Tears of the Kingdom is radically and unintentionally about intrinsic motivation. All the building blocks are placed right in front of you, but you'll have to assemble them yourself. This is nothing new for pure sandbox games, but TOTK isn't supposed to be a pure sandbox game! In its best moments, it harnesses this: even mundane challenges are an opportunity to spark creativity. In its worst, it resents this, and will fight your agency tooth-and-nail.

Most of the time, the game lands in an awkward middle: not outright controlling you per se, but holding the guiding reins with shocking determination. Say you're on a floating island with a crystal you need to deliver to a nearby shrine. Almost certainly the game will place a wing and fan nearby, reducing the whole situation to a classic Zelda "nuzzle" where the solution is just handed to you directly. I understand tutorialization, but the game refuses to trust the player even after hours and hours and hours of this.

This also undermines any sort of efficiency-driven play, since the optimal solutions (that aren't obtuse speedrun-style tech) are simple and/or universal cheesy tactics (e.g. object + ascend + recall). There also seems to be some sort of aggressive speed cap that gives strong diminishing returns to multiple fans/rockets/etc. which hurts the parts management aspect.

But, with all this said, there's nothing stopping me from simply ignoring the game and coming up with my own wacky idea that's fun and interesting! What if I tried to launch the crystal directly with rockets? What if I dropped something to the surface from the shrine, brought the crystal, and recalled it back up? What if I put it on a really, really, really long stick?

Once I accidentally lifted up a large floating platform too high to grab with my Ultrahand. So I took out all my weapons, glued them in a straight line, and managed to reach up high enough to fuse it to the platform and yank the whole thing back down!

These are some of the most joyous experiences I've had in a game. I can't praise the building system enough (despite some minor control issues) in how deep, intuitive, and polished it is. Much of my time was spent messing around in some random location, seeing what I could build that used the items and landscape around me. It's the only true sequel to Super Metroid that Nintendo has ever made: the world is a kaleidoscope of problems to be both invented and solved.

But what's bizarre to me is how so much of the game either refuses to acknowledge this or even actively resists it! One of the greatest experiences I had with this game was making the climb up to the Water Temple on my own, without any prompting. Finding strange and inventive ways to hop between islands as I climb higher and higher in solitude, listening to the quiet ambience and seeing the imposing structure above creep closer and closer, then finally breaking in to hear the Water Temple's song play. This was by far the most powerful experiential moment I had in both open-world Zeldas, and in retrospect mirrors much of the strengths of Fumito Ueda's work.

And then, I was greeted with a loud "DA-DING" error message from the central console of the temple. So I dropped down, completed a menial fetch quest so Sidon would come up to the island chain, then returned to the console. "DA-DING." I went back, talked to him on a different island so the game would flip the proper flag, then returned again and was finally allowed to progress. It's baffling how the same game can have mechanics that encourage such freedom and a structure that so constricts it.

Mostly though, as with my first example, the game settles for mere apathy. Shrines vary from stiflingly simple lock-and-key tests of specific parts to open-ended challenges that you could feasibly solve without knowing the intended solution. (Sadly, the former are far more common than the latter.) The Fire Temple's skatepark design was my overwhelming favorite, and the Lightning Temple shows glimmers of greatness, but the Water and Wind Temple feel like Divine Beasts, and on the whole it's hard to not be disappointed in the missed potential here.

The Depths has parts lying around everywhere and treacherous terrain to use them on, but is homogenous and bloated. Sky Islands offer small shrine-esque challenges that can be fun, but fall far short of the potential illustrated by the tutorial area. Most of the side quests I tried were fetch quest adjacent, but there might be some really good ones out there! Which speaks to a larger point: there's too much content that's too much like BOTW that's spread across too large an area.

Combat mirrors the rest of the game, and its problems go back to BOTW. The sheer amount of options offered by fusing is breathtaking, and the breadth of interactions in BOTW's chemistry system has been made far more accessible. But the balance is all wrong! You can feel the potential during the combat shrines, where stripping your items away forces a more improvisational style. But the games it's (unconsciously) looking towards have key differences. Halo's two weapon limit prevents you from hoarding ammo in advance, whereas in TOTK (and BOTW for that matter) you will collect random resources without thinking. Traditional roguelikes are stingy with items to incentivize crafty use of each one, but BOTW and TOTK shower you with powerful consumables and fusion materials. Arkane's immersive sims also suffer from these problems to some degree, but in those games the level design is as much your foe as the enemies themselves, while level design is perhaps the single greatest failing of TOTK. All of the above games aspire to differentiate their tools, and TOTK has a lot of ways to produce interesting and unique effects, but the most common and powerful fusion materials are simple damage increases, which scale into the late game far better than the creative ones!

Despite all I've said above, I wouldn't quite call the combat "bad" per se. The swordplay is somewhat entertaining, throwing weapons is a great risk-reward mechanic, and having to scavenge around mid-fight adds a lot. But the most fun thing to do is to play with your food: try weird effects and interactions (of which the Bokoblins are fantastically suited for!) instead of playing efficiently all the time. Freeze things and blow them off cliffs! Bounce enemies around with a mushroom spear! Start Bokoblin-Zonai infighting!

For being so brilliantly realized yet simultaneously sloppily crafted, TOTK earns the title of most bizarre game I've ever played. It almost has a romhack quality to it: making visionary changes in some areas while uncritically accepting so much of its ill-fitting foundation. I had many moments of joy while playing it, but all throughout, the game looked on with a disinterested gaze. No score.