away from you. Riju skill is specially annoying, because it takes time for her lighting radio to expand and if you are not quick enough it just vanish  

They should have used a better button control schema to activate Sage's Vow skills because often the Sages will be so close to each other making quite impossible to have a precise decision of which skill will be activate 

Overall battle still the weakest aspect of Zelda. It's simply not fully enjoyable. It's tolerable, but that's it. That's why I keep avoid fighting as much as possible. Overall I'm happy this game is easy, because if it was hard it would be infuriating to defeat bosses with such awkward controllers 

A recent rumor claimed that Nintendo might collaborate once more with Illumination on an animated The Legend of Zelda movie. Recently, in an interview with TheWrap, Chris Meledandri, the founder and CEO of Illumination, weighed in:

"I don’t know where that came from. I mean I can understand how people would surmise all sorts of things because obviously, we’ve had a great experience working together. My relationship with Nintendo now includes being on their board of directors, so I understand how people can surmise these things. But in terms of the specifics, that was just something that I’ve been hearing lots of rumors. This is just about what’s next between Nintendo and Illumination."

Source

Personally, I hope Illumination never touches Zelda, given the studio's track record. Although I'm unsure any studio could do the franchise justice, if Nintendo applies to its film adaptation the same cautious, conservative, broad approach used for The Super Mario Bros. Movie.

Illumination tarnishing Zelda's Legend is not something the world needs to see.

At this point, I'd just prefer Nintendo to mount up their own animation studio and use Dreamworks as partners for the distribution of these internally made movies

I'm getting all these build schemes from the Yiga clan camps down in the depths, so far I've not been compelled to use a single one :/ The 3 wheeled vehicle is somewhat controllable, but slow, I can walk faster lol. I don't have enough battery for the flying things, non seem any better than rocket shield plus para glider anyway. Need more water to enjoy the boats, there are some lakes in the depths but no reason to use a raft so far.

My most use for ultra hand seems to be lift up crates to let them smash open, move Yiga flame throwers / beam weapons / doors out of the way, and put a rocket balloon together to sniff out the next light root.

Combat is very simple and the only enjoyable aspect of it is to watch the moblins etc fight each other. Best is to fire a couple muddle buds from a high vantage point into a camp and watch the chaos. With explosives in the camp they tend to blow each other up as well :) And that's pretty much the only 'efficient' way to do it since all enemies are already black, silver, boss types. So I keep my health at 1 heart, use puff shrooms for sneak attack + desperate strength bonus attack. And it still takes 4 sneak attack hits from a 34 dmg axe with all the bonuses applied to take a full health silver moblin down.

These weapons breaking so fast really limits the combat. There is just no incentive to take them on 'fair and square', and I guess Nintendo knows that as every camp has some muddle buds, puff shrooms and bomb flowers planted around the perimeter. Flintox etc I leave alone, not worth the cost.

I'm have about 30-35% Depths explored. The biomes up top affect the enemies below but there are no heat or cold sections. There is a whole lot of up and down though, it's way more vertical exploration than BotW was. Keeps it interesting. Plus not being able to see what's in the distance only makes me want to explore more! Slowly but surely bringing the light to the entire Depths :)

As for a Zelda movie, Studio Ghibli needs to do that! The couple animated bits they did for the original Ni No Kuni were amazing.

Dreamworks is hit or miss and Illumination just sucks, don't have a single good movie released ever

Walt Disney Animation and Pixar are the only reliable blockbuster animation studios and I don't see them particularly interested adapting third party series, they want to focus on their own IPs (and that's a good thing)

I don't think we need a Zelda movie, but if we get I'd choose a anime-style done by a Chinese or Japanese studio over a western studio any day 

I guess they are the most reliable when it comes to making completely safe average movies

2 or 3 builds are good to explore the skies. The others are as good as useless

Sky islands are the most fun sections in the game for me because they are all but a huge natural puzzle. They are the parts of the game that clearly are more tightly designed and well thought to make use of the game new mechanics. When the inevitable DLC comes out I hope they focus more on bringing in more sky islands 

However as good as they are they took me way too long to be reliably explored. I needed to almost fully upgrade my stamina bar and get tons of battery's upgrades to reach some sky islands and even at over 120 shrines finished there are islands that I'm yet to explore because I still have to figure out how to reach them 

Depths were very nice... for the first 40 hours of the game (I'm 125 hours now). After that, they felt like a shore to me. Most of them are empty spaces with only the mines and coliseums being nice to explore. The worst part is that I avoided the Yiga questline, as well as Josha questline which both seems to be the ones to "guide" you trough the depths.

Some regions like Faron region and Eldin region are also meant to be explored in specific moments of the game (i.e. Sage's questline). During my endless wandering throughout the depths I've explored both regions before of the time which made both questlines a bit... underwhelming. But that can't be helped, the nature of an open world game is to allow this kind of progression so I'm the only one to blame

I've unlocked 101 light roots so far and there are still some dark spaces, mostly from Hebra/Tabantha/Hyrule Ridge regions 

I suggest you to give a chance for overworld. Unlike the depths it's has no own factor (we all know the map already), nor sense of survival, but still fun to do its quests and unlock the shrines and towers. The questlines of TOTK are far ahead of BOTW, in a sense they indeed look like quests (you need to find specific places, items, characters and figure out how to interact and do some actions at the right time/order). A fairly good portion of the map underwent changes on its design (the caves are some of the best additions) and above all Hyrule itself still beautiful and atmospheric. You will need to, however, adapt your expectations and desire because the game was designed to have more structures quests, which means you will take a break on exploration and find out what the questline want you to do.