sorry in advance for the wall of text, but playing the totk leak is making me want to write down my thoughts i've had on this game since early 2020.

i've completed this game 4 times, and every time it's gotten worse and worse. my memories of my first playthrough are awesome, but somewhere in between 2017 and now i became way less fond of massive open world games in general. don't get me wrong, i still really enjoy a well executed open world, but i just don't feel like botw's world fits that bill. yes, the physics are fun to fuck around with, but after you're done playing around with that, what else is there to do? fight the same 5 enemies and 3 bosses over and over? find koroks? it gets stale FAST.

shrines are cool except for the fact that 20 of them are tests of strength and 29 are empty (yes i know that the empty ones usually have a puzzle in the overworld you have to solve but idk 29 of the 120 shrines being completely empty just feels wrong).

my favorite parts of the game are where the narrative takes the main focus, so basically going to every civilization and doing the divine beasts, even though i feel like they are weaker than a good majority of 3d zelda's other dungeons. i like most of the characters in the game, especially zelda, very fond of this version of her, urbosa and revali. mipha is cool too but a little too plain to be one of my favorites. final boss is bad overall.

calamity ganon is just okay and i guess a nice shake up after fighting the blights. but dark beast is just a pathetic way to end the game off. was not satisfied with that at all, even after my first playthrough.

and outside of all that, i've got a lot of nitpicks that have built up over the 215 hours i've put into this game, my biggest of which would be having to pause every time i want to heal during a fight. not only does this completely break the pace of the game every time you do it, but it makes every fight braindead easy. it's literally impossible to die as long as you're prepared to hit the pause button.

some other nitpicks i have are the cooking system feeling a little pointless, not being able to fast travel with your horse (to fast travel points where nothing would change if your horse was with you), and the ost while roaming the overworld becoming really dull after hours of hearing the same 3 piano notes played over and over and over (the music tracks that aren't ambient are amazing though).

to wrap everything up, i would still say this game is fine overall despite my tastes changing, but unless i get amnesia i can't see myself ever coming back to it again because it feels like i've done everything a million times over. praying the next 3d zelda after totk is much more linear!