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?
as someone who quit BotW after one divine beast and has [legally obtained :owl-wink: ] Tears of the Kingdom and has been playing it over the last two weeks:
Let me preface my more detailed review with a disclaimer admitting a bit of my character first: I loved Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, completely unironically. I had a fucking blast playing through all of the singleplayer vehicle challenges making the biggest physics-based abominations, and probably spent dozens or hundreds of hours in multiplayer building stupid vehicles and shit with my friends
Now, with that disclaimer out of the way, TotK is actually pretty good. For me, the average open world game is largely devoid of interesting content and for TotK, this remains true. However, because the game constantly gives you magitek jet fighter plane monster truck parts 24/7, you never really have to actually engage with those empty expanses. Unlike the first game where 75% of my time spent playing was watching my stamina bar dry up like a forgotten sponge as I climbed the same copy-pasted cliffs over and over again, in this game 75% of my time spent playing is goofily gluing random shit together and attaching rockets to it, just so I don't have to actually traverse any terrain lmao
The physics based vehicle shit also solves a problem you were talking about: meaningful rewards. While they still throw random fucking weapons at you in chests, they also throw a lot of vehicle parts, which are much more fun to use and deal with than another -1 Shitstick of Wood that breaks in two hits. And to also go on, shrines are more fun than in the previous game for twofold reasons: They give you all of your sheikah slate abilities inside the tutorial this time, allowing them to craft every shrine puzzle around like five abilities that are all unique and fun to use, and the shrines are based more on their physics engine this time, with a lot of solutions for shrines being "build a hook to use this zipline with" and other cooler shit
I've completed 3/5 of the game's equivalents to divine beasts, and all of them have been more fun and most importantly more environmentally unique than the last game. TotK has essentially a hybrid of the old zelda formula and the divine beasts from BotW as its "dungeons". You do get a new ability that is integral to completing the dungeon, but most of the time that ability is used to "play hide and seek as to where you can use your new ability on things to complete the dungeon" more than traditional puzzles. There are puzzles, but most of them just use the same five physics abilities you've had from the start of the game, they are fun but they don't follow the "use your cool new hookshot on things in unique ways" formula. This game pretty much feels like a more complete game that BotW was a beta test for.
also don't fuckin buy the game lmao nintendo sucks balls and it's 70 dollars?? wtf
tl;dr, new vehicle physics shit fun, they allow you to skip most open world boring snooze shit, new dungeons are a little better than divine beasts, but still not really like the original dungeons of old