So Minecraft fans?
Seeing some of the funnier creations has intrigued me, but not enough to fork out 70 dollars. I'm glad people are enjoying it but Zelda is clearly no longer intended for me, and I probably should have realized this 15 years ago with Skyward Sword.
I'm emulating it, and I can verify that it's absolutely not worth $70. It is worth $30. It retreads far too much from BotW to be worth full price + $10, and it is imbalanced as fuck.
You were right when you talked about Ubisoft getting a whole lot of guff for their games while Nintendo gets praise for doing the same thing. At least Ubisoft has brand new maps from game to game. TotK really needed a new overworld, too. The depths are fun, but there's not a lot to them, while the sky islands are really underwhelming. They're often disappointing.
You get to the sky islands by seeing boulders fall out of the sky, so you run up to one, climb on it, and use your Recall magic. That makes the boulder shoot back up into the sky from where it fell. It'll take you to a sky island, but they're disappointing because all the ones I've recalled have just taken me to tiny islands with one unremarkable treasure chest on them. A couple of those would be fine, but that's all I've found so far.
You also don't get the paraglider for a
while. You get it if you follow the main questline, which of course I don't wanna ever do in open world games until I've explored a good bit, but they really should have given it to you on the tutorial island.
I beat the game with the absolute minimum hearts, only 1 health upgrade and the rest from heart containers from bosses. It's not very hard, especially after Elden Ring, but the enemies just hit like a tank. The second I drank a defense potion I took no damage at all, but other than that just don't get hit.
Yeah, I'm gitting gud at dodging, but when you have damage sponge enemies that hit like a tank, and all I have is a stick with a rock duct taped to it, and the enemy is gonna drop a few turds and maybe a single rupee if I'm lucky, it just makes for such unsatisfying combat, so I end up retreating more often than fighting. Sometimes I'll get all tough guy and hammer away at a group of enemies, die a few times, and then end up finally taking them down only to be left thoroughly unsatisfied. Combat is more effort than it's often worth, and that just sucks sucks sucks.