Tears of the the Kigndom is clearly the best one, but the feeling that BOTW game me is beyond explanation. So, if I have to pick one I'll stay with BOTW.

Kinda seems like this is sort of one of those GoldenEye vs Perfect Dark situations.

PD/TotK by all accounts is technically better and improved over the previous game, but its very hard to beat the feeling you get from that first ground breaking game. I loved PD but my friends and I played GoldenEye wayyyyy more than PD and GoldenEye stands out to me as one of the greatest games of all time while PD was just a very good game that was on paper an improvement but just didn't feel as fun. But there are certainly people (and perhaps many of these people didn't play GoldenEye before PD) who say PD was much better.

For people who really just wanted a new world to explore in TotK to get that same sense of exploration and adventure all over again, since awesome open world exploration of an amazing world was the thing that blew people away about BotW, TotK might be on paper much improved over BotW but simply not have close to the same feeling of awe and adventure. So, partially nostalgia of that first experience, partially that there's simply much less new stuff to explore in TotK even if there is actually more stuff to do and the game is in general an improvement. I'm guessing if people played TotK before BotW people would probably almost universally say TotK is better.

Seems like it pretty much comes down to someone needing to have said: Hey Nintendo, a game based on adventure/exploration needs to have a brand new world, not just a modified rehashing of the last game's map.

It's hard to judge games objectively. Cuz 'on paper' doesn't matter if a game subjectively feels worse, even if that's only because it's just an improvement over the last game whereas the last game was a leap forward for gaming.

I probably won't actually get around to playing TotK until like late next year I'm guessing, but I'm excited for it. Though like SvennoJ said, I'm not into the building stuff as much as I might have been when I was a kid. I tried Minecraft once and I was just like nah I don't feel like wasting my time building stuff, and when I got Mario Maker 2 I thought I'd be making all sorts of levels but after trying it out I was like nah I don't feel like spending my time doing this I'd rather just play levels. So I'm personally interested how I'll come down on the building stuff, cuz it sounds awesome but I could see me just wanting to stick to "playing" rather than spending my time building stuff.

If by that you mean "cheese everything with Recall" shrines, then yes.

I personally enjoyed BoTW more. During my time with the game it felt like I was a kid again in the sense that pretty much every waking moment I could play it there was no chance that I wasn't playing it. That hasn't happened with ToTK, even though I've put like 200 hours into it so far.

I get bored in ToTK after a day or two of getting back into it. I still haven't fought Ganon because I want to complete every shrine first, so maybe that's what is boring me, but I never felt that way with BoTW.

They're both great, and if I hadn't played BoTW first then maybe I'd think the sequel was better. It just feels like, to me, BoTW was lightning in a bottle type situation. It was already incredibly hyped and it came out on a new console, which is always fun.

I hope Nintendo goes in a different direction with the next Zelda game, despite how much I've enjoyed these two. The last thing I want is to feel that my favorite game franchise is getting stale.

I really loved BotW but TotK as a sequel should be was more of the same but I didn't feel like it evolved in a meaningful ways. It just packed more content in and some of the ideas didn't feel as fresh because of that I wasn't as in love with it as BotW but make no mistake TotK definitely I think is the better product