While BOTW's story was threadbare, there's a few things it did really well.
Some, such as
making me wonder what the cinnamon toast fuck was going on when a random Korok popped up, are more surreal than I'd care to acknowledge, but for now I'd like to focus on something it did especially well: Worldbuilding. BOTW may actually be one of the richer Zeldas in this regard, especially if you're the type of dipshit who goes avidly exploring for the sake of it.
Some things are just cool finds, like that one cave where you find a shitload of Knight Broadswords.
Others are involve the kind of Autism any super-fan would enjoy and are haunting in their implications; the Plateau you start on has what is very clearly the remains of Hyrule Castle Town, to the point where the maps match up almost exactly, which fucked with me. Other times you'll be investigating some stuff in the desert looking for stuff like Fairy Fountains, and
you realize that the giant fish skeleton inexplicably in the desert is, in fact, very clearly the bleached bones of the now-long-since-deceased Wind Fish from Link's Awakening, giving the whole area a much more tragic tone.
The game is replete with this like this, and it extends to characterization as well. The fact that the game hinted that Mipha had plans to marry link (
with the Zora Armor something she made for him as a dowery) gave a neat view that maybe this Link would have been romantically linked to someone else had everything not gone tits-up. There's certainly not enough emotional payoff for it, due to the way the narrative is structured, but it's hardly bad.
For every problem I had with BOTW, and there was a lot, I found myself pushed on hardest by two things:
My ability to do stupid shit and what else I could find out about the world and the setting. And while part of me will wax nostalgic about
committing war crimes,
sending Guardians to the Shadow Realm, and
wielding the strongest weapon known to the Build Engine (doors), it was learning more and putting together the pieces that kept me going. That and
rampaging across Hyrule Field on a Magitek Harley Davidson, anyway.
I kept wanting more story shit to find, and that's something I think BOTW could absolutely work into further games.
That and making the weapon system less shit, at any rate.
