A fun concept executed terribly. The roguelike direction is a neat idea for Splatoon and it carries enough strengths of the series that I can't truly hate it, with strong aesthetics, music, and core movement that generally feels nice.

Yet it's entirely underbaked and disappointing. Floors repeat immediately, the boss count is too low, and the story borders on nonexistent. Cute character moments for Pearl and Marina are all we get, with Acht as much of a non-character as the silent protagonist. The only variety comes from the weapon builds, but even those feel too limited. Pearl drone builds playing the game for you are just boring, the scoring system based on matching chip colors is annoying (sometimes no matter how much you reroll it just won't give you what you need, and some chips do literally nothing if not comboing with chips of different colors), on and on.

I love roguelikes but this one is just tedious, especially because there's nothing to make the early floors interesting (no way to play them better to scale harder, or manage resources, etc) and no scaling challenges after beating the game. The latter is especially a problem because runs take about half an hour and it's not all that hard to just win on your 2nd or 3rd run. Being only given the challenge to win without permanent upgrades is insulting when you already won with few, and several hacks unlock whole new mechanics or make you more likely to get synergistic builds, which might make the game easier but also make it more fun. All you are left with is a big task list to do it again and again, if you have the patience. What happened with the Splatoon devs?

Tears of the Kingdom is an evil video game. It is a shallow, meandering homonuculus in the shape of a "critically acclaimed video game." It is sinister in how it slithers along wearing the skin of a game we all liked seven years ago. It is deceptive in how it tricks the player into thinking it's wealth of "content" is fun. It is manipulative in how it attempts to wring tears out from the player despite the story meaning nothing.

It is a game about nothing for everyone. It is formless sludge to keep your fingers busy and your mind vacant. It is the death of art. It loots the corpses of the good Zelda games and uses them for fuel for the content mill.

It's kinda fun to skydive though

I won't call Tears of the Kingdom the worst game I've ever played - that'd be obviously hyperbolic. It's mechanically sound, looks nice, and there is some meager bits of fun to be had. But I think it's absolutely one of the worst pieces of art I've ever experienced. It does nothing to justify it's own existence, seemingly satisfied with just being. It has nothing new to say, nothing interesting to do, nothing cool to see. But hey, there's 900 Korok seeds, 700 locations, 194 caves, 152 shrines, 120 lightroots, 58 wells, 35 chasms, 35 settlements, 60 side adventures, 31 shrine quests, 139 side quests, 18 memories, it's so awesome dude there's so much content the game is great it has content I like this game because it has content I love content