Tons of positive reviews for Tears of the Kingdom have come out, favorably comparing it to BotW. But, I haven't seen much said on improving over BotW, other than 'it has more stuff'.
I know the simple solution is 'just pirate it and try it out', which, yeah, I might do eventually when I have time, but I've emulated enough to know that it's not always super easy to get everything working right.
Regardless, I felt that BotW was too big and aimless, with an open world that felt empty. The people that like BotW seem to 'make their own fun', and use physics to solve open ended problems. Which, sounds fun, but my fun was kinda killed by the feeling that nothing had a point. I just felt like most of the 'rewards' were just weapons that would break (which, I don't even mind weapon durability, but it did make weapons as a reward suck), or collectables that had minimal impact on the game. Only a few set pieces did much for me, and they were very few and far between. Overall, played about a dozen hours, then went and killed Ganon, to little fanfare.
And, if Tears of the Kingdom is strictly BotW 2, I'd rather not 'waste' another 12 hours. But, I've heard some people say they added dungeons, and more direction to the game. Any opinions from you all?
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Seconding Twilight Princess. The gameplay and basic "enter current dungeon, get item halfway, beat current dungeon and get access to next dungeon with new item" loop are the same as prior 3D Zeldas. But it does it in an incredibly polished way. The story is arguably the best in any Zelda game, and that's largely due to the wonderful and memorable characters in it. Especially Midna.
I want to like Wind Waker. I do like the visual style, and the gameplay and music are fantastic. But there's just a little too much sailing-through-nothing for my tastes.
Twilight Princess is kinda in a funny spot. FWIW, I do like it, but its a bit contentious, put at a spot where the 'zelda formula' was somewhat regarded as 'getting stale'. And while the game does have a lot of great items and moments, there some midgame grind to clear out the darkness spots, and a few of its items are some of the worst offends of the 'bad zelda items' type design; where they're extremely situational, and mostly just there to solve puzzles (notably the gear, and to a lesser extent the ball-and-chain).
But also, the good party of the game are absolutely enough to carry it for me, so I think it works, but I get the complaints about it.