A worthy sequel with both pluses and minuses when compared to Breath of the Wild. They're so intertwined that it's easier just to highlight what was changed or addressed and see how they stack up:
The biggest change in how you approach almost everything in the game is the new Right Arm Abilities, replacing Runes. I think how you feel about these will largely come down to how much you enjoy Ultrahand, the clear spotlight of the game's mechanics. To me, it was ok. I prefer the slightly more limited nature of the Runes, which didn't feel as overcentralizing. But I still definitely had fun with the abilities overall, there were just more opportunities where they felt gimmicky compared to meshing well with the world. Fuse also had this problem, I ended up missing unique weapons with cool appearances a lot more than I expected.
The world is probably the other biggest change here. The sky islands felt a little small and empty to me overall, and the depths were also probably my least favorite area of the game, so surprisingly I think the best change here was the addition of caves and fleshing out the mainland more. I liked BotW's world, which fit its atmosphere, but there's really not much downside to these additions. Side stories were also well expanded here, which was nice overall. There felt like a lot of little plot threads to find and follow as far as you please, highlights for me being Hateno Village and Gerudo Town. The depths though, I may have enjoyed the game more without. I started out not disliking them, as they were a nice pace break for a different style of gameplay, but as the game went on I found myself getting more and more bothered whenever I had to trudge down there. In a smaller capacity, they would be something cool to explore every now and then, but a zone of darkness spanning the entire overworld just made it a bit of a slog after too long. Also, I felt like enemy variety was much improved and probably the best thing they addressed, even if there's still quite a lot of Bokoblins (now with silly horns glued to their heads).
Right off the bat, you get the impression that they heard feedback about how light the story was in BotW and wanted to push this more. Bizarrely, they end up just falling back to the "go collect memories" style after the introduction, which is probably what those complaints were more about. Either way, I don't have much of a problem with those, but I also didn't massively love the new story either. The extremely formulaic "regional phenomena" plots were not my favorite and felt like a very thin reskin of BotW's setup (just swap "champions" to "sages" and most of the plot is the same). The story after these was more interesting, though the gameplay tied to some of it (collecting certain parts) was a slog. Overall, this was all solid enough, but I definitely respect BotW's sense of discovery and freedom with the story more. Temples were also very short and not quite the true return to dungeons that I think many were hoping for. They did have more unique art and bosses than Divine Beasts, but honestly I think they are about equal overall. And thinking back to the intro, I think the overall experience (gameplay + story) of the Great Plateau blows the Great Sky Island out of the... sky. The complete sweeping under the rug of most of the replaced concepts from BotW also felt a little weird, like Sheikah tech being mostly missing or replaced 1:1 with Zonai stuff. This gave me the impression that BotW felt like a more cohesive game overall in its meshing of world, theme, and story.
One more thing I can't forget to mention: the controls for the sage abilities are possibly the worst thing in the game. They turn these somewhat-fun concepts for abilities into super frustrating to use, annoying, or just inaccessible tools that almost never feel like they're there when you need them. Having unique contextual activation conditions like BotW's champion abilities would have been an absolutely massive improvement here.
Overall, while this may have sounded somewhat negative, at the end of the day this is still a supreme adventure in a great world with plenty of fun mechanics and content to explore. Though I prefer BotW overall after this first playthrough, this is a great game on its own with a lot to discover and dig into, and I very much enjoyed most of my time with it.
The biggest change in how you approach almost everything in the game is the new Right Arm Abilities, replacing Runes. I think how you feel about these will largely come down to how much you enjoy Ultrahand, the clear spotlight of the game's mechanics. To me, it was ok. I prefer the slightly more limited nature of the Runes, which didn't feel as overcentralizing. But I still definitely had fun with the abilities overall, there were just more opportunities where they felt gimmicky compared to meshing well with the world. Fuse also had this problem, I ended up missing unique weapons with cool appearances a lot more than I expected.
The world is probably the other biggest change here. The sky islands felt a little small and empty to me overall, and the depths were also probably my least favorite area of the game, so surprisingly I think the best change here was the addition of caves and fleshing out the mainland more. I liked BotW's world, which fit its atmosphere, but there's really not much downside to these additions. Side stories were also well expanded here, which was nice overall. There felt like a lot of little plot threads to find and follow as far as you please, highlights for me being Hateno Village and Gerudo Town. The depths though, I may have enjoyed the game more without. I started out not disliking them, as they were a nice pace break for a different style of gameplay, but as the game went on I found myself getting more and more bothered whenever I had to trudge down there. In a smaller capacity, they would be something cool to explore every now and then, but a zone of darkness spanning the entire overworld just made it a bit of a slog after too long. Also, I felt like enemy variety was much improved and probably the best thing they addressed, even if there's still quite a lot of Bokoblins (now with silly horns glued to their heads).
Right off the bat, you get the impression that they heard feedback about how light the story was in BotW and wanted to push this more. Bizarrely, they end up just falling back to the "go collect memories" style after the introduction, which is probably what those complaints were more about. Either way, I don't have much of a problem with those, but I also didn't massively love the new story either. The extremely formulaic "regional phenomena" plots were not my favorite and felt like a very thin reskin of BotW's setup (just swap "champions" to "sages" and most of the plot is the same). The story after these was more interesting, though the gameplay tied to some of it (collecting certain parts) was a slog. Overall, this was all solid enough, but I definitely respect BotW's sense of discovery and freedom with the story more. Temples were also very short and not quite the true return to dungeons that I think many were hoping for. They did have more unique art and bosses than Divine Beasts, but honestly I think they are about equal overall. And thinking back to the intro, I think the overall experience (gameplay + story) of the Great Plateau blows the Great Sky Island out of the... sky. The complete sweeping under the rug of most of the replaced concepts from BotW also felt a little weird, like Sheikah tech being mostly missing or replaced 1:1 with Zonai stuff. This gave me the impression that BotW felt like a more cohesive game overall in its meshing of world, theme, and story.
One more thing I can't forget to mention: the controls for the sage abilities are possibly the worst thing in the game. They turn these somewhat-fun concepts for abilities into super frustrating to use, annoying, or just inaccessible tools that almost never feel like they're there when you need them. Having unique contextual activation conditions like BotW's champion abilities would have been an absolutely massive improvement here.
Overall, while this may have sounded somewhat negative, at the end of the day this is still a supreme adventure in a great world with plenty of fun mechanics and content to explore. Though I prefer BotW overall after this first playthrough, this is a great game on its own with a lot to discover and dig into, and I very much enjoyed most of my time with it.