This is genuinely the most soulless cash grab of a game I have personally ever had the displeasure of playing to completion and beyond. The wait up to the release of this game had me more hype than any other, more than any metal gear or megaten game. This is by far the most disappointed with a game I've ever been. It's entirely too obvious to see that nintendo, or whoever worked on this aspect of the game was really trying to capture the "Magical" and "Breathtaking" moments of the first game and to me it felt extremely forced and unimpactful, the moment where link is ever-so cinematically free-falling didn't make me think "wow how expansive and instagram post worthy. GOTY for sure!" It instead made me realize that this was the idea behind it all. "Big moments of realization that people can all relate to and unanimously claim to be goty material for no reason other than it's the sequel to BOTW, and by extension, another Zelda game." In Metal Gear Solid 2 they simulate the events of Shadow Moses in the first game to train Raiden to reach Solid Snake's legendary status (recreating "greatness" with a formula that worked all to well the first time). This is what has happened to this game. Nintendo had everybody wait forever for breath of the wild, so the excitement of buying your new switch and playing it ASAP made the whole experience that much more memorable and "wow so sunset so open world". Nowadays, 6 years after the switch came out and it's getting hard to run anything on it cause the hardware is older than most of the people playing on them, so it's not as exciting and not carried by launch title status anymore. The entire map is re-used from the original which to me is such a terrible decision. I hated exploring this map for like the 5th time. They made the Sky islands seem like such a gigantic part of the game since they were in literally every trailer and on the box of the game itself but there are like 5 interesting ones and the rest are shrines or completely forgettable and/or empty. Every new boss or enemy in this game is fought the EXACT. SAME. WAY. Shoot an arrow at it's very obvious and contrasting glowing giant weak point (usually an eye) and go into a DPS phase. Nintendo also successfully brainwashed every player into thinking that they "brought back old zelda dugeons" when in reality they are the EXACT SAME FORMULA as the divine beasts, feel 10x more unfinished and bizarre/out of place, and are just no longer shaped like an animal, losing every bit of the little personality they had in the first place only to get replaced with "Random building with element. Admittedly the idea behind the wind one was okay but i ended up doing the water one first since that's the path i followed in BOTW. Zelda's strongest keyboard warriors will gush about how amazingly non-linear these two games are 'til your ears bleed, and how you can "go right to gannon if you want to", which to BOTW's credit, you CAN do, and while i prefer the story-driven route found in most traditional zelda games, the option being there is interesting, and really makes you as the player feel like you're preparing to go fight him instead of just following orders from old men and sages and gods/goddesses etc. This however is not the case in TOTK. The water dungeon, which you CAN go to, is filled with enemies that will most likely one-shot you. It is true that the game hints at you to go to the wind one first but i thought this was supposed to be an open world game? no linearity to be seen here, that's so ten years ago. I won't even get into how useless and fucking stupid looking the summons are and how they're inferior in every way to the abilities from botw, because i want to talk about the big soyjack moment of this game, the depths. The depths are cool for maybe an hour until you realize that no, despite what the reviewers told you, it's NOT a second hyrule, it's actually about as interesting as a minecraft superflat world that's constantly pitch black unless you have those stupid seeds or detour every five minutes to turn one of the big light sources on to reveal more nothing around you. The depths is quite possibly the worst aspect of this game. In a game that's so fucking set on having you explore everything, they sure do love to make everything as boring as possible. Speaking of boring I want to mention that the big new idea in this game: the ultra hand and merge abilities are both SUPER FUCKING BORING! The merge ability lets link attach various items he comes across to pretty much any weapon, usually changing it's properties. My issue with this stems from the fact that every single weapon you find on the surface that's made of metal is all gloomed up, therefore reducing it's damage output and durability ten fold. This FORCES the player into using the stupid merging mechanic to make some of the ugliest weapons imaginable, while simultaneously re-creating weapons that already existed in botw. Like attaching some electric item to a sword will just make it into a thunderblade from the last game. The water item makes your weapon spew out water. Who would have thought. Forcing the players into doing specifically what the game wants or you'll never win: a perfect example of the non-linearity this game is praised for, for some reason.The second big new idea in this game is ultrahand. it lets you gmod things together to make vehicles and to solve puzzles, but the puzzles are like always one of three or four and can only be solved a very specific way or else it feels like cheating and is obviously not intended. Another perfect example of giving the player zero fucking time to use their head to create something of their own and just following the lego instructions to make their 30th basic air craft to cross a medium-sized gap. When i said the depths was the worst this game had to offer i lied because i forgot to mention the entire storyline of this game is completely abysmal and makes zero fucking sense because in this game's ultimate wisdom, you can experience the most important cutscenes COMPLETELY OUT OF ORDER. The bulk of the story is told through memory-style cutscenes like from botw except this time they all follow one single plot instead of little intermittent lore bytes that worked to flesh out the world more instead of provide the ONLY IMPORTANT STORY in the ENTIRE MAIN GAME. The problem is that after you hit up the first dragon's tear, you are not told which one to go to next, and if you are i sure as hell never even saw it once, and neither did any of my friends. You can straight up watch characters in this game die before they do anything else. Why couldn't they just play them all in order regardless of which one you do? It just makes zero fucking sense to me. The whole furry subplot with the girl in the robot was just such a snoozefest i was so done with the game at that point i can't even recall exactly what i saw. Just lots of flashing lights and colours and talking about mystical orbs, and powers, and relics and explaining the same exact fucking backstory BEAT FOR BEAT every time you finish a dungeon. And not to mention everybody in hyrule is completely and utterly useless. When this so obviously fake clone of zelda is wreaking havoc left and right and we have seen VIDEO PROOF that it's a fake link just says nothing as usual and we're forced to painstakingly watch stupid avoidable shit happen right before our very eyes to progress the dreadful plot is just awful. I seriously think that this is the worst Zelda game. There's so much more i could go into about how much this game can't get anything it tried to do right but I don't really care to anymore. It will probably go on to sell another 20 zillion copies and win game of the year and have that slapped on the box art for the next console generation.