I'll be perfectly honest, I was not expecting to enjoy this game that much. I loved Breath of the Wild, but eventually I got to a point where I'd "had enough", put it down and never picked it back up. All of the promotional content and hype leading up to it's release did not convince me there were enough new things to hold my interest again. Then the game released, and I found I was wrong.
I am truly amazed at how much Nintendo managed to revolutionize their open world sandbox with just a couple simple changes. The highlight is of course the Ultrahand crafting system, which allows you to explore and interact with the sandbox of this world completely new and unpredictable ways, and makes this game even less linear than it's predecessor. This system rewards creativity, and allows for traversal and interactions that make you feel like you're cheating the game. A great example of this would be the climb to the Sky temple, which is supposed to take you through a massive obstacle course to reach the top. Except I grabbed rockets from a different sky area I'd explored, stuck them to a flying machine and blasted past 1/2 of the climb.
The game is chock-full of moments like this, and it feels wonderful.
Ultrahand is not alone though. The Rewind and Ascend powers, while they sounded a bit basic, are also invaluable tools that let you tackle the world and it's puzzles in drastically new ways, and along with Ultrahand make Hyrule feel new and fresh again.
Hyrule is not the only area to explore in this game though. The addition of the sky and depths areas, which I thought would be tedious to explore, actually ended up being incredibly fun, especially since they encouraged different uses of these new exploration powers, and have DRASTICALLY different vibes.
While Hyrule feels like an inhabited world where normal RPG events are taking place, the sky islands feel like archeological sights. When up there you're exploring the ruins of an ancient race, solving their puzzles in ways vastly different from anywhere else in the game, and occasionally dealing with the security systems they left behind. Travel here is almost exclusively by air and such a blast to engage in.
By contrast, the depths are dark, scary and dangerous. The ground and walls can hurt you, and the monsters are much more terrifying and deadly. And god forbid you lose your light sources. This is all compounded by the fact you can't heal damage normally while down there, adding to the sense of dread and danger of being in that area.
For all the praise I give it though, ToTK does have a few downsides that we have to talk about. The most blatant and obvious one is the controls. Nintendo has kept the same controls as BotW for the most part, but those controls were outdated already when that game came out, and now in 2023 it feels even moreso. Not using industry standards like running with L3 push and instead giving it a dedicated button feels like a step backwards, especially when the game is already making you do crazy button combinations due to lack of available buttons for even basic actions like switching weapons or fusing arrows.
Additionally some of the "repeated" actions are very tedious. There is no reason why we couldn't streamline cooking or turning in korok seeds. Yes, you can skip "some" of the animations, but it's still a tedious affair that made me want to engage with those mechanics as little as possible.
Finally, I have to address that it is very possible to get yourself stuck in multiple places in the tutorial area before you unlock the Ascend ability. Might be a minor gripe, but getting ultrahand encourages you to experiment, yet you just might end up get yourself stuck and be forced to reload old saves if you experiment too hard.
You can also do this by entering some temples (At least one) before doing the quest to gain access to them, but this is a minor issue since by then you can teleport out.
Overall though, this is an excellent game that I strongly recommend to anyone who is a fan of Zelda or open world games.
I am truly amazed at how much Nintendo managed to revolutionize their open world sandbox with just a couple simple changes. The highlight is of course the Ultrahand crafting system, which allows you to explore and interact with the sandbox of this world completely new and unpredictable ways, and makes this game even less linear than it's predecessor. This system rewards creativity, and allows for traversal and interactions that make you feel like you're cheating the game. A great example of this would be the climb to the Sky temple, which is supposed to take you through a massive obstacle course to reach the top. Except I grabbed rockets from a different sky area I'd explored, stuck them to a flying machine and blasted past 1/2 of the climb.
The game is chock-full of moments like this, and it feels wonderful.
Ultrahand is not alone though. The Rewind and Ascend powers, while they sounded a bit basic, are also invaluable tools that let you tackle the world and it's puzzles in drastically new ways, and along with Ultrahand make Hyrule feel new and fresh again.
Hyrule is not the only area to explore in this game though. The addition of the sky and depths areas, which I thought would be tedious to explore, actually ended up being incredibly fun, especially since they encouraged different uses of these new exploration powers, and have DRASTICALLY different vibes.
While Hyrule feels like an inhabited world where normal RPG events are taking place, the sky islands feel like archeological sights. When up there you're exploring the ruins of an ancient race, solving their puzzles in ways vastly different from anywhere else in the game, and occasionally dealing with the security systems they left behind. Travel here is almost exclusively by air and such a blast to engage in.
By contrast, the depths are dark, scary and dangerous. The ground and walls can hurt you, and the monsters are much more terrifying and deadly. And god forbid you lose your light sources. This is all compounded by the fact you can't heal damage normally while down there, adding to the sense of dread and danger of being in that area.
For all the praise I give it though, ToTK does have a few downsides that we have to talk about. The most blatant and obvious one is the controls. Nintendo has kept the same controls as BotW for the most part, but those controls were outdated already when that game came out, and now in 2023 it feels even moreso. Not using industry standards like running with L3 push and instead giving it a dedicated button feels like a step backwards, especially when the game is already making you do crazy button combinations due to lack of available buttons for even basic actions like switching weapons or fusing arrows.
Additionally some of the "repeated" actions are very tedious. There is no reason why we couldn't streamline cooking or turning in korok seeds. Yes, you can skip "some" of the animations, but it's still a tedious affair that made me want to engage with those mechanics as little as possible.
Finally, I have to address that it is very possible to get yourself stuck in multiple places in the tutorial area before you unlock the Ascend ability. Might be a minor gripe, but getting ultrahand encourages you to experiment, yet you just might end up get yourself stuck and be forced to reload old saves if you experiment too hard.
You can also do this by entering some temples (At least one) before doing the quest to gain access to them, but this is a minor issue since by then you can teleport out.
Overall though, this is an excellent game that I strongly recommend to anyone who is a fan of Zelda or open world games.