They did it again, and I am so glad I dodged all the marketing to experience it for myself. It really is amazing how much they kept the core feel of Zelda while introducing so many new elements.

These new runes blow the fuck out of the older runes, to be honest. Ultrahand, letting you just build anything out of nearly everything, led to some insane scenarios and changed how you view every interaction. I built so many dumb things that never should have worked, yet somehow they did. Fuse lets you combine anything with your weapons to create new effects. Shield fuses, especially, were always fun to use, and there was a good variety of arrow fuses too. Weapons felt like, after a while, I just kept making the same stuff using monster parts, rock for mining, or a boss drop. Recall might seem underwhelming at first, but you can actually use it to cheese so many puzzles. I enjoyed using recall the most, and it has to be my favourite one from both games. How did they manage to make the recall range infinite? So many times I dropped something from so high up only to think it was gone forever. Instead, you can just recall it, even if you see a tiny little pixel in the faraway distance, as in dropping something from the sky to the ground below, and you can see it touch. How is this running on the switch while they despawn your Zonai creations if you step 10 metres away? Ascend is a bit more niche, but it is very useful for climbing structures quickly. It works well with recall and for getting out of caves easily. Autobuild I just didn't like as much. While the costs are low if you're missing materials, I really didn't want to farm zonai after a certain point. I would also just rather keep building new stuff than rely on my limited favourites.

While the world may be the same, they really put in a lot of effort to make it fresh, giving off the feeling of being familiar but also alien. Areas where you've been before have changed quite considerably, with caves, wells, and varied monsters. Other towns that were a footnote in BotW become much more expanded here, with dozens of memorable sidequests. The sidequests in this game received the biggest upgrade and fit perfectly within the series. Nearly all of them were a blast to do and much more than your standard collect 10 apples. My particular favourites were the Gazette questline in every stable, the returning boss in the depths, and all the riddle ones. Even the main story quests have been improved with great lead-ups to each dungeon. Zora's main story was easily my favourite. Sadly, the shrine quests suffered a lot. Nearly everyone of them wants you to find the crystal and bring it back to the empty shrine. Most of them are way too simple, with very little to figure out. In BotW, these shrine quests were some of my favourites due to their being cryptic, which really worked to make sure you earned them. In TotK, there are just a few of the cryptic ones that actually require some thinking. Shrines, for the most part, were good and introduced some fun concepts. Except for the "free" shrines where you just get a reward, bring them down a bit. These were usually given after figuring out some puzzle to locate or unlock the shrine. Most of these have been relegated now to "solve the crystal shrine quest," to which they have added way too many. There are still a few free shrines outside of those, but they feel much more earned. The sky islands were pretty close to being my favourite addition. Each archipelago has some new puzzles to figure out and really leans on Zonai equipment. The sense of adventure you get here is only matched by the Great Sea in The Wind Waker. I just really wish there was more to the sky and that they heavily cut down on the crystal quests.

After BotW, you would think the sequel would improve on every front. Unfortunately, there are some terrible new decisions that were made, I assume to cater to people who were dissatisfied with the previous game. While their new "dungeons" for the main story are an improvement overall (setting, music, Zeldaish boss) versus their divine beast counter-parts, the actual design of puzzles suffered a lot. Being able to manipulate the beasts in BotW was something I really liked trying to figure out. In TotK, you can essentially speedrun every one of the 5 or 4 puzzles with very little thought compared to even most shrines. While they tried to make it closer to a traditional Zelda dungeon, I feel like it really is just a sidegrade. Also, in these dungeons, you get a faction ally who will help you with their abilities. You get to keep their ability in terms of a spirit form to accompany you over the entire playthrough. Each one will follow you in this spirit form and require you to go up to them and press A to use the new ability. It's a bit weird with just one of them, but hey, it works. Eventually, they decide to give you all four of them together, and each one has the same button for their ability. Some of them will teleport away from you, or others will poof into you while you're trying to activate another one. During battles, it's even more hectic with no reliable way of figuring out where each member will be since they also like to attack random enemies! I can't believe anyone thought this was a good idea, and I am so glad you can just turn them off. This really feels like a direct fix for people asking for a companion in every 3D Zelda. This is supposed to be the powers replacement, but it was done so much better in BotW. Having them just passively (except Rito) tied to your moveset while having disappointing effects was very much missed here.

I'm still very neutral on the Depths. Once you land on Hyrule and see a gaping chasm, your mind starts to wander to what could be down there. Soon after you get your first main story quest, go down there and explore. At first, it looks pretty interesting given the limited amount of time you spend, and I expected a lot more to come. You then zoom out and realize the map is as large as the entire overworld map. You explore for a few hours down there and start to realize it is pretty empty with not much to do. Sure, each region has a couple of interesting landmarks, but they are few and far between. Don't get me wrong, these landmarks were cool and usually end up in a chest giving you some DLC/Amiibo or a new schematic. In between all this, though, is just tedious busywork. Zonai and poes are the new currencies you will gather down here, with the former dropping off enemies and gem rocks while the latter is just randomly sprawled everywhere, usually in chunks of 10. At least Zonai has a much larger use than poes but poes really feels like it exists because they didn't put something else to entice you down there. When I first saw the poes guy in Lookout Landing, I was expecting some grand search like Twilight Princess, where they would be hidden in certain areas and I would have to find specific ones. Instead, poes are just random fluff you mindlessly pick up to use on various vendors. Unlike the overworld, there are no shrines, koroks, or sidequests (except for 1) to be found down here. There are barely any NPCs, and when you do find one, it's just an enemy. They even decided to reuse the story dungeon bosses down here multiple times! It just reeks of rushed content thrown around to give you a second map. At least the new chasms all over the map were fun to find.

Some minor things now... the tutorial being longer but also omitting some stuff to just force you to do the main story when you have your freedom, kind of sucks but with such a large game, it is easy to forget about. It definitely did contribute to my being a bit sour on the opening. For me, BotW and TotK are all about the journey, not the destination. They may have put more emphasis on the main story here, but anything outside of the four main regions I just did not care for at all.