This is a good game worth playing for many different reasons, It being a Zelda game is not one of those. Much like my thoughts on the predecessor BotW (which incidentally you should play first otherwise you won't want to after TotK), it's an enticing and wonderful open world game wrapped around one of the worst Zelda's in terms of story, combat, abilities, and dungeons, which follows my thoughts on BotW 1:1 albeit slightly better in the story. Since this criticism of mine of BotW extends to TotK, clearly nothing has changed enough in the six years it's been since that 2017 release of BotW for me. What's here in the sequel is yet another of the weakest 3D Zeldas in the 4 core aspects of the game; story, combat, abilities, and dungeons. Things that always orbit the exploration and discovery the series is known for and most importantly these two games have perfected. While that exploration remains here as strongly as it was in BotW - it cannot be overstated how little some things have improved or changed from then to it's direct sequel here. Link, the not so titular protagonist, plays and moves the exact same which I really did not like the first time around in Hyrule (seeing it unchanged is insane), his basic movement in combat, and exploration is not good. Slowly struggling to grab onto a surface while awkwardly titling your glider, and dealing with the hangups of the flow of combat like the flurry rush not working and awkward fighting/dodging ensuing. Again all of this I didn't like at all in BotW and was fundamentally broken like the flurry rush. Considering this is the series that invented Z targeting all the way back in Ocarina of Time, I expected some significant improvements to the game feel of Link. Beyond this there's many more issues for me notably in the optional content specifically the Shrines. Out of the 152 I've made my way through to completion I can think of less than 20 that I enjoyed. Even less that explore a puzzle concept more than once with added depth. I don't like these bite sized rooms because they don't do anything that interesting - they're best when they scratch your brain to think outside of the box like some of the combat shrines. Most importantly out of these 152 shrines 46 (that I've kept track of) were shrine blessings - essentially for free, and 13 were tutorial shrines (possibly more I'm not thinking of.) Which means, in reality, less than 100 of these are Shrines in the sense you complete a small puzzle or battle and move on to a reward. While this was true for BotW (sadly) - I've already done it once and I was sick of it there too, it's much the same here with little change in complexity, and the fatigue remains. Side content in terms of koroks is also bland and are similarly unchanged, with a lackluster reward process of an extra item slot. Hudson signs are another "collectathon" addition which I didn't mind since they make you engage with your ultrahand better than the shrines do but not by much, certainly not enough to do 82 of them. Actual quests this time however are better than BotW - but again this is let down by more collectathons which out stay their welcome. The main content of the game is the dungeons (temples) which I was very disappointed in after expecting a lot of improvements from BotW's Divine Beasts - it's again a mixed bag but with some that are worse than the Divine Beast's and some that are marginally better. For TotK this criticism sticks more for two reasons; This is a direct sequel which had strong criticism on Dungeon's, and these dungeons or Temple's are trying to emulate those found in classic 3D Zelda games - They feel a lot less unique than the divine beasts did. They fail on both counts for me with only one of them forcing the player to engage with the dungeon's layout and map without being able to break it - the Gerudo Temple. I could talk at much further length why this game fails but these are the points on the critical path to me for improvement from BotW > TotK. Which this game simply has refused to do so it's unfortunately again a good open world game in a pretty mediocre Zelda game. It's also strange to me there's maybe less than 12 unique sky islands - was expecting a lot more from this. Then finding out there's an underground area that's 70% just empty space did not help. Everything people love about this game I mostly love too from the creativity available to the player to small things that have changed in the world in this sequel. I just don't think it's amazing despite it's flaws, I think it's only decent because of these flaws - some legacy issues from BotW some entirely new ones created for this game like having to chase around your abilities to use them (and the lack of utility 3 of them have) or having to manually attach fuse materials to your arrows. If this is your first Zelda I would strongly recommend playing previous entries to get a better idea of how bad a lot of the content is here in comparison from puzzles and dungeons, to the story and writing it hasn't been much worse than this other than Breath of the Wild, and here comes Tears of the Kingdom which has totally failed to improve upon the core problems with that entry so this is unfortunately a weak sequel.