This should have been DLC.

Things I liked:

• All the quality-of-life improvements detailed in this video.
• The fusion mechanic, as well as retooling the weapons to be qualitatively different, was neat and meshed really well with the open world gameplay where you’re constantly stumbling over stuff. I was really happy to get some use out of items that just gathered dust in BotW. Consumables in general were way more useful, and now that monster parts are used to make strong weapons, you always get “refunded” for breaking weapons in the process of fighting strong monsters.
• Link’s scruffier redesign is great. Stop trying to make him act dignified, Zelda, embrace his gremlin nature.
• Purah is now an adult instead of a 100yo loli.
• The Zonai are cute. Rabbit people <3
  • Also, Rauru’s outfit is surprisingly stripperiffic. Zelda’s character designers are finally letting their horniness swing both ways I guess?
• You can ride the dragons!
• I liked that the sages used their cultures’ ultimate weapons, and that you could confirm this with the camera. It’s a nice little worldbuilding detail.
• Relatedly, I like that the ultimate weapons are actually useful now due to all other weapons getting nerfed. They are now actually the strongest weapons of their class.
• There’s no longer any creepy transphobic subplot with the Gerudo, you’re just allowed to walk around freely. They’re still deeply weird about men (more on that later), but it could be worse.
• You now have a “home base” area that is populated by NPCs you recruit over the course of the game. I liked their chatter dialogue about them adjusting to the different climate in Hyrule, as well as showing all the races working together.

…And the rest of it was pretty mediocre. To be honest, the exploration felt very tedious, like I was just going through the motions this time, since the world map is almost exactly the same but you still have to re-explore the whole thing. I’ve heard the game was originally planned to be BotW DLC, and I honestly think it would have worked much better as that instead of making us explore the exact same world map all over again on top of the new stuff.

Exploration feels really choppy and less satisfying now. The Skyview Towers give you so much height that they trivialize the need for on-foot exploration; you can immediately scope out every point of interest and then bypass huge swaths of the world to get there. Instead of covering whole areas thoroughly I just beelined for towers/shrines/etc. and then was constantly doubling back and losing track of where I had and hadn’t explored. Yeah, part of that’s on me I guess, but come on, devs, you know players will always optimize the fun out of a game if you let them. The end result makes the whole world just feel… smaller I guess. The whole thing just felt like ticking off a set of boxes instead of exploring a world organically.

And about that world, well… The major new thing this game adds to the open world is verticality: There are now both floating islands in the sky of Hyrule and a massive underground area that mirrors the surface, in addition to smaller caves all over the surface. I think this is a fine idea in theory, but it is a terrible, terrible fit for the top-down map. The map is useless when you’re trying to explore caves and near-useless when exploring sky islands. What’s especially frustrating is that BotW already had 3D mapping technology they could have used, but they deliberately took it out so now dungeons only have top-down flat maps that are nearly incomprehensible. Why did they do this.

The second big addition is physics. Magnesis has been upgraded to a universal telekinesis that works on everything and allows you to glue objects together, and the game also provides new mechanical devices designed to work with this so you can create cars, planes, cannons, etc.

Everyone else seems to love this, but I hate it for the same reason I always hate physics engines: it’s incredibly, incredibly frustrating how fiddly everything is. I genuinely do not understand how people can enjoy physics puzzles. I understand why devs make them, because it sounds like a cool idea on paper and it’s a good way to show off your technical specs, but in practice it just creates puzzles that can be screwed up through no fault of the player because the number of possible states and variables are far in excess of anything human-comprehensible. You can understand the procedure for solving the puzzle perfectly, but you can continually fail it because your rotation or placement was a few degrees off. It takes way, way too long to get things into the right position and it can still be completely scuppered by gravity messing it up in unexpected ways. Please stop doing this, devs, it’s not fun.

Relatedly, the magic abilities feel very underwhelming this time around. Ascend is pretty much the only one with combat application, and even that’s pretty minor. I rarely used anything but Ascend outside of puzzles. It would have been neat if you could use Ultrahand or Recall on enemies in some capacity (like how you could use Stasis on enemies in BotW, which was cool), but no such luck.

Oh, and you don’t have Revali’s Gale anymore, which hurts real bad. I know you can create an updraft with items, but that requires navigating the menus multiple times to select everything, which is way too tedious for something you want to be doing all the time. Ascend does not make up the difference when there are still so many mountains without convenient overhangs. (I assume the conveniently flat and gravity-defying Zonai ruin chunks were meant to work with this, but there are way, way too few of them.)

The third new mechanic is that instead of the champions giving you spirit abilities, the new plot-relevant NPCs follow you around to help in combat like a party-based system. Once again, this sounds like a nice idea in theory, but in practice I found them really annoying. Not only do they trivialize the combat by winning most fights for you, they add so much visual clutter when there’s more than one and their activation button being the same as the generic interact button made me accidentally activate their abilities so many times. I go to pick up some monster parts and oops Tulin just blew it off a cliff, or I go to pick some fruit and oops Yunobo just lit the place on fire. I think it would have been totally reasonable and much better if you could only have one active at a time, and honestly I expected that would be the case. (Although I suppose in practice that would be even more frustrating since you’d need to navigate the menu any time you wanted to use their utility abilities… Maybe they could have made Yunobo automatically appear next to sediment like how Tulin always appears when gliding.)

Miscellaneous annoyances:

• We desperately needed a shortcut for fusing materials to weapons like there is for arrows.
• The tutorial goes on way longer and is much more railroady this time. I spent an embarrassingly long time without the paraglider because I foolishly thought giving me access to the whole world meant I could explore the whole world.
• I agree with the rest of the internet that the korok escort quests are really annoying, mainly for the same reasons why all physics puzzles are annoying. I seemingly always under- or over-shot when trying to deliver them via plane or rocket, and picking them up manually is so slow and tedious. The ones that just required you to strap them to your horse were easier, but so trivial I question why they needed to exist at all. That’s not a puzzle, that’s just a chore.
• Max HP buffs still give a full recovery, so the cooking mechanic is still completely pointless. Why did they not change this? Did not enough people complain about it? It seems like such an obvious design flaw to me…
• You still end up with way more items than you can ever use, even if you’re constantly fusing stuff to arrows. I ended the game with 1000 brightbloom seeds. I wonder if a solution to this would have been to make eating the only way to restore health, instead of giving you a free inn you can teleport to anytime in Lookout Landing.
• It feels like there are way, way more Blessing shrines this time around. They are usually paired with a shrine quest (of which there are many more this time), but I would have preferred more shrines with dedicated puzzles over a dozen “strap a rocket to a crystal” non-puzzles.

But in all honestly, it’s still a good game despite my gripes, even if I still prefer BotW.

But we have to talk about the plot.

It’s bad. Really, really bad. BotW had shockingly good writing for a Zelda game: there was a large cast of likable characters; the non-linearity of the flashbacks were well-done and worked excellently with the open world; and Zelda had possibly the most personality she’s ever had in the franchise. TotK instead falls back on the most cliched fantasy tropes it can find. In BotW, the champions were all just people who pitched in because it was the right thing to do; now, it’s been retconned so that they’re only important because they have special bloodline magic. Also, apparently their ancestors were indentured to Hyrule for 10000+ years just so that they could help Link because the world revolves around the protagonist. Not that this matters in the slightest, because your allies are all the same people you already befriended in the previous game and thus are already willing to help you, what is the point of this why do you expect me or them to care their great^20 grandpa wants them to do the thing they’re already doing agh I hate this.

Also god the level of characters fawning over Link in this game, especially Zelda, is just embarrassing. Remember how Zelda started off the last game hating Link and gradually grew close to him over the course of a long character arc? Lolnope now she’s just his 24/7 cheerleader who’s so obsessed with him she manages to convince characters who have never met him that they should stake all their hopes on him. Let characters have their own lives and goals that aren’t just singing Link’s praises, please. It gets to the point where Sidon’s wife tells you that whenever they’re alone Sidon spends all his time talking about how awesome Link is, and instead of feeling annoyed or jealous of this she just ends up agreeing Link is the most amazing person ever. (Oh yes, Sidon has a wife now. Fandom is very mad about that, as you can imagine.) Yeah, I agree Sidon reads as incredibly gay for Link, but only because we’re doing the standard shonen thing of showing so much contempt for women that male/male relationships are the only meaningful ones.

(Also Sidon once again tips the gender balance male, even though once again his past counterpart was female. Would have been fine if the Rito sage flipped to female to rebalance it but of course the scion of the Rito elder has to be a boy.)

We also discover that the Zelda writers are so addicted to retconning they can’t even hold still for a single direct sequel: Now instead of the Ancients being Shiekah, they have somehow always been a completely different race with completely different technology, so all the Shiekah Ancient tech has poofed out of existence (except some stuff still references the Divine Beasts which are now nowhere to be found, just to make it more confusing). Why. Why. God forbid this kudzu of a franchise maintain a comprehensible timeline for one game.

Speaking of timeline kudzu, the game does the variable-order flashback story again, but it does not work nearly as well this time. Instead of a series of loosely-connected vignettes they tell a single linear story, so getting them out of order is just pointlessly confusing. (Also this time you can literally see the locations from space so there’s no puzzle involved in finding them.) These flashbacks also spoil major twists in the main plot, yet the beats in the main plot are still presented as if they’re shocking reveals. Was I not supposed to pursue them until the endgame…?

Oh, and so you know how I praised the Gerudo subplot for no longer being a transphobic mess? Well they decided to counterbalance that by trying to figure out how the Gerudo work for the first time and coming up with the most unhinged explanation possible. Why are there so many Gerudo in Gerudo Town when almost all Gerudo are born outside their homeland (since they can only reproduce with foreigners)? Well, turns out foreign-born Gerudo kids are forced to leave their families to live in Gerudo Town until they’re adults, during which they apparently completely forget they have ever interacted with men. The game portrays this as a bittersweet coming-of-age thing instead of the deeply messed up kidnapping and indoctrination it is, and apparently no one has every objected to this in the history of ever. The quest ends with the kid’s dad saying he’d like to visit her in Gerudo Town, only for his wife to remind him no boyz allowed, and then we just move on as if that isn’t incredibly depressing.

(There is also a Gerudo family who chose to move back to Gerudo Town so they could start a business there, and the father is imprisoned for trying to see his daughter. This is portrayed as funny instead of horrifically dystopian.)

Speaking of the Gerudo, remember how Ganondorf had turned into an insane inhuman monster last game and no one seemed to really know who he was? Well apparently that never happened because Ganondorf’s human body is just sitting under Hyrule Castle and is still perfectly intelligible despite being in solitary confinement for 10000 years and also a decrepit mummy. Because God forbid this series ever does anything halfway interesting with its villains, no, we have to dust off Ganondorf AGAIN, because the writers are scraping the absolute bottom of the barrel. He then proceeds to be an utterly generic evil overlord with no personality, motivation, or redeeming qualities whatsoever, because it wasn’t enough that the writers stooped to “Somehow, Ganondorf returned,” they had to make him the absolute blandest and most boring Ganondorf possible. He literally says “This world should be bathed in darkness instead of insufferable light.” WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN. THIS IS MAD LIBS. This Ganondorf has exactly as much character as Calamity Ganon did, so why did they even bother bringing back his human form?

Also Ganondorf is still the king of the Gerudo and they still included the bit about male Gerudo being born once every 100 years and male Gerudo automatically being king because the writers are chauvinists, even though the fact we now have an explicit and very long timeline begs the question of why there hasn’t been a male Gerudo since. Is the male Gerudo the same soul reincarnating every time, so it got messed up by putting Ganondorf in suspended animation? Does it even matter? Why did you bring this up just to create a plot hole, writers?

They then proceed to retcon the events of the Imprisoning War yet again (so Ocarina of Time didn’t happen in this continuity) to be all about how the first king of Hyrule was so super awesome and nobly sacrificed himself to imprison Ganondorf after his wife got fridged. (For some reason the game tells you this four times in nearly-identical cutscenes.) We do get one brief shot of Zelda participating in the fight to set up a distraction so Rauru can do his noble sacrifice, so that’s something I guess?

The one thing I will give them is that the Gerudo themselves aren’t evil, and side with Hyrule against Ganondorf after he turns into a demon. They are also the only race given any reason to go along with Zelda’s “pls indenture yourself to Hyrule for 10000 years so you can be some future dude’s backup” request, as the Gerudo sage says she feels responsible for enabling Ganondorf.

A roundup of remaining complaints I don’t have a transition for:

• Zelda tells Ganondorf exactly how she plans to defeat him using Link and the Master Sword. You’re supposed to be wise, Zelda.
• “Secret Stone” is a dumb name. Apparently this is an accurate translation of the Japanese, but come on, localization team, try harder.
• How does a single secret stone make Ganondorf strong enough to beat seven other secret stone wielders?
• The first king and queen of Hyrule are dark-skinned, which would be cool if the present-day royal family wasn’t extremely Aryan. We’re left with the implication that they married nothing but white people for their whole lineage. I have to wonder if this was intended to address the criticism of the Gerudo vs. Hylian conflict being extremely racist; if so, points for trying, but too little too late.
  • Also I’m not entirely clear how they started a royal line in the first place when Sonia and Rauru didn’t appear to have any kids before they died. Are we supposed to assume there was a litter of royal brats offscreen in all the flashbacks?
• I have no idea what Mineru’s “spirit” power is, nor why she had to shove her soul into a jar, because everyone else seems to stick around as a ghost without needing any special spirit powers.
• Mineru is supposedly with you from the start of the game, but only talks to you after you do all the main quests because [not found]. She literally says “I initially planned to talk to you at the start,” and I expected an explanation but she just continues without one. I sense some last-minute revision happened here.
• While the Yiga clan in general are still the right balance of silly to threatening to me, Kohga (and his larger role in the plot) is just such a ridiculous buffoon it takes all the satisfaction out of beating him. He does the “Let me tell you my exact plans and the exact location I’m heading to so you can stop me” routine every. Single. Time. It’s not even necessary when the steward constructs outright mark the next location on the map anyway!
  • Actually let’s talk about the gameplay implications of this too.  It’s the standard bad open-world design of leading you by the nose through quest markers, which so many reviewers praised BotW for not doing. It would have been so much better to do a Schrodinger design where he’s present in every mine simultaneously and we just advance the plot every time we encounter him, instead of him camping out in a fixed location while we wander the rest of the world.
• A major sidequest involves a mayoral election in a town governed by a monarchy. 9_9 If the concept of democracy exists and Zelda is really such a wise and enlightened ruler she better turn Hyrule into a democracy in the next game. It’s not like that would even threaten her power, everyone worships the ground she walks on so she’d win any election in a landslide.
• Hyrule Castle is just as decrepit as it was in the first game, with the roof of Zelda’s study still caved in. You couldn’t have cleaned it up a little, texture artists?
• Kass is gone! :( There is a new cute Rito NPC who is also great but I miss Kass :(

But I’m not done, because now we have to talk about the single worst plot twist in the game. Spoiler warning if you care.

So you might remember that back when the game was first announced, some people speculated Zelda might be playable due to her redesign with shorter hair and a more adventurous outfit. Of course then the very next trailer showed her falling into a hole, which of course happens in the first 5 minutes of the game.

What happens after that is that Zelda travels back in time to Hyrule’s founding, using her magic time powers that she totally always had shut up. She tries to find a way to time travel back to the present, but is so crap at using her power she can’t even attempt it even with the advice of the literal god-beings who are the source of her power. So instead she turns herself into a mindless insane dragon with the Master Sword jammed in her skull so she can suffer for 10000 years just to deliver the sword to Link in the present day. And yes, this does mean you can harvest Zelda for parts like every other dragon.

This is just so… ugh. Zelda spends the last game trapped and suffering for 100 years, then this game she has to do it again but even more. At least in the last game she actually fought the final boss with you, this time she just exists as a glorified delivery service. The writers just won’t stop using Zelda as a punching bag. But don’t worry, she doesn’t have any lasting trauma, you turn her back at the end (in a method that sure seems like Rauru could have done it at any time) and she conveniently can’t remember her 10000 years of insanity as a non-human so she’s fine, because we can’t let anything get in the way of her being a perfect demure waifu.

Everything about the story and writing screams “rushed” to me. The lazy, color-by-numbers plot, the copy-pasted cutscenes for each sage, the mess of plot holes and retcons…

I actually seriously wonder if Zelda was planned to be playable at some point. Supposedly the excuse for why she wasn’t playable in BotW was that her long hair messed with the helmet physics… And now suddenly her redesign for this game gives her shorter hair than Link. Moreover, so many of the outfits are really feminine this time — like, the Frostbite Shirt is just straight-up a dress. Tumblr has interpreted this as Nintendo embracing Link as a GNC icon, but given BotW had only one crossdressing outfit that was portrayed as a transphobic joke, I’m a bit suspicious they would go so wholeheartedly in the other direction. I find it more likely those outfits were designed for Zelda and they either didn’t want to or didn’t have time to redesign them for Link. It would explain why the plot is such a lazy, confused mess, especially in regards to its treatment of Zelda, if they originally had a different story planned and had to abruptly change it.

Or maybe I’m being too generous, and they really are just creatively bankrupt after they used up all their good ideas in the first game.

All in all, this should have been DLC, and I really hope they return to the standard Zelda formula instead of another open world game next time. The prospect of re-exploring all of Hyrule a third time is just exhausting.