Amazon US (NA?) is selling The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom (Physical) for $59.99 (-$10 off)

Reached 140 hours today

Still around 15 shrines left to find and beat
Unlocked all lighroots
Upgraded my cannon armor to the maximum
Unlocked the solemn vow of 4 sages (some Sages will are Unlocked behind the king geoks, quite tiresome to beat, I think I will miss the fifth Sage)
Built a house to store some of my weapons there, the unique ones like sea breeze boomerang and sword of the hero

Not really bothering with Korok seeds


Still a lot of side quests I want to finish (at least 10), trying to collect all the unique horses (got 4 of them for now) and unlock some gears

I believe I will end my playtrough by this Sunday, with around ~160 hours played. This is a good 40 hours more than BOTW

My physical copy of FF XVI should arrive next Monday, and I want to play it asap. I will try to play some backlog after it, and plan to complete TOTK only when the inevitable DLC comes out (hope it's not more than 6 months away)

Awesome game, I'll comeback here to write my review after beating Ganondorf

That's 3 hours a day since release. I wish I still had that kind of time to spend on games :)

So 160 hours, with fast travel I assume, and you finished BotW in 120 hours. BotW took me 170 hours without fast travel so I'm looking at at least 230 hours to complete TotK in my playstyle. Madness! I'm at bout 40% Depths explored now, haven't done anything else yet since leaving tutorial island.

I got about 90 minutes a day I can spend on TotK on average, I should be able to finish it end October / early November at my pace :) (without interruptions)

I agree, it feels too big at times. I'd much rather have a smaller area to explore, but with the same amount of content jammed into it. I have the same feeling with the shrines, some of them just feel so pointless, as if they had a predetermined number they had to reach. 

I started playing 6 days after the launch so more than 3 actually...

Trust me, it will take far more than 230 hours without fast travel if you want to unlock everything the game had to offer because this game is much more packed and fast travel speed up things a lot. I've unlocked the towers as soon as possible and fast travel the whole game like crazy, plus I'm now much more experienced in the game mechanics like sensors. Spent well less time exploring some Hyrule regions and much less time climbing mountains as well 

If I've played TOTK brand new without playing BOTW before I believe it would take me a good 180 hours to beat it, no doubt 

Sky islands will be particularly painful... if you for some reason make a mistake when calculating distance/stamina and fall from them, returning will sometimes not be fast. Yesterday I was trying to reach a sky island very far, and only succeeded when teleporting to a specific Dungeon in the sky and paragliding from there. The problem is this dungeon take a good 30 minutes to reach if you go to no fast travel route (you can reach it trough a very fun platforming section in Hebra region). There is an workaround, which is saving your game periodically and returning to it if you fail to reach a sky island, but I don't know... seems even less fun than teleporting... 

The developers realized not even shrines were enough this time, you can unlock some portable teleport seals that let you place them on every flat floor and you can fast travel to them. For instance if you are in a sky island very troublesome to reach and there is no shrine close, you can place the mark on the floor and teleport to there anytime (up to 3 marks, which you need to complete quests to unlock)

There is a mechanic you can use though. This time you can travel on the top of the dragons! This can make you reach some sky islands, the ones not that high

Just make sure to have a gear that is resistant to the Ice and Fire dragons

The Light Dragon flies over 5km I think, and take 2 real world hours complete it's travel around Hyrule. You can mount her from the top of the archipelago you start the game, you just have to... wait 2 hours for her and then travel on top of her until you reach the island you want to reach and... good luck

(But Don't finish Tears of the Kingdom questline, for doing so the Light Dragon will go down from 5km+ to ~2km and you will no longer be able to reach every island from her, although it becomes much easier and fast to find spots to mount her to farm her scales/horns/etc) 

Check out this super detailed Zelda diorama modeled after those old Polly Pocket/Mighty Max toys:

Source

It's not about the fun factor why i don't use teleport. I want to make my journey a continuous one. But I'm funny like that, continuous journey doesn't mean no reloading. I save all the time before committing to a questionable climb or glide. I quit to menu when I die so I can load my save game with the single heart health instead of using continue which restores my health. (I wish you could load on death, 2 loading screens to reload after dying :/)

To me it's about creating a continuous path through the game without skipping the intermediate terrain. It all builds a sense of scale for me. Save/load doesn't interfere with that. Hence I rather walk and don't even use the para glider all that much :) Basically this (from exploring the world in FS2020)

One continuous path connecting 7146 airports together, took over 2500 hours to complete that journey. (Had loads of time then from lock downs)

Anyway I'll see what happens when I get to the sky islands. They are fundamentally incompatible with my play style, so I'll have to adapt. There is no continuous path to make with floating islands :/

TotK got back to a 96 metascore.

Light Dragon can mitigate things a bit, as I said she flies all over Hyrule, you can use her as your personal airplane you continuously travel Hyrule. I did it once actually, spent the 2 hours travel on top of her doing nothing but watching the Horizon... it was a very relaxing experience 

But it's not fast. You will need to commit exploring a group of islands, and then spend some time for it to comeback (2 hours), and often she will fly over the islands, which means you cannot comeback and will need to again reach an island high enough to mount her. Once you finish the Tears of the Kingdom questline she will start flying closer to the ground like the other dragons, so flying her to explore most of islands will no longer be an option 

Is it too big for a Zelda game? No. Is it too big to run on Nintendo Switch? Almost. XD