For me it's Diablo II. Granted I've played my fair share of D2 since launch, and also recently on a private server with a comrade from hexbear, but I still feel like years later the game didn't grab me as much as D1 did.
Granted I don't hate D2, but for a game that I keep coming back to, D1 takes the prize.
Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. TOTK isn't a bad game, but it does feel like a 70 dollar add-on to BOTW. It just didn't capture the magic.
I like TotK but the engineering mechanic is pretty laborious. You have a lot of freedom but only a small percentage of what you try works, and because of the clunky interface it takes a LONG time to make multiple attempts.
Only having 2 of the 3 axes to rotate things on is the worst part of that imo
As much fun as it was building ridiculous vehicles and crucifying Koroks, it got tiresome pretty quickly. It actively dissuades me from going back to it as much as past Zeldas.
That's one that didn't really vibe with me, an interesting case of my hype going down the more I actually learned about the game before it came out.
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I was feeling it until about half way through and then it fell off for me really hard. I think the building concept was cool as hell but felt like it wasn't incorporated into the game. I feel if it had to be a Nintendo franchise maybe something like Pilot Wings could have gotten a boost with that idea, PW has usually doubled as a tech demo anyway. Have an open world with stuff you can build with, maybe some light combat for raiding materials or whatever and then make the rest of the game based around those vehicles. Have it be about racing the vehicles you make. You could even fo a multi player that's like City Whatever from Kirby Air Ride where all the players get dropped into a space and have a certain amount of time to get a vehicle together before a series of races with that vehicle.
For totk once I built a good hover bike I never had to be resourceful again. I didn't try a second play where I didn't get the paraglider or auto build and that did make the game better. Just not being able to paraglide makes it so you need to build stuff and no auto build means you have to use what's around you. There were a fee things I couldn't so but I manages to do the main quest and most side quests with it
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It's such a fucking shame that the discourse around TOTK is completely dominated by stupid shortsighted "70$ DLC" arguments. TOTK is one of the most exciting sequels I have ever played. It's everything people want when they buy a new console generation, except on the same old hardware. The toolset the game gives you to solve puzzles is absolutely insane, ascend and recall alone are genius ideas and they all fit together absolutely perfectly. They could not have made that game had they also made a new map and I am so glad they didn't.