I've got to commend P5R on the fact that it assumes all Persona 5 fans must already accept that the pacing is a lost cause and lean in even further into its absurd longevity.

But maybe when I feel a game doesnt respect my time when I play it through a fucking pandemic and am stuck in my house playing vidya more than ever before, it can actually fuck off.

There's good changes in Royal, from the minor to the more substantial, and there are things I like a lot about P5 in general. Its art style is fantastic, the soundtrack is a banger, it's very cozy. Royal makes appreciated changes to combat, bosses and dungeons, and theres a bunch of little things improved throughout the whole game.

The extra story content in this game should absolutely have been like the Answer in FES where you can just launch with it. Yes, the Answer is garbage, and there's a bunch of little changes in the main story but 90% of the game being a retread of a story that doesn't really stand up to the scruitiny of me getting increasingly frustrated at it.

And the thing is, if P5R was an edit, maybe with an extra story added at the end seperately like the answer, it could have been really great. Persona 5 is a game that could have more interesting story content added whilst also being shorter. Dungeons and characters could be consolidated, the introduction could be shortened, the calendar could be made basically half as long - but Royal does none of this.

It's a shame, really. If this game was 50 hours instead of 100+ I could probably see past more of it's issues. Until then, fuck it.

This game is... a problem.

This review is long, grab a coffee.

I am very much not a fan of BoTW, you could even say I'm an active disliker of BoTW, a sort of hater. And while a lot of the hyperboles i use often are due to my incredible flaw of just not being able to stop myself from being a contrarian for no reason, i genuinely loathe this game.

Let's get the boring stuff out first
"Why 5/10 if you hate it so much?"

I truly believe BoTW actually shows some incredible game design and awesome ideas, i played this game for ~200h, i could make my own fun, at times. I didn't hate every single moment to moment interaction, i love its presentation. I could get through it, which is something i can't say about some terrible Zelda entries like Phantom Hourglass.
So, plenty of stuff to like, and that i liked, but also so much to hate.

I wanna start with probably the biggest "i can't believe people are praising this" issue: the music.
Zelda, from the first entry (which this game -supposedly- takes most of its core identity from) was extremely tied to its soundtrack. In almost every game you play an instrument, or make music, or find music, or has some plot-heavy connection to songs. BoTW throws that completely out.
Music in this game is terrible.
No, it's not more immersive to just have "ambience" music playing around, if you really wanna commit to that, just don't have music playing, like most of the areas of Souls games do. I do not understand how it's possible to believe in this "ambience is more immersive" farce when NieR: Automata showed the world that you can absolutely have immersive music and make it extremely noticeable, and in the process it made the best videogame OST of all time.
BoTW music is nothing, even worse than nothing, it's an active insult to a franchise that had always worked so much for its melodies that i can't believe so few people cared.

Music might be the more egregious removal, but BoTW doesn't stop there.
Many people have complained about the lack of dungeons, and i'm one of them. Now, i do understand that the core philosophy of BoTW doesn't marry well with the dungeon design of the franchise born out of A Link to The Past, but something better could have been done.
The divine beasts are incredibly underwhelming, and the puzzles in the shrines and overworld are so laughably basic that it feels like the team has learned nothing from all the past entries. I am not asking for "classic dungeons", though, i do want them, i am asking for an actually well-constructed iteration on concepts, something that feels satisfactory to figure out, even if easy. What i want is complexity (not to be confused with difficulty, something can be complex and easy or simple and hard) and BoTW just gave me simplicity.

The simplicity of the world and its secrets is also why i do not buy the idea that BoTW somehow "carries the design of the original Zelda".
Before writing this, i played some of Zelda 1 for the first time, manual open, no clue what to do, just like it was meant to.
The original Zelda is rich with secrets and actual rewarding and engaging discoveries. BoTW might embrace the same sense of freedom but the design of the two games could not be more different. Zelda 1 asks you to stop playing, literally to jump of out the game world to read the manual, figure out incredibly unintuitive stuff with your wits and dedication, while BoTW just asks you to walk. The Zelda 1 approach has issues too, but what i wanna highlight is the stark contrast between the "discovery of secrets" of the original and the "just go explore" of BoTW. They are not the same, they have completely different pulls on the player. BoTW is completely new territory, it doesn't carry any torch except the one it used to burn all the Zelda legacy to the ground.

The game gave me, however, complexity in another department: combat.
Combat is easy, but it's complex. A lot of different interactions come into play: buffs, enemy scaling, weapon durability, weapon type, parrying, disarmament, status effects, environmental interactions. It's a lot, and that sounds great on paper to me.
The problem lies in the fact that you don't really have to engage with any of this. The layers of complexity are completely bypassed by the path of least resistance of just attacking and switching weapons when one breaks. There's no reason to engage in the mechanics of combat, and that wouldn't really be an issue if combat wasn't so prominent.
More than any other Zelda title (except maybe Zelda 1), BoTW throws you into combat scenarios, and that really hurts the game when the combat is so painfully boring. The series never really had engaging combat (except for Skyward Sword, i will die on this hill) but that was never really a major issue because of how little of it there was. BoTW, despite the supposed freedom that gives you, most often then not leads to the same experience over and over.

The combat highlights probably the core issue with the game: you don't have to do anything. The "intrinsic motivation" is all that there is, the supposed "joy of exploration". It doesn't work. This approach just makes everything in the game not worth engaging at all. There's no gain, no point at all, just go climb that mountain because "it looks fun". Doesn't look fun to you? Well, tough luck, buddy, this is all there is.

And this is why i fundamentally cannot like this game. Ever.
There's no fix for this, it's the design, it's the philosophy of the game, its identity. To ask for this to be removed is to ask for a different game. But i do want a different game, i do not want this.

I wrote this because now more than ever i need an outlet for these feelings. Breath of The Wild is probably gonna be the most influential game of recent times, in fact it already is, and that's not good.
The trailers for the upcoming Tears of The Kingdom are worrying to me. This is the new direction of Zelda, and it hurts me.
But it's not just the new direction of the franchise, the impact of BoTW is so massive that since its release every new major release takes from its design, and it's awful. Not only we're stuck with seeing this questionable design philosophy all over, but other games do it even WORSE!

I truly believe BoTW is one of the worst things to happen to game design since games-as-a-service took off (and at least that it's finally beginning to die out).

In the end, i still had some pleasant moments with the game, but thinking about it (which is what i like most about any media) hurts me, and I'd rather live in a world where this game didn't see the light of day, even if it means the Elden Ring would probably not exist. It's a trade-off i am willing to make.

its called pastiche you dipshits and it rocks

honestly this game is basically perfect, surf maps sega dreamcast sonic adventure gun game good sound design good platforming good leaderboards good skips good everything. adore it!

also here's my spiciest take: if you dont like the writing in this but you do like the writing in hades then you need to get better at having fun because they are The Same, but this one is more joyous