Finished the game last night, 72h, 41% completion, the game is fucking massive.
Did all memories, got master sword, completed the towers, 40 shrines, most of the islands and more than half of the depths, including completing the Yiga quest.
All the Temples were shit, in some ways they were worse than the Divine Beasts. Having played OoT recently, the difference in quality is night and day. I think the design of having 4 to 5 disconnected puzzles really diminishes the quality of the Temples. Instead of having one interconnected dungeon to figure out, it's like 4 smaller disconnected sections. This makes the whole process easier, faster and simpler.
None of the shrines I did were good, some had better ideas than others, but all of them were too short and too easy to be enjoyable or memorable.
The sages as companions were a fun inclusion, but I found their implementation a mess, having to get close to them and interact with them in order to use their abilities is really clunky and unreliable. In BotW the champion's abilities were implemented perfectly into the gameplay, it's frustrating to see they mess-up something that was fine on the previous game. The bird and the Spirit Sage are the only ones that work well, though for as cool as it was, I found the spirit sage to be completely useless.
The last boss was great though. While Ganon's moveset is barely a step up from Phantom Ganon's, the gimmicks in the fight made it quite fun, probably as fun as the (mediocre) combat allows it to be. My only complaint is that the arena is quite boring, why not set it on a sky island looking down on Hyrule? Just like the previous game, they have a final phase that is more of a cut-scene than game. I don't know which was worse, the pig in BotW or this one, but they feel like an excuse for some good visuals and great music before the end
While I don't usually care for stories in Zelda, this one was so bad it's hard to ignore. Probably the worst plot in any Zelda I've played, it's both a repeat of OoT and BotW. The only new plot element in it is what happens to Zelda, which was just retarded.
I don't mind this new Zelda format, while I prefer the classic 3d format, this is clearly more popular, so no doubt they will continue with it for a couple of games. I just hope they actually attempt to change things in the next one. Not only the combat was completely unchanged, but the entire main quest structure as well.
I also hope that they release new 2d games in between these big 3d releases. Emphasis on new, I love Link's Awakening, it's my favorite 2D Zelda, but I fucking hate remakes.
can make enemies bounce back.
