It's not even a bad game as such, but fuck Nintendo and fuck whoever produced and directed it. It's not just lazy, it literally pushes back games as an art form.
Yeah, some parts of it are cool and/or innovative (the dungeons are great), but the main questline overall and especially at the end is pathetic in the way that it leans on set pieces and cinematography as a crutch in a game that is supposedly centered on freedom.
Remember like a decade ago when every single fucking game that was "good" was one that just pretended to be a movie that you push buttons to advance, and that produced a swamp of QTE bullshit and games that only exist for the cutscenes? That trend had clearly been receding in recent years even though Last of Us (the main example of that trend) is still quite popular.
But Nintendo found just the way to revive it! "Hmm, games that pretend to be kino are old-hat, so what do we do to market to masses that we treat like slack-jawed yokels to impress as many of them as possible? I know! Instead of pretending to be kino, let's pretend to be Infinity War!"
It's the same shit! It's just a fucking Marvel formula transplanted to Breath of the Wild's setting, with vapid not-even-scavenger-hunts to watch cutscene after cutscene where cool things happen that are completely disconnected from player input.
Everyone knows that the beast ganon fight in BotW was dogshit. You know the dragon fight at the end of TotK? Literally the same thing! You get on a fucking mount and zoom around the big scary monster that doesn't actually do anything, strike the big glowing weak points along its body, and then stab it in the fucking forehead and it's done. But now, because it has some Avengers-ass "Oh, I recognize the thing!" direction with Dragon Zelda suddenly becoming [almost] an actual participant in the plot and Dragon Ganon shooting a billion fireballs that aren't even fucking aimed at you while you fly circles around him, now it's cool? Or because the fucking Force Ghosts pop in and contradict the rules about the dragon transformation being permanent so that Link can get his waifu as a prize for fighting the monster, but she has some voice lines so it's egalitarian!
And don't get me started on having the bosses come back along with the Sages ("It's just like Infinity War!") to just fucking negate each other offscreen. Absolute horseshit that makes the Divine Beast business at the end of BotW look elegant by comparison.
Fuck these fucking hack writers and their pandering bullshit that we will now get a thousand other games imitating. We're just going to get compounding dark ages of writing as paradigm after paradigm is added to make it worse and worse as these shitheads optimize the formula for selling both to credulous 13-year-olds and otaku 35-year-olds. I hate it.
7/10
I have a lot of issues with the game design for BotW & TotK.
Effort vs. Reward: This is way off. Repeatedly, I spend time figuring out a hard shrine puzzle or discovering a chest in a hidden away location to be rewarded with Arrows x5 or an Opal. Useless.
Character Growth: Just like BotW, TotK gives you all the tools in the first two hours and then little after except for a wind gust in a different direction than the last game. I miss unlocking meaningful upgrades from dungeons that opened up new abilities or ways to move. Instead, the game relies entirely on gear like every other open world game, but this time, it requires me to constantly juggle sets or hunt ingredients to mitigate environmental effects.
Shit Density: Fucking shrines, korok seeds, light roots, sky shrines, bubblfrogs, geoglyphs, skyview towers, stables, caves, wells, chasms, old maps, materials, Hyrule Compendium, Hudson signs, etc, etc, etc. There's way too much shit in the game. It just becomes inconsequential noise.
Recycled location: Of course, I didn't expect a completely new Hyrule map, though I was hoping for something different like Ocarina -> Majora's. I wasn't expecting the sky area to be so minimal or the depths to me just a mirror of the surface. Having to collect shrines again is annoying.
A sequel without explanation: This game is a direct sequel to BotW, but there's zero explanation that I've seen on things like where the fuck did the other towers or shrines go. Some aspects are addressed while others are ignored out of convenience.
Plot Delivery: A main offender for me. Zelda doesn't have huge cinematic cutscenes, so I'm okay with a more minimalist approach, but stuff the end of the shrines when you meet the sages is so mind numbing. Since they can be tackled in any order, the sages repeat the exact same lines with a little flavor to them. I skipped some of them because they say the same thing. Same thing with the geoglyphs. It worked for BotW because Link had amnesia, but getting the story out of order didn't work for me.
Quality of Life: I don't hate weapon degradation per se, but like BotW, I'll never use the cool unique race weapons because I can't afford to remake them. I also hate fusing. I'd rather have the same system as BotW. Also, the animations for getting shit, holy hell. If you're going to make me hunt 150+ fucking shrines, don't make me skip the first cutscene, watch the Light Blessing "get" animation, and then skip another cutscene. Just give me the shit. Same thing with getting hearts or stamina. Show me once then just give it to me.
In general, the build powers just make the game too goofy for my taste.
Jokes on you, because now it does and the player is a spectator to the plot outside of narrowly-circumscribed interactions at the very end. The story might as well be delivered in a walking simulator.