I loved Breath of the Wild's fresh take on Zelda after the series started to get a bit stale, so I came into Tears of the Kingdom with high expectations. Breath of the Wild was not without its flaws, but they only really made themselves clear to me after sinking in a lot of time with the game and in my opinion were excusable given how much was thrown out from previous games and how much experimentation was done in reworking core systems such as healing and combat.

Pretty much immediately something did not feel right about this game, the opening area of the Great Sky Island is laboriously long, tedious, and surprisingly linear-feeling compared to Breath of the Wild's incredible Great Plateau. Instead of getting set loose to explore and fend for myself, I felt railroaded towards the next point of interest by Rauru or the construct robots, and it was clear to me that the themes of loneliness and being one with nature were replaced with rebuilding civilization. This would not be a bad thing on its own, but the writing feels just as lifeless and uninteresting as it was in Breath of the Wild, but now this is a much bigger part of Tears of the Kingdom so it sticks out more.

My main issue with Breath of the Wild that I hoped to see smoothed over in a sequel (before Tears of the Kingdom was announced) was that the game does very little to disincentivize you from ruining your own fun. This is an issue that is pervasive through almost every aspect of the game; healing instantly in menus with no limit takes the tension out of combat completely, upgrading armor will accidentally make you unkillable because of how BotW calculates damage vs defense, and cooking is completely imbalanced by the existence of Hearty ingredients which completely restore all your hearts and add temporary bonus hearts on top of that. While to some extent can be seen as a consequence of prioritizing player freedom over all things, I think a sense of freedom can be preserved even when making changes to address these issues. Not even an attempt was made to address these major issues, really the only major issue with Breath of the Wild that you could say that Tears of the Kingdom resolves is that it makes materials more useful, which to the game's credit is an important issue that I am happy to see resolved in such an creative way with the Fuse system. The only issue is that it doesn't take long to realize that the Fuse system is not as interesting or fun as it seems at first, and even feels like a step backwards in some ways, as you end up just slapping the strongest and most abundant monster parts on every weapon and now all your weapons feel even less unique from each other than they did in Breath of the Wild.

The game is also a complete UI and UX nightmare, fiddling with the arrow Fuse menu is easily the most egregious issue, but dropping items from your inventory to Fuse them, and having to go to the menu to un-Fuse weapons are similarly tedious and you perform these actions so often that I can't believe this workflow was not made smoother before release.

The game is clearly all about the Ultrahand ability and Zonai devices, but not being able to use your Zonai devices in Shrines feels like a bizarre slapped-on solution to prevent players from breaking puzzles by smuggling in their own solutions. I can understand the logic, but it flies in the face of the game's design philosophy of letting the player do whatever they want; if the player can trivialize combat for themselves by eating 10 apples every time they get close to death, why not let them bring in a few rockets and just fly to the goal. This is especially funny considering that you could still bring in a shield with a rocket attached and use that to brute force your way through several puzzles. Just a baffling decision overall. Reusing the Shrines concept alone is a bit unfortunate and keeps the game from feeling like much of an improvement from Breath of the Wild, so seeing them implemented in such a half-measured approach only further makes me wish they had gone for something completely different that better compliments Ultrahand.

It also feels as though the game's marketing materials were a bit dishonest about the role that the sky would serve in the game. Besides the Great Sky Island, there are barely any sizeable islands in the game that do more than act as simple puzzles or a place to play a minigame or get some Zonai devices. This was one of the greatest disappointments to realize as I filled in the map. More baffling still is that the Depths, an area that was never revealed before the game released, is huge and almost completely devoid of interesting experiences. The Gloom enemies that deal permanent damage until you return to the surface or stave off the Gloom damage in other ways such as food or an armor set do make things interesting at first, but it becomes old very quickly. I would have much preferred if the Depths were removed in favor of fleshing out the sky and making it the exciting hook that the game pretends it is.

I kept playing this game hoping for things to get better and for the "real game" to start. That moment never came, and just exploring reshuffled areas from Breath of the Wild with some caves here and there was not enough to keep me playing, I gave up on my way to the Fire Temple after clearing the Wind Temple, but not before exploring significant portions of Hyrule and the Depths. I think that the gameplay style that Breath of the Wild started to unearth has a lot of potential, it's a shame that the game's direct sequel squanders the opportunity to build on that potential in any meaningful way.