Didn't like it. Sorry.
I often think that the reason I struggled to enjoy this game was because I hadn't played any Zelda entries previously, and had no nostalgia or emotional attachment to the characters or world. Thing is, I see a lot of people in a similar boat to me describe it as one of the best games they ever played, which I eternally struggle to understand.
The plot felt negligible. The characters' histories are for the most part locked behind an extremely tedious side quest in the form of 'go place and take picture', which doesn't align with the journey you take at all, leaving it feeling like something only a completionist would do. The combat would have been fun, if not for the glaring issue of weapon durability which... why? I've heard people say it's supposed to encourage you to use different weapons, but all it achieved was the opposite; you hoard good weapons for tough encounters because everything breaks in like 3 hits, meaning you end up using the same low-damage, common-drop weapons for basically the vast duration of the game (or you grind early to get the Master Sword). Even the ultra-special weapons you get as rewards end up breaking this way, discouraging you from ever using them (and YES, they can be repaired, but for one of the rarest resources in the game?? Yay, grinding for money and resources, the best part of every game. Especially when you have to do it to maintain a basic core functionality of Being Able To Fight Stuff.) Even this I could kind of accept, if not for the hugely limited inventory space - why, oh why would you introduce a mechanic where your weapons uses are finite, and then not let you stockpile them? And the only way to increase inventory space is to trek back and forth on the woefully barren land to do some inane mini-puzzles that grant you 1 inventory slot in exchange for like, 30 of them.
Traversal feels agonising and dull because everything is the same; it's basically just patented flat-shaded Nintendo Switch Grass(tm) as far as the eye can see. Occasionally you have to climb and repeatedly fall off some equally flat grey cliffs. Sometimes the grass is recolored to look like snow.
I've seen people compliment the game because it 'rewards exploration', which always confuses me, because... a) that's the basic job of any open world game, and b), BOTW does not do that well. Your rewards are basically always a), a shrine, all of which look the same and get exceptionally tedious once you've done about 20 of them, or b) a Korok. That's it. There are like 4 enemy types in the game. The Divine Beasts are fun, but there's only 4 of them. The characters and settlements are fun, but these are always incredibly small and have very little to actually do; everything feels quite empty and unpopulated. The way Goron City was talked about had me expecting some incredibly complex legacy-dungeon-type of metropolis after you've made your way through the volcano, when in fact it was basically a circle of tents and like, 1 shop. Everything felt this way.
The horse system was impossible and basically useless; there's no use for a method of speeding up traversal that a) can't cope /with/ traversal, getting stuck or bugged out on the tiniest rock or deviation from flat ground, and b) is completely limited to where you take it, fast travel not applying to your horse, leaving it stranded wherever you left it and leaving you with another thing to go fetch. It's so frustrating in a fantasy open-world game where 90% of the quests or extra content involves backtracking over endless expanses of places you've already been. And yes, they made a horse functionality that fixes this - in paid DLC. Classic Nintendo.
I do think it's possible that this game was just hugely limited by the Switch, but even so, given it was one of the Switch's biggest titles, you'd think they would have optimised it better. That the environments would be less boring to look at, that there would be more types of enemy in a world that is meant to feel so rich and diverse, that there would just be... more to do, other than yet another copy pasted shrine or literal Korok shit. There were so many times I spent ages and ages scaling a mountain or getting to some weird isolated place on the map which seemed like it /had/ to have something there, only to be rewarded with either... nothing, a shrine, or a korok. That's it, every time. It's not rewarding exploration or fun gameplay, it's frustrating and boring. I really wouldn't mind because I'm not a Zelda fan and it's fine for mediocre games to exist, but the way this is lauded by IGN and every reviewer ever as somehow being the pinnacle of open-world games and the best game ever to exist feels so deeply at odds with reality. It's not an awful game but it's definitely not what people praise it to be. Also, Elden Ring is the same price. Do with that what you will.
I often think that the reason I struggled to enjoy this game was because I hadn't played any Zelda entries previously, and had no nostalgia or emotional attachment to the characters or world. Thing is, I see a lot of people in a similar boat to me describe it as one of the best games they ever played, which I eternally struggle to understand.
The plot felt negligible. The characters' histories are for the most part locked behind an extremely tedious side quest in the form of 'go place and take picture', which doesn't align with the journey you take at all, leaving it feeling like something only a completionist would do. The combat would have been fun, if not for the glaring issue of weapon durability which... why? I've heard people say it's supposed to encourage you to use different weapons, but all it achieved was the opposite; you hoard good weapons for tough encounters because everything breaks in like 3 hits, meaning you end up using the same low-damage, common-drop weapons for basically the vast duration of the game (or you grind early to get the Master Sword). Even the ultra-special weapons you get as rewards end up breaking this way, discouraging you from ever using them (and YES, they can be repaired, but for one of the rarest resources in the game?? Yay, grinding for money and resources, the best part of every game. Especially when you have to do it to maintain a basic core functionality of Being Able To Fight Stuff.) Even this I could kind of accept, if not for the hugely limited inventory space - why, oh why would you introduce a mechanic where your weapons uses are finite, and then not let you stockpile them? And the only way to increase inventory space is to trek back and forth on the woefully barren land to do some inane mini-puzzles that grant you 1 inventory slot in exchange for like, 30 of them.
Traversal feels agonising and dull because everything is the same; it's basically just patented flat-shaded Nintendo Switch Grass(tm) as far as the eye can see. Occasionally you have to climb and repeatedly fall off some equally flat grey cliffs. Sometimes the grass is recolored to look like snow.
I've seen people compliment the game because it 'rewards exploration', which always confuses me, because... a) that's the basic job of any open world game, and b), BOTW does not do that well. Your rewards are basically always a), a shrine, all of which look the same and get exceptionally tedious once you've done about 20 of them, or b) a Korok. That's it. There are like 4 enemy types in the game. The Divine Beasts are fun, but there's only 4 of them. The characters and settlements are fun, but these are always incredibly small and have very little to actually do; everything feels quite empty and unpopulated. The way Goron City was talked about had me expecting some incredibly complex legacy-dungeon-type of metropolis after you've made your way through the volcano, when in fact it was basically a circle of tents and like, 1 shop. Everything felt this way.
The horse system was impossible and basically useless; there's no use for a method of speeding up traversal that a) can't cope /with/ traversal, getting stuck or bugged out on the tiniest rock or deviation from flat ground, and b) is completely limited to where you take it, fast travel not applying to your horse, leaving it stranded wherever you left it and leaving you with another thing to go fetch. It's so frustrating in a fantasy open-world game where 90% of the quests or extra content involves backtracking over endless expanses of places you've already been. And yes, they made a horse functionality that fixes this - in paid DLC. Classic Nintendo.
I do think it's possible that this game was just hugely limited by the Switch, but even so, given it was one of the Switch's biggest titles, you'd think they would have optimised it better. That the environments would be less boring to look at, that there would be more types of enemy in a world that is meant to feel so rich and diverse, that there would just be... more to do, other than yet another copy pasted shrine or literal Korok shit. There were so many times I spent ages and ages scaling a mountain or getting to some weird isolated place on the map which seemed like it /had/ to have something there, only to be rewarded with either... nothing, a shrine, or a korok. That's it, every time. It's not rewarding exploration or fun gameplay, it's frustrating and boring. I really wouldn't mind because I'm not a Zelda fan and it's fine for mediocre games to exist, but the way this is lauded by IGN and every reviewer ever as somehow being the pinnacle of open-world games and the best game ever to exist feels so deeply at odds with reality. It's not an awful game but it's definitely not what people praise it to be. Also, Elden Ring is the same price. Do with that what you will.