The great thing about that game is that it can be all of it...it is realxing, stressfull, claustrophobic, a little creepy at times, melanchonic and peacefull all at once...depending on what are you doing, where you go in the solar system, and how you are playing. Just like BOTW the player has complete agency over progression perhaps even more...so it's up to you to decide the pacing. Of course to solve some riddles you have to be aware of time and.... yes it happens, you may have to start over some sections if time is over in an incovenient moment...but that is also part of the challange.

If you're interested to try go in knowing as little as possible...game progression is completely based your information and knowledge...any gameplay video could be a potential spoiler. It's usless to say at this point I definetly recommend it.

As for you last question...what do you do in the last 5 minutes? That's when you relax, after all the end of the loop is inevitable...

I found that the best approach to the weapons in BOTW is to treat them like ammo rather than getting attached to them. Each one is there to be deployed and replaced; by being finite I appreciated each one more, but things never got stale as my weapons loadout and thus my approach to combat was constantly changing. It kept things fresh in a way that unbreakable weapons wouldn't have. I couldn't just use my strongest weapon and neglect everything else, and I loved that.

It's like in a shooter where you run out of ammo for one gun, grab something new, use it up, grab another one, etc. 

Sounds good, and it's 40% off atm, added to download queue :)

Seems like your post may be satirical, but I honestly feel this way. The Switch was my first Nintendo home console, and I bought it primarily to play BotW. I really did like it, but I would give it around an 8.5-9. There were some moments that were truly magical, but overall, I didn’t understand the insane and darn-near unprecedented amount of praise it received. Before I played, people told me I didn’t need to have played previous Zelda games to love BotW, but I think you kind of do for nostalgia and to fully appreciate it.

Exploration in the greeny and snowy areas of Hyrule is very captivating, you get to see trees, deers, birds, grass moving along the wind, etcetera. Those are great stimuli and make running around or horse riding very entertaining. It's when you go to the barren locations where you definitely can feel that exploration is like a chore, you essentially see nothing on top of doing nothing (with the exception of the many Koroks out there). That's why I really dislike going to the Gerudo chain, Death Mountain, or the many cliffs and steppes in the game. Gerudo desert is not so bad, though, not sure why. So maybe 60% (maybe more) of the world is very nice, while the rest is very uninspiring.

This is how I approached the weapons, too.

I agree that Death Mountain is boring, easily my least favorite area of the game.

I might disagree with all of those things except the more cosmetic variety and monsters. Including bosses, such as the Divine beasts, which were a lot of fun, I’d like more.

I find Breath of the Wild already fixed the dungeon gameplay problems of OOT, MM, Celda, TP,. Not with the Divine Beast dungeons (which I’ll get to) but with the puzzle shrines (as opposed to battle and freebie shrines).

What  were those problems? Slowness, Blocker puzzles, setbacks, and more. 

The first major problem being slowness of the dungeons stemming from the fact that 3D takes longer to traverse than 2D, making the dungeon experience significantly less fun than Link to the Past. The puzzle Shrines in Breath of the Wild fix this by shrinking the number of rooms, this way, the lengths are around as long as the dungeons on older 2D Zelda games.

Second were the blocker “find the key/switch” type puzzles that could sometimes take literally hours to find without a guide unless you were very lucky. This is searching for a key hidden in one of like 38 rooms felt like searching for needles in a haystack style design, and it’s not fun; especially if you missed it and searched the ENTIRE rest of the dungeon for it once or twice before giving up and using a guide or quitting the game. Sometimes it was trying to figure out which puzzle you were supposed to do, often you could see stuff, and it wasn’t apparent if you were supposed to get to it yet.  The design often felt convoluted because it was a mush-mash of different things rather than a consistent theme: what this ended up achieving is making most of the dungeons feel the same since you were doing the same sort of stuff and nothing really stood out gameplay wise unless it was particularly annoying - like the Water Temple. In Link to the Past, these “find the key” puzzles did exist, but they normally took no longer than 30 seconds. Puzzles were generally themed, and this quickness and consistency was fun. Breath of the Wild doesn’t quite replicate the experience, but it makes the feeling very similar; and BOTW removed the blockers that were in EVERY other 3D Zelda game.

Third, setbacks. A big example of this is the Fire Temple, walking along a narrow path, falling, taking 5-10 minutes to get back up there. This was annoying in Link to the Past as well, but it normally took like 20 seconds to climb back up from places you could get accidentally knocked down from - I think at worst it was about 45 seconds to 1 minute in one of the dark world dungeons. Breath of the Wild doesn’t have this problem either, 20 seconds to maybe 1 minute to climb back in puzzle shrines.

If anything, the Divine Beast Dungeons were the devs throwing a bone to those 3D Zelda fans who wanted some kind of similar dungeon experience to the other 3D games. In my opinion, they were already too long and kind of polluted the beautiful Breath of the Wild world with an unnecessary component. I’d personally be happier if it was just the fight against the divine beast after the quests, story, and journey to get to them. From a gameplay perspective, these dungeons are still superior to other 3D Zelda design. But, IMO, they were still the worst part of Breath of the Wild. I don’t want more of those in there.

If I were to improve dungeons, then, I agree, more cosmetic variety is a plus. The Shiekah theme is OK for battle shrines and freebie shrines, but adding something a different to the puzzle shrines would be a nice addition.

Second, the other thing LTTP dungeons have that the BOTW puzzle shrines didn’t were the bosses at the end. I think it would be cool having some kind of mini boss at the end of each that was fun to fight. Maybe the Divine Beasts could inform the theme of the mini bosses in the surrounding shrines?

I’d also like to see more Divine Beast fights, and no long-ass dungeons. More puzzle shrines, and puzzle shrines with interesting design styles like the one where you lose your weapons.

The other point I disagree with you on is the expendable weapons and shields. I think the accumulation and expenditure of items, weapons, and tools is a fundamental pillar of the game’s overall design and it would wreck it to have stuff you only got once and could use forever. While unbreakable weapons design is fine for other games, they’re not Zelda, it’s like putting in button commands for Just Dance, it breaks the fundamental experience. It’s not surprising that much of the magic of the game is lost the moment you get the master sword, and that still has charging. If anything, I would be a little more harsh with the survival requirements, and probably limit the stuff that helps you so the game is MORE based on consuming stuff; it was much more fun when you needed to use your items to stay warm than it was when you got a coat that just kind of made you permanently warm. With weapons, I might want to up the variety of weapons, but not make them invincible, I think that would ruin the game.

All in all, I am talking about an improved Breath of the Wild, if this was a completely new type of Zelda, rather than Breath of the Wild 2, I’d only expect them to make a great game regardless of how they make it: but a compromised version of BOTW 1 is not what would work, IMO - stuff that looks like compromised  (like the Divine Beast dungeons) tend to hurt the game. Most of the stuff I suggested with greater variety and volume of stuff is hard - many more mini bosses means new design, lots of new art, lots of coding/scripting, and a hell of a lot of testing. It might be more feasible to just throw in a bunch of upgradeable villages and call it a day - since those items are static and require less code and QA.

Anyway, long post, no time to proofread, sorry for broken sentences.

I tend to agree withe overtly long dungeon part. The smaller shrines work better. They just need diversity. And I would rather they go all in on BotW rather than trying to go back. They need to decide what they want and whether it's old Zelda or BotW Zelda. Anything in between would just be a hodge podge and a disservice to both old Zelda and BotW

Yeah I for one much preferred the bite-sized shrines over having more long dungeons; it made these little nuggets of progress more digestible so I constantly had the endorphin rush of hunting down, finding, or beating one.

That said, I would kinda like it if BOTW2 had four themed dungeons to replace the Divine Beasts; while I did enjoy the latter, I wish they had their own themes instead of all being the same rusty brown aesthetic. It's not a big problem, just an area with room for improvement.

Ok. This was surely a joke. 96 and 97 is pretty learly splitting hairs. My real complaint was the laxk od unbreakable weapons. I wanted a grand quest that paid off w the master sword bwing upgraded or somwthing like that. Also tnhat ending was very unsatiafying. A simple embrace qouldve dixed it for me. Hyrule warriors aoc had better storytelling imo. Wish botw was that good story wiae.