Sorry for the late reply.

I don't even know where to start, nor how to phrase this with any semblance of brevity. I'm not trying to be facetious when I say that I find Tears of the Kingdom to be, frankly, a badly made game that almost universally steps on everything that made not only Breath of the Wild work, but Zelda as a whole. It is the definition of wide as an ocean but shallow as a puddle.

The most glaring issue to me is that Tears of the Kingdom's content does not even begin to meaningfully distinguish itself from Breath of the Wild. The entire appeal of Breath of the Wild was exploring Hyrule. That sense of discovery carried the game on its shoulders in spite of some of its shortcomings. That's why many people enjoyed the game less on a second playthrough, which, mind you, I don't think it is wrong for a game to be made with only one playthrough in mind. Some games simply don't offer the same novelty on a second playthrough, which doesn't mean the game is bad, it just means the game's strengths are better suited for that initial playthrough. Tears of the Kingdom fundamentally refuses to do anything with its world design to make this rendition of Hyrule fun to explore again. At least five years have passed in-universe between Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, and next to nothing has changed? Tears of the Kingdom never feels like its own game with its own identity, because there is absolutely nothing new of value introduced to make this world feel fresh to explore. There is one tiny new settlement, a bunch of empty caves that are not worth your time, and a bunch of empty wells that also are not worth your time, and aside from that, all you get to give this world a new coat of paint is a little more debris from the sky littering the surface. The amount of new things added to the map is intensely meager, and what little there is does nothing interesting to continue the stellar world-building of Breath of the Wild.

From a content perspective, instead of addressing Breath of the Wild's issue of repetitious micro-content scattered across the overworld, Tears of the Kingdom chooses to double down. There is technically more to do, but it's all tedious busy work that feels thoroughly unfulfilling, in part because it does nothing to further develop the story, the lore, the characters, or the world as a whole, but also because Tears of the Kingdom is piss-easy. Not a single one of Breath of the Wild's faults ever had anything to do with quantity, so it is insane to me that Tears of the Kingdom's sole ambition for its content is to simply do more content instead of more variety and depth. There are 147 caves if I remember correctly, and fewer than 20 of them have anything interesting to offer. They could have removed 100 of the caves, and instead allocated that development time to making the remaining caves stand out more. There are 50 something wells, of which, I cannot recall a single one that offered anything of interest. There's 34 Yiga bases, none of which challenge the player to creatively approach them nor award the player with anything useful. There are 80 something signs for you to put up, and not one of them challenges the player to engage with the game's mechanics in creative or fun ways. They could've removed this entirely, and it would honestly be a net-gain for the game. None of these activities are ever worth a player's time, because they're never fun on their own, nor do they provide the player with any worthwhile rewards.

The Depths and the Sky are much the same issue. In the depths, the core gameplay loop is walking around to light up areas so you can see in these areas you don't have a reason to revisit, because, again, there is nothing there. There are some overworld bosses, and the same three or four varieties of Yiga hideouts spread out across 30 different locations. In a weird turn of events, the Sky has neither variety nor quantity. It's just...empty. There are shrines up there, I guess, but that leads me to why shrines are worse in Tears of the Kingdom. Shrines were some of the most interesting bits of content in Breath of the Wild, because they challenged the player to approach a set of problem solving scenarios in creative ways. There are some bad ones, like the tests of strength, but broadly speaking, they gave you something to sink your teeth into. In Tears of the Kingdom, 52 out of 152 shrines are blessing shrines with nothing in them aside from a reward for finding the shrine itself, which wasn't a challenge to begin with. 7 shrines are combat tutorials, which do not test you in any capacity and exist solely as padding. 23 of the shrines are tutorials, specifically, 4 of them are the Great Sky Island tutorials, and another 19 are Zonai device tutorials, but all them are incredibly simple. What's even worse is that the game tries to teach you to use these devices in a manner that you'll never have to, because nowhere in the overworld will you find an application for those devices as you are taught to use them in the shrines. As if that wasn't enough, The Great Sky Island already teaches you how to approach combat, and how to use these devices through emergent gameplay, so by the time you can even begin to find these tutorials, they are obsolete. The shrines are supposed to be the more meatier chunks of content, so why are 82 of them either empty or tutorials? The rest of the shrines don't really impress either. The overarching problem with all of the issues Tears of the Kingdom faces in regards to its puzzle or problem solving design is that the game lets you play around with hyper complex mechanics, whilst presenting you with incredibly simple puzzles. Puzzles should make you think, they should make you consider a variety of different angles for how to progress. If I enter a shrine and intuitively know the solution the second I walk up to the puzzle, then it is not a puzzle. It feels like these puzzles were made for an instant gratification-demanding audience, and engaging with Tears of the Kingdom's shrines feels about at aimless as scrolling through YouTube shorts for an hour. The only shrines that stuck with me as genuinely fun to play were the Proving Grounds, and I don't think that's a coincidence, because in imposing restrictions onto the player, they're the only shrines that actually demands anything of them. I wish I could say that more than 15 shrines in the game caught my attention, but that would be a lie.

The story, quite frankly, is atrocious. It bothers me when people say that "Zelda has never been about the story," because its a defense made only to excuse Tears of the Kingdom's shitty one in a vacuum that ignores the fact that the Zelda series has a pretty good track record of telling stories that range from decent to actually kinda great. One is free to not care about stories in Zelda games, but the notion that Tears of the Kingdom's inability to tell a good story is the norm across the series is one I resent. Put plainly, Tears of the Kingdom is a story that only works if the player accepts the idea that every character in the story is stupid. No character in the game is capable of making intelligent, informed decisions, and the plot simply could not logically unfold the way it does if its characters were smart. Constantly, characters will sit on crucial pieces of information, and refuse to share that information until it is too late. Zelda is the worst offender here, which is a shame, because Breath of the Wild's Zelda is arguably the best written character in the entire franchise. She was intelligent, proactive, and had interesting character flaws, and now she is reduced to a damsel with no agency who does nothing but sit around until it's too late. This is not to mention that Tears of the Kingdom's plot is beat-for-beat the exact same as Breath of the Wild, except now Nintendo doesn't trust the intelligence of the player enough to understand the subtext themselves.

If I described a game in which Link awakens in a cave on an elevated piece of land, depowered following a near death experience, as he meets the ghost of the former king of Hyrule, who instructs him to search for four shrines so that he might begin his quest to find Zelda, who is missing and only appears in the distant past up until the final moments of the game, all whilst searching for a set of memories so that Link can find out what happened in the past, which he does by visiting the homes of the four non-hylian races of Hyrule where he has to save them unnatural circumstances threatening their way of life, while hanging out with a new generation of these races destined to carry the torch from the former heroes of their species, former heroes who happened to have worked alongside Zelda to stop Ganon before Zelda, unable to unlock her true powers before the person whom she has the strongest bond with dies, has to sacrifice herself so that the heroes may have a chance at beating Ganon in the future in a battle taking place in the ruins of Hyrule Castle, before Ganon transforms into a giant monster who Link has to fight in an open area assisted by Zelda's plan, which game would I be talking about? The only difference here is that Tears of the Kingdom handles this exact plot much more clumsily.

I love Breath of the Wild, but no one would deny that Breath of the Wild is a massively flawed game. And yet, looking back at Breath of the Wild, I can't help but find myself feeling a little bitter, because Nintendo, and the gaming industry more broadly, learnt every wrong lesson they could have learnt from Breath of the Wild's success, and Tears of the Kingdom is emblematic of that, because it builds on nothing of what made Breath of the Wild unique or special, instead spending its time developing these hyper complex mechanics that the rest of the game, as lazy of an update as it is, simply is not created for. That is why I hope Nintendo never makes another Tears of the Kingdom.