This game, on a technical level, is an improvement on BotW on basically every level. Despite that, I think that it is not a better game.
Breath of the wild was an incredible achievement, it single-handedly changed what we thought a "Zelda game" was like, and left an indelible impression on the gaming landscape. It had flaws, some pretty glaring ones even, but its impact is undisputable.
Tears iterates on the same formula, tweaking it and correcting each and every flaw. There is a solution to weapon duration, there are more interesting powers, there is a more involved story, there are actual dungeons. But it doesn't do enough new things to be considered a great game IMHO
The new powers are mind-blowing on a technical level. The fact that you can conjure up intricate contraptions, slap a controller stick on them, and you can drive them with an intuitive control scheme, is unbelievable. But I feel that while this is very "technically" impressive, it doesn't necessarily translate to fun gameplay.
Building is cumbersome and clunky, and most of your creations will fail and collapse. Most of the time you are better off on foot. That is, until you learn that you only need one contraption: the hoverbike. Once you have that, you have a metaphorical "hammer": each and every transversal problem becomes a nail. You don't need any other tool once you have that. Maybe the odd rocket-on-a-shield once in a while.
Your new powers are extremely powerful and versatile, to a fault. Like the all-powerful hoverbike that solves all explorative difficulties, a good exploiting of the time rewind power solves a good 40% of the shrines, bypassing the actual solution. It is interesting that you have so many tools to solve problems, that you can find creative "unintended" solutions. But your overpowered abilities makes just a couple of solutions a panacea for most conundrums.
On a game design standpoint, Hyrule is always amazing, but it is still the same Hyrule: I know it like the back of my hand already. There is new stuff of course: caves and floating islands for example (few, far between, samey and underwhelming). And of course the depths: a huge swath of disappointment and wasted potential.
They could design a whole new underground Hyrule, as big as the original one, and they decided to make it a desolate wasteland, which looks absolutely the same regardless of where you are, with basically no points of interest or worthwhile rewards for explorations (no, yiga schematics, zonaite, and amiibo armour aren't nearly enough)
On the topic of exploration rewards: they are also quite underwhelming. You have koroks (a rehash of BotW), shrines with heart or stamina upgrades (another rehash of BotW), and a whole slew of missions that give you next-to-useless inventory clutter as a reward (oh, five rice for this task that took me 15 minutes? Thank you I really needed it. 50 rupees? I'll just add them to my
already overflowing wallet, thanks man).
The exceptions are the "side adventures": they still rarely have interesting rewards (a new fabric for the parasail? Really??) but they are at least interesting, charming missions, and they have a worthwhile storyline with an actual plot and a conclusion.
The UI is also surprisingly sloppy, I'll give a couple of examples: The "fuse" powers can't be used from the inventory, and it requires you to drop the item you want to fuse for no apparent reason. Fusing an item to an arrow requires you to slooooooowly scroll to a single line inventory with each and every item in your inventory (out of hundreds). Why they didn't use a grid, or they didn't allow you to pre-craft fused arrow is beyond me.
The story is a bit more involved, but the game structure is way too similar to BotW for me to take it seriously.
The main mission asks you to travel to the exact same four places as the first game for crying out loud.
I realise I just spent hundreds of words harping on this game. Let me be clear: I don't hate it. I just can't appreciate it fully because breath of the wild exists. It already gave me that magic feeling of wonder and exploration, and this sequel couldn't quite recapture that lightning in a bottle.
The foundation of the game is still good, even great at times. There are moments of brilliance, there were sessions where I was captured, enamoured, immersed in exploration. The finale even had me tearing up a little bit. But those emotions were the exception. In BotW, they where the rule.
I finished this game in a hundred hours (and change) of playtime, roughly the same playtime as BotW. But I finished BotW in a few weeks of playing. For Tears, it took me five months. Make of that what you will.
Breath of the wild was an incredible achievement, it single-handedly changed what we thought a "Zelda game" was like, and left an indelible impression on the gaming landscape. It had flaws, some pretty glaring ones even, but its impact is undisputable.
Tears iterates on the same formula, tweaking it and correcting each and every flaw. There is a solution to weapon duration, there are more interesting powers, there is a more involved story, there are actual dungeons. But it doesn't do enough new things to be considered a great game IMHO
The new powers are mind-blowing on a technical level. The fact that you can conjure up intricate contraptions, slap a controller stick on them, and you can drive them with an intuitive control scheme, is unbelievable. But I feel that while this is very "technically" impressive, it doesn't necessarily translate to fun gameplay.
Building is cumbersome and clunky, and most of your creations will fail and collapse. Most of the time you are better off on foot. That is, until you learn that you only need one contraption: the hoverbike. Once you have that, you have a metaphorical "hammer": each and every transversal problem becomes a nail. You don't need any other tool once you have that. Maybe the odd rocket-on-a-shield once in a while.
Your new powers are extremely powerful and versatile, to a fault. Like the all-powerful hoverbike that solves all explorative difficulties, a good exploiting of the time rewind power solves a good 40% of the shrines, bypassing the actual solution. It is interesting that you have so many tools to solve problems, that you can find creative "unintended" solutions. But your overpowered abilities makes just a couple of solutions a panacea for most conundrums.
On a game design standpoint, Hyrule is always amazing, but it is still the same Hyrule: I know it like the back of my hand already. There is new stuff of course: caves and floating islands for example (few, far between, samey and underwhelming). And of course the depths: a huge swath of disappointment and wasted potential.
They could design a whole new underground Hyrule, as big as the original one, and they decided to make it a desolate wasteland, which looks absolutely the same regardless of where you are, with basically no points of interest or worthwhile rewards for explorations (no, yiga schematics, zonaite, and amiibo armour aren't nearly enough)
On the topic of exploration rewards: they are also quite underwhelming. You have koroks (a rehash of BotW), shrines with heart or stamina upgrades (another rehash of BotW), and a whole slew of missions that give you next-to-useless inventory clutter as a reward (oh, five rice for this task that took me 15 minutes? Thank you I really needed it. 50 rupees? I'll just add them to my
already overflowing wallet, thanks man).
The exceptions are the "side adventures": they still rarely have interesting rewards (a new fabric for the parasail? Really??) but they are at least interesting, charming missions, and they have a worthwhile storyline with an actual plot and a conclusion.
The UI is also surprisingly sloppy, I'll give a couple of examples: The "fuse" powers can't be used from the inventory, and it requires you to drop the item you want to fuse for no apparent reason. Fusing an item to an arrow requires you to slooooooowly scroll to a single line inventory with each and every item in your inventory (out of hundreds). Why they didn't use a grid, or they didn't allow you to pre-craft fused arrow is beyond me.
The story is a bit more involved, but the game structure is way too similar to BotW for me to take it seriously.
The main mission asks you to travel to the exact same four places as the first game for crying out loud.
I realise I just spent hundreds of words harping on this game. Let me be clear: I don't hate it. I just can't appreciate it fully because breath of the wild exists. It already gave me that magic feeling of wonder and exploration, and this sequel couldn't quite recapture that lightning in a bottle.
The foundation of the game is still good, even great at times. There are moments of brilliance, there were sessions where I was captured, enamoured, immersed in exploration. The finale even had me tearing up a little bit. But those emotions were the exception. In BotW, they where the rule.
I finished this game in a hundred hours (and change) of playtime, roughly the same playtime as BotW. But I finished BotW in a few weeks of playing. For Tears, it took me five months. Make of that what you will.