Star Fox Zero is underrated, and I completely understand why. The game is really bad at tutorializing its unique control scheme, leaving a horrible first impression.

I stumbled through my first playthrough pretty frustrated with the controls. It wasn't until after I died half a dozen times on Aquarosa on my second run that the controls finally clicked with me, and I started having a good time.

Prior Star Fox games only allow the player to shoot directly forward. You pepper enemy weak points, before dodging out of the way of return fire. Star Fox Zero, however, is designed around the ability to shoot enemies from several different angles. You're meant to circle around many of the bosses. Trying to attack them head-on as in past Star Fox games will leave you extremely vulnerable to return fire. The game is terrible about communicating the necessity of this new play-style to the player, and so most people will probably assume the game is poorly designed, and drop it within a couple hours.

The real problem with the game is that it's pretty light on content. Alternate routes are half-baked, and all routes culminate with the same three missions, which hurts replayability. I really liked the idea of using wormholes to get a jump on enemy plans, but the alternate missions lack story context, and don't change the ending, which is a big missed opportunity. You can tell they were added at the eleventh hour.

Star Fox Zero is a good game, and its control scheme is actually one of its strengths rather than a hindrance. I think if its alternate routes were more fleshed out (and maybe the gyrowing completely removed), we'd have a game to rival Star Fox 64.

The online discourse for this game is baffling. If I'd listened to the current consensus, then I would have avoided all but a handful of NES games, because they're apparently unfun, dated junk.

I decided to give the original Metroid a shot anyway, and I'm floored. This game is spectacular. Some of the music tracks are among the best I've ever heard. The atmosphere is as thick as butter. The world is enormous and labyrinthian. I felt a sense of vertigo uncovering side passage after side passage in areas I'd previously explored, realizing the map was at least double the size than I'd previously thought.

People are playing this game wrong. Don't use a guide, just read the manual. Be frustrated, and learn the game. This isn't a walk in the park. This is an expedition to a hostile alien fortress.

I don't think I'm ever going to get around to finishing this game, so now's as good a time as any to do a write-up.

Breath of the Wild is my favorite game. It got me back into gaming after putting it down after a few years, and back into Nintendo games after not caring for nearly a decade. I was excited as anyone for Tears of the Kingdom. The early marketing was excellent, presenting an ominous, Majora-esque asset flip of the more melancholic BotW. I imagined deep crevices carved into the ground, exhuming all sorts of long-dormant horrors, forever altering the Hyrule with which I was familiar. I had faith that the long development time would be used to add all sorts of interesting content and well-designed dungeons.

My initial impression of the game was good. I enjoyed the tutorial island. Helping the overpacked Korok get to his friend was cute. On the surface, one of the first caves I found was the Majora tree stump cave. I remember feeling excited by the Japanese aesthetic for the shrine housing the piece of Fierce Deity armor, and wondered what other kinds of ancient architecture I'd find. Diving into The Depths for the first time was thrilling.

Disappointments, however, quickly crept in. The oddly specific over-packed Korok scenario quickly became contrived as I found dozens more. The tutorial island turned out to be the most interesting sky island by far, as the others were sparse and often copied multiple times. The tree stump cave turned out to be one of the few interesting caves, with most of the others largely using the same mossy aesthetic, with the same Horriblins and the same Japanese architecture housing the same BotW DLC armor. The Depths turned out to have a dearth of interesting content, my time largely spent stumbling around in the dark, avoiding the same enemy camps that absolutely litter the surface.

My biggest problem with TotK is how much it mindlessly copies from BotW. For BotW, the developers went back to the drawing board, and thoughtfully reconsidered all of the rote Zelda tropes that had accumulated in the series since Majora's Mask, like so many fleas. All of the pieces fit together. Take the memory system, for example. For BotW, the developers smartly crafted a smattering of nonessential vignettes, where the order in which you found them was not important, because it suited the open world structure of the game. Anyone with a brain can see that this structure does not fit the essential, linear story that TotK wants to tell. It felt like watching a movie with its scenes out of order. It also leads to big problems like Link spending all his time "trying to find Zelda," when he already knows exactly where she is, but doesn't bother letting anyone else know.

No one held a gun to Aonuma's head and said he had to use the same damn Korok seed inventory system, or shrine health and stamina system, or combat durability system, or memory-based narrative, or music. BotW was great in part because of how new everything felt. But Aonuma's team is already resting on its laurels, and I fear BotW's revolutionary template is already ossified convention.

The worst is how TotK handles BotW's map. Many previous points of interest are utterly devoid of content, including Thundra Plateau, Gut Check Rock, Hyrule Castle Ruins, and The Forgotten Temple. Areas with affecting environmental storytelling in BotW like Fort Hateno are downgraded to dumps littered with ugly brown-gray sky island slabs. I was baffled and offended when I made my way to Akkala Citadel, only to find an inexplicably generic monster cave where the citadel entrance should have been exposed. They really should have made sure there was enough to do on the surface before bothering with the dull-as-dishwater Depths.

Speaking of environmental storytelling, how bad is TotK's? What's the point of introducing another heretofore unmentioned technologically advanced ancient civilization? What happened to the Shiekah tech from BotW, including the army of laser-spewing spider robots and Divine Beasts that devastated the countryside for 100 years? I don't think they're even mentioned once. It almost feels like The Calamity didn't even happen. This created a huge disconnect from the world for me. All the ruins that felt so meaningful to explore in BotW felt like they belonged in a different game in TotK.

I haven't mentioned Ultrahand until now, because it felt largely superfluous to my experience with the game. On the tutorial island, I learned to my great disappointment that walking more than 50 yards from a boat I'd built to cross the first lake caused it to despawn. I was further let down after my first exhilarating flight on a wing part was cut short by the extremely stingy 30-second use time limit.

Ultrahand is barely integrated into the game. It feels like someone took the building mechanic from Garry's Mod, shoved it into BotW, and dumped a bunch of Lego parts everywhere. The game almost never requires its use outside of scripted events like the Death Mountain approach or boring green crystal sky island shrines; it's often faster and more effective to deal with the game's many enemies using the vanilla BotW combat.

So many elements of the game disincentivize its use. The building mechanic itself is finicky and time-consuming, and the distance and time limits are even more demoralizing. I was lucky to find auto-build early in the game, but the heavy Zonaite cost kept me from using it much. Maybe it wouldn't have mattered if going in to The Depths was fun, but mindlessly mining Zonaite felt like the worst kind of grindy MMO filler. I think the biggest tell is how many people complained when Nintendo removed the duplication glitch from the first build of the game. I normally side with Nintendo in these instances, but here, I think it exposes just how unfun and stingy the game is with resources.

I'm just scratching the surface of TotK's serious flaws. The "dungeons" are lackluster, and their "press these 5 or so buttons in any order" design uninspired. The repetitive sage cutscenes after the fairly enjoyable but too-easy boss fights are pathetic. Shrines are often just tutorials for Zonai parts, and can often be cheesed in unsatisfying ways. Sage powers are horribly implemented.

I'll balance all the negativity I just wrote by saying that I recognize that TotK isn't a bad game. If I hadn't played BotW, I'm sure I would have enjoyed it more. Maybe my expectations for the sequel of my favorite game were too high. And there are truly excellent moments that incentivized me to push through all the middling content, like launching off the roofs of sky ships into the eye of a snow storm, or exploring the super interesting Gerudo underground shelter, or fighting a Boss Bokoblin squad for the first time. But I can't deny that I resented most of the 100+ hour grind I put into this game, and I regret ever buying it.