Experiencing The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom: Should and could have been DLC.
I DID play Breath of the Wild, and couldn't get into it. Couldn't stand it. I did beat it after "fixing" QoL things.
I went into Tears of the Kingdom highly skeptical - but I was told multiple times that it "fixed" the issues that Breath had.
In my opinion: it did improve a lot from that game. I know a lot of people are angry about the same map etc. I will say: I didn't feel like it was worth full price, at all.
What I Liked
✅ Exploration. You can experience the world at its fullest, and the verticality is certainly impressive. In fact, it's arguably the only real enjoyment I got out of the game, due to the sheer freedom of flying all over the place with very little restriction plus the gimmicks that let you pass through ceilings almost at will.
✅ Story. While it's not going to win any awards, and it certainly retcons quite a bit of the series, it genuinely intrigued me at many points.
What I Didn't Like
👎 Shrines. It's not that they're bad...quite the opposite. A few were fun, my main beef is that the sheer number of them made the game feel like busywork. Locating them from the air and then figuring out the most efficient way to get there was good, my only beef is the amount. I would have preferred something with maybe 50 shrines where you just get one Heart Container per shrine, rather than having to accrue the Light Blessings. It made the game feel like a mobile game, honestly.
👎 Enemy Damage Amounts. Especially early on, it feels like they made the enemy hit way too hard. It reminds me of Working Delays...err, Designs, back in the PS1 era, making their games significantly more difficult just because. The game itself isn't hard, the amount of damage the enemies do just feels artificial and unnecessary. If you want to add difficulty, add more enemies (since...)
👎 Sparse, Empty World. There are very few enemies roaming about. You'll go wide stretches and not run into many enemies except the occasional set of bats or Chuchus. Also, it feels like the exploration parts are too far apart (likely given the freedom of air travel).
👎 Uninteresting Side Quests. I simply had no interest in anything I was asked to do by an NPC. The mainline quest also had certain segments that were annoying, where you simply cannot progress the game without doing them.
👎 The Depths. Don't get me wrong; having the Depths as a different, new place to explore was decently good. My issue is how it was done. The Depths are perpetually dark and Gloom is all over the place. There's very little freedom of travel, but it apparently stretches completely underneath the overworld (making it obscenely massive). There are parts in places to make vehicles, however...
👎 Overly Picky Building Mechanic. At first this seemed rather cool, to just build something and have at it, but then I realized that for the most part, you're still restricted to certain given designs by the game. A great example of this is the hot air balloon. I attached four downward facing fans, which should have lifted the balloon straight up, but instead the balloon tipped and shot off in a different direction; yet if you attach that same balloon to a metal grate and do the same four fans, it stays upright. I get it; center of gravity. The problem is, if there's no wind (and in this specific place there wasn't), there's nothing that should have tipped the balloon regardless of that grate. This made building in the Depths not that much fun at all. You do get an Autobuild feature, the problem is it requires Zonaite, which has to be mined. More tedium, more busywork.
👎 Severe Lack of Voice Acting. There IS voice acting, but it's extremely sparse, to the point that it might as well not even be there. Given how much time and attention was given around a line of sidequests dealing with helping a guy keep a sign upright, more could have been done in this area.
I got to the second form of the final boss, and decided it wasn't fun anymore, nor worth beating. It's not a bad game; it's definitely more fun than Breath of the Wild (because of the freedom of travel). But again, I didn't feel like it was worth $70, at all. If it were a $30 "hey fans, here's what we had planned to do as DLC but decided to give you as a thank you" price, it'd be a good buy.