They throw out the core of a series to court the ubisoft dream, and what the players are left with is just that... a hollow open world. Pretty much everything gutted from nuZelda is what I actually enjoyed the series for. A unique arsenal of items, aesthetic dungeons and bosses, epic stories that build upon past entries, the lore, area themes and leitmotif... all these things have been sacrificed to an open world with G-mod gimmicks, mini-puzzles (shrines), and korok seeds.
And don't forget annoyances like crafting, weapon degradation, etc. BotW is an unfun hassle, a slog, and doesn't even look that good artistically compared to any previous 3D Zelda from Wind Waker up through Skyward Sword.
I'll still say it's a good game for what it is, 7/10 if it was a new franchise, but it is not Zelda (I guess it's like Zelda 1, which was their goal, but that game is just a primitive blueprint LttP honed to near perfection).
BOTW and MGSV are both perfect examples of games that would be better had they just been designed as a traditional linear game.
They both had deeper issues that still would've made them bad entries in their respective series, but yeah, they'd have been better.
I saw plenty of varied locations and meaningful sandbox interactions in it
No, you haven't. You found a breakable weapon and a Korok seed.
for as great as the dungeons and such were in the earlier games, they almost always had a very strict manner in how you completed them.
But it didn't
feel that way, and Water Temple in OoT is actually one of my favorites for being a little more open to navigation than usual. And I'd rather have a strictly linear but interesting dungeon than a boring open world any day.
I think you can do both, combine them properly, but BotW didn't and just shit shrines at you because they couldn't be bothered trying to make an open world design work with the Zelda formula.
He's playing WW, not TotK.
The Switch Pokemon games are actually playable now.
It removes Wokeism from them? Switch 2 is based!
What’s so bad with finding unorthodox ways to solve a puzzle? That’s one of the reasons emergent gameplay is so popular. It allows the player freedom to experiment and utilize the game mechanics in much freer manners.
You need structure or else there's not really a puzzle, puzzles have a solution. You don't solve a Rubik's cube by dismantling it and reconstructing it, that's not fun, it's stupid, not clever at all, but people think the equivalent in Zelda is good game design and somehow a sign of a good player too.
BOTW and TOTK is a legit top 3 experience on Switch.
A Wii U game and its DLC make it into the top 3? Sounds like an insult to the Switch rather than praise for those mid games
