My review:
It is here, the king has returned. Tears of the Kingdom, the long awaited and occasionally delayed sequel to Breath of the Wild has arrived to take your 70 dollars and month worth of free time. Literally building on the previous game's foundations, TotK adds a bunch of fixes while breaking a few things as well. These include vehicle mechanics, a bigger (if not better,) story and explorable sky and cave worlds. But is it good? Is it all good? Is it as good? Read on to find out. Oh, and I'm going to do this without regard to spoilers. I won't directly state the ending or anything but don't read if you don't want spoilers.
First off, this game is big. We thought BotW was big 7 years ago but TotK doubles it in size by adding the depths, a difficult to traverse underworld with rare weapons and resources as well as fun caves and a shitty sky. Its easily worth the extra ten dollars over other Switch games, a talking point that seems to have died the moment the game actually came out. A lot of the game's additions, in regards to things like enemy variety and overworld bosses fix flaws in the previous game. Additional character interactions between Link and his friends are also welcome, though they seem to lack some of the pizzazz of the previous game. Rivali and Mipha had more character in five minutes than most of Link's current companions do in the whole game, for instance.
The carefully crafted character motivations of the previous game weren't the only thing lost in the sequel either. And I'm not just talking about infinite bombs either. For one, BotW put tremendous effort into making BotW feel like a living, realistic setting and world. TotK plops crap everywhere, ignoring scale or logics. Wooden Shiekah survey towers loom above the land, dominating your view while piles of building material are just left everywhere. Gone is the beautiful, wild and untouched world of its predecessor. Missing too are the well thought out character of the various towns that was present in the first game. Hateno and Kakariko receive identical tourism plots where idiots in pajamas run across the village while Tarreytown looks like a dev asset dump. The game's terrible starter dungeon is just a slog. Oh, and your ghost companions? Useful but very brute force compared to the powers of the previous game.
The biggest new addition, craftily hidden by the devs until close to the game's release, was the building mechanics. They work, and there's fun to be had with them, but there are also clear problems with them. Sadly, since I doubt this game is going to be a trilogy it appears this is what we'll be stuck with. As is, I mostly did not use them unless flying to the overworld or forced to for a quest. And while building a car is fun, it really eats up resources to rebuild it, with only limited utility once built.
While people point to the Switch's limited graphical output as a factor I would argue that other limits hurt it more. The lack of buttons on the Switch controller left me wishing for a keyboard and mouse. Having a dedicated Yunubo button or quick key outfits would have been a godsend. A desire to separate the Zonai from the ancient Sheikah left them with a lime green color, rather than the beautiful deep blue of the previous game's shrines. Oh yeah, and fuck the sky world. I rarely visited, there's definitely shrines up there I haven't done. I did love exploring the depths and invading Yiga hideouts, though.
Still, regardless of that all, its still a great game. I loved finding and exploring caves and wells, completing dungeons, hanging out more with the cast, finding out the story of what Zelda did in the past and seeing that one great part of the story. With six years of development, with no re-start or "dev hell" period, its clear to see the results of the team's labor and with the benefit of hindsight its easy to see that the team had ideas of the game's basic systems while creating its prequel, and built that game with the idea of layering additional things onto it in this game. What we see here then is the result of a solid decade of game planning. A true live service game, delivered all at once. I enjoyed the 200 hours I spent in the game and proudly rate it a 2 out of 2.
For now I am done, though, even if there's a few things I have not yet discovered in it. Perhaps I shall return to it, in a year or three but much like the team itself, its time for me to move on and do other things.
PS, Diablo is GotY.
