You can choose to play the game however you want.  No one was forcing you to use Tulin or the sky towers to explore less of the terrain.  Hell you could have invented a a plane or hovercraft type vehicle to zip through huge chunks of area as well you liked.  There is just so much creativity to do whatever you want in the game.

They were for me, hated them with a passion. But I agree, best dungeons and the sand sea was incredible. But I ultimately gave up on it due to the motion controls. I would love to play SS without them. I actually bought the remake to be able to play it without motion controls but never got to actually playing it. My kid played some on his Switch lite and I helped him a couple of times, but haven't made the time for myself to play through it again.

However I fondly remember SS for its dungeons and combat was quite enjoyable too when the motion controls cooperated. However I had a high failure rate with them, often doing a different move than intended. Gesture based motion controls just don't work for me.

Best looking and best rewards for exploring is still Wind Waker. Sailing the ocean discovering new things was awesome. Plus you get to go under water! Windwaker's dungeons are second best after SS. BotW doesn't even come close to either.

BotW/TotK feel more like AC games. Throw everything at it then most people will find something to like and get sucked into an addictive repetitive game play loop. Plus most people never finish games and will just play the bits they like and move on.

I'm about to get TOTK this week, hopefully i can finish Elden ring by then. I wanna do a second play though of this amazing game. I waited this long cause i didn't wanna play it on ps4 pro at 40-45FPS playing it locked 60fps on ps5 is beautiful and F*** it i'm gonna be using a guide to get the NPC side quests, i always did it before and didn't mind but i'm in gaming mood trying to figure it out myself in this game is impossible.

You're probably right, just saying that for my opinion, SS will never drop outside of my top 5 Zeldas like TOTK might.

I'm sure it's a great game, but I passed for two reasons: one, my Switch's fan is busted and would not allow me to even attempt playing it, and two, it's far too similar to BOTW. I own BOTW. I really liked it. But I was hoping for something more akin to Majora's Mask... for those of you old enough to understand what that means. I didn't expect brand-new everything, given that they must have spent a small fortune building BOTW. But I did expect an entirely new concept. With Majora's Mask, you pretty much had the same art, a lot of the same assets and things of that nature, but that was where the similarities ended. Everything else was completely different; so different, in fact, that it might as well have been a launch title for the Gamecube. And that's sort of what I was hoping for with this game, but it didn't happen. Which is fine. Apparently, it's amazing. But for me, personally, I was hoping for something a lot fresher than what we got, so I took a pass.

Your perception of developers not wanting us to be locked in a certain place for hours makes a lot sense but I actually agree with that idea. That is why I used Hyrule castle as what I think is the  perfect example for what I was trying to say, because you’re never actually locked in there, you’re free to explore the place however you want, Hyrule castle feels like an expansion of the world in an indoors settings. It’s perfect! 

As for the necessity of puzzles in the Zelda universe, that is a whole other conversation. I don’t think they are. People who grew up with OoT tend to think they are and I don’t blame them. But I think the LoZ series would be way more fun if they ditched the puzzles and  was more like a light hearted Elden Ring or the original LoZ for that matter. 

Puzzles are overrated. 

Puzzles are amazing wdym. 

I always found them to be much more fun than combat in Zelda series. Zelda suffers from a problem of being way too easy to truly have a fun combat, and that's likely never change if they want to keep the games accessible enough for kids and early teens

Although maybe I'm wrong. Horizon has a very fun combat, because you can have lot of options of how to fight and explore enemies weakness. And is a game "easy enough" for a 6 years old to beat, granted in the easiest mode

Maybe if they changed their enemy design to make the fights having more depth then it could work

The switch analog controls are pretty amazing.  Major improvement over motion.  It was worth the add.

How WWHD isn't on the switch is a mystery.  That game is superb.

I think all of these criticisms are valid. The one that rings most true to me is the reuse of the exact same game world. It's pretty disappointing, when judged by 2023 standards.

I'm not going to run through how I agree with all these critiques. Just note that I do, to varying degrees. What I think is one of the biggest issues, and it isn't Nintendo's fault, is the fact that critic reviews largely failed to touch on these things. Basically, nearly all of the early reviews puff this thing up as one of the greatest games ever made. And, it is a great game. But, it has a whole lot of flaws too. It's disappointing that those things were not discussed in most reviews.

With all of that said, I should note that this is the first game in a while that has compelled me to play for several hours at a time, try to find times to sneak in short sessions, and otherwise has just made me want to play it as much as possible.  So, they definitely did a whole lot right. 

I think every game has room for improvement. As for these, I agree with some of them. Not so much others.

In terms of the map... I just honestly don't care, because I don't really remember the map that well. I remember the main locales, but it's not like I remembered what's around each corner, so I still felt  the same sense of exploration. It's not like I know where every shrine and cave and lynel is. Maybe that's just the benefit of my pot addled brain. I think the sky and underground areas help make up for the lack of new villages and stuff on the overworld.

I agree with the lack of enemy types. I don't think it's necessarily bad, but more would have been better. Especially if they really required different methods to deal with them. 

Boss fights are hit or miss, but that's just the way it's gonna go. They can't all be winners. I think this is a pretty big improvement over the last game at least. Not as good as Skyward Sword, but that's just a benefit of having a more structured experience.

I disagree on the last point. I think being able to glide from towers is a good addition, particularly because we already did the land traversal in the first game. This time around you have some options to basically "break" the game a little more, which I think is a good thing. 

I think the rewards were also fine. You don't always get something great, but that's kind of the point. Random reward systems actually are better at encouraging people to keep trying things, and while sometimes its a bummer to get an opal, I found something neat often enough to make exploration worthwhile. There are shrines, weapons, schema stones, sage's will, armor, new Zonai devices, and so on.

I think the "problem" with BOTW and TOTK comes with the territory of making it more open and free.

Skyward Sword is kind of the extreme in the other direction for Zelda. Skyward Sword is what I would call contrived. Everything in the game is obviously there just for the purpose of Link's adventure, and feels really inorganic. There's no reason for anything to be there, if not for Link. That makes the world feel less immersive, but it also allows the devs a greater ability to make sure each moment is great and rewarding (in theory anyway). They can make sure any quest leads to some worthwhile rewards, they can make sure each boss is matched well to take advantage of your arsenal, they can make enemies that have to be dealt with in particular ways etc. Skyward Sword had IMO the best dungeons, combat, and puzzles in the experience, at the cost of exploration feeling kind of meh.

BOTW is an organic experience. It feels like the world is, for the most part, something that exists on its own, not just for your benefit. And there's something more fun about that at times, but the devs can't really control all the moment to moment things to make sure they work. They're not going to be able to put something great at every puzzle, ensure every boss is matched to your current abilities, or craft tight puzzles that you can't easily work around by like making a balloon or w/e.

At the end I like both styles of Zelda games, but each is going to have its weak points. Took me a while to get into it, but TOTK has been probably the game that has been most absorbing to me over the last couple of years, so I think it's pretty great even if some things could be better. 

 Oh and Skyward Sword is awesome. Haters gonna hate. Really hope it's not the last of the more linear style Zelda games. Both have their place imo.