Yes the mechanics in TotK are out of this world. However in 300 hours play time, they often got in the way instead of adding to the fun.

Fuse is the best new addition, but it's a shame it makes everything look ridiculous. Plus in the end you still only use a couple things and end up with a bloated inventory, while adding extra steps to get things done. Is it an improvement to fuse bomb flowers to arrows instead of simply having bomb arrows?
It's useful for weapons since you have a limited inventory, but it didn't make it more fun imo. Just more steps and a lot of searching through endless inventory items.It actually made me less inventive in combat compared to BotW since Eightfold blade puff shroom sneak strike is totally op. While mini bosses just need highest damage combination. BotW 'forced' me to adapt to the weapons at hand, TotK you simply make a bunch of what suits you.

Ascend I rarely used, only for puzzle solving. I don't like fast travel and Ascend is basically vertical fast travel, loading screen and all. It was fun to use in combat although it took any challenge away from Talusses.

Recall trivialized most shrine puzzles and a lot of combat. Too op as well.

Ultra-hand and insta build the same. Apart from it being a pita to use with the controls and camera limitations. And often the straight forward solution without ultra-hand building is much faster.

Maybe it's the overkill in bloat that made me stop using the abilities. Well also because there is no persistence and you have max 8 slots for builds. Mad respect for those building complicated machines, yet it doesn't feel like Zelda at all. But at least it allowed me to play the game without fast travel, flying back out of the Depths :)

It feels like TotK is at conflict with itself. Does it want to be Minecraft or an action RPG/Adventure. Does it want to tell a story or be a sandbox. It's trying to do both, but doesn't succeed at combining the two very well. BotW felt more coherent, abilities that fit the game play and story instead of feeling like playing with cheats enabled.

In the end, even though it's only been a few months since I played TotK, my journey through BotW has more high points in my memory. Maybe it's because of the novelty of discovering the world for the first time. But probably also since my journey through BotW was a lot more 'linear' instead of tons of back and forth in TotK. You can see how much I've worn down the roads in TotK haha.

Slow travel, horse auto follows the roads!

I didn't feel like Tears was trying to be both a sandbox and a story; it's very much the former, the story is secondary, as it is for most Nintendo games. Mario Wonder for instance has a story, it's just not the focus.
And it's definitely not trying to be Minecraft; they both have an interactive and emergent world, but Tears is much more directed and goal-oriented. It falls closer to something like Skyrim or Far Cry 2-4, just with a more "Nintendo" design ethos.

Personally, my play-through through BotW felt more like creating a story while in TotK it felt more like a sandbox with quests. Zelda has always had a story, it's not comparable to Mario Wonder. I didn't feel that Tears was directed at all, far less than Skyrim and Far Cry.

While I was playing and following the game on Reddit there were tons of posts how to play (which order to follow) and not inadvertently spoil the story by doing things out of order, too soon, too late, skipping steps. Next to endless posts how to make the game more gamey, which 'rules' to follow to create some challenge and/or add an adventure flair to the game. The consensus was mostly, don't use the hoverbike, don't fly everywhere, limit/ignore the Zonai stuff and either leave the tears or check the temple to do them in order. Don't go to the lost woods too early, don't worry Crysis at Hyrule castle is not the end yet, safe to do when prompted.

My main 'issue' was that exploring meant messing up the story. I didn't have that problem in BotW despite doing exactly the same, head out and look for interesting things. In TotK that led to ending up at the temples far too early and from the wrong way, then having to back track to find the quest to unlock the rest of the puzzles. I ended up completely skipping the Ring Ruins Quest and had Mineru far too early, as well as the Master sword. That turned the story delivery into a big mess with the big twist revealed before I even had seen the setup.

As a sandbox with Zelda themed quests, awesome game. It just didn't feel as much as a Zelda adventure as BotW was.

As a tribute to Zero Punctuation ending:

Actual review starts at 1:00, lot of hyperbole of course, yet also some truths.

Here's his 'review' of BotW for comparison although he focuses on the Switch experience first.

Actual review starts at 1:55

if I had to play one of them again today, it would be TOTK

TotK for me. I love both games but I've sunk more time into TotK with more to go since I still want to find all the caves.
For me the depths were where it was at, wandering around in the dark. I rarely constructed things. It was mostly on foot exploration throwing brightbloom seeds like a mad man. I loved that sometimes you'd launch a seed and it would just keep dropping. You'd creep up to the edge and see it waaaay down in the bottom of a chasm that you had no idea was in front of you moments before. That for me was prime exploration. Who cares that the surface was roughly the same you had the entire depths to explore and even a bit of exploration in the sky.
After 300 plus hours I still have tons of stuff to find.

There's plenty of direction and goals in Tears, it's simply directed by gameplay more than story, like other Nintendo games.

There's a literal main story with objective markers and everything that you can follow through in an entirely linear fashion if you want to, but there's also shrines, there's sidequests, lightroots, towers, korok challenges, wells, caves, if anything the sheer amount of goals can be almost overwhelming.

The trick with Tears is not to overthink it; don't worry about optimal efficiency, just go with the flow.

That's how I messed up the flow lol. Didn't overthink it, just went out and followed my nose to the things that stood out most, which royally screwed up the story and flow of the game. Hence I enjoyed the side adventures a lot more than the main quest which turned into a big mess.

And yeah, the sheer amount of everything was overwhelming. The variety was good, yet 1000 korok seeds (100 reach my friend), 509 compendium entries, 152 shrines (48 Rauru's blessings, 31 shrine quests), 149 caves, 147 bubble frogs, 136 armor pieces, 136 side quests, 126 different monster parts, 120 light roots, 81 Hudson signs, 60 side adventures, 58 wells, 50 skull cave encampments, 50 forts, 34 Yiga Schematics and camps, 28 fabrics, 20 sage's wills, and more. It definitely got repetitive.

More is not always better in the end. Nothing felt special anymore, just one of many. But it did facilitate turning the game into a nightly routine. Do some of this, some of that, not really getting anywhere yet plugging away and having fun. Nothing really memorable, just a comfortable routine. That's how I got to 300 hours play time while only remembering about 10-20 hours of content lol. Nothing wrong with that, but I can see why some call it the biggest DLC/expansion ever, rather than a true sequel.

BotW was amazing, TotK is comfort food. The best kind of comfort food there is.

The difference for me was, I couldn't stop playing BotW, played it every moment I had available. TotK I played daily, yet usually no longer than an hour or two, then I was 'full' and left it for the next day. I did have longer play sessions as well, yet it was very different from how I played BotW. I finished BotW within a month, a quarter of the time spend with the game while still 3/5ths of my total play time of TotK.

Yeah I also found that TOTK was best enjoyed in 1-2 hour bursts per day, just cos its sheer size made sinking long sessions into it feel a bit intimidating.

I played through to the end of the story in around 60 hours, played over 2 months, but after that I did need a long break, and I left it alone for the next three months until I just went back to it recently to play the postgame.

I didn't quite fall wildly in love with TOTK as I did with BOTW, just cos its core gameplay was no longer a such an eye-opening novelty, but at the same time, I can't deny that I did like the core abilities and the temples better in TOTK.

The same gameplay loop of botw: go explore find something interesting, look around and other thing interesting appear and you follow it. When you see you explored a large chunk, hours have passed.
When you go back there you are guided to another path for things you havent explored. But now you have more options and just more things to do, you repeat this loop for longer.


Overall, it feels more alive. There are expeditions where you fight along with hyrule people. NPCs feels more alive, eagering to fight. I like have minions fighting with me (sages), taking care of combat while i think in stole the hordes. Beying eaten by like-likes was a nice touch.

The map is exactly what I would expect from a sequence in the same map. Feels revisiting the same place 10 years latter. You want to know what happened, the new configuration, what the reveval did to the places

I think totk integrates better the abilities. They feel like complementing each other. You move things with the ultrahand, turn them back on time, ascend on the things fuse the things in your weapon.
Finally better function to the zillion drops and items. Albeit, it kinda drops the flow in combat when having to select items to fuse with weapon or arrow in combat. But after sometime, the most used stay on the most used list and avoid this problem. You realize some are more useful than others and in practice you will use them a lot more.
All new cave system integrates so well with ascend. too fun to use in combat as well. as turning back the time. Of course, the ultrahand and the overwelm potential of creations and situations you use it.

First time entering the depths, realizing is an entire map the size of surface, all in pitch dark (and all the correspondence to the surface map) was just incredible.
(Also Nintendo managing to hide this detail in any form in trailers was bold)
This one and Dropping from sky first time and getting the Master sword in this game was one of the best memories in gaming.

I am loving and I have double the time I spend on botw. Not finished yet.
I think it should have a map layer for caves and wells. Not revealed initially, but maybe revealing the parts after finding the corresponding bubulgem. I think it was a missed opportunity.