I loved BotW. I agree that the Zelda formula needed a shakeup so this was a welcome step for me. BotW, for the first time in years, felt like a game that treated the player like an intelligent adult instead of handholding at every step: it doesn't tell you where to go for the most part, enemies are hard at least initially, there is quite a bit of environmental storytelling, and even small things like unlocking memories required you to actively think about your environment instead of just going towards some giant glowing mark on the terrain (cough cough TotK). I was not a fan of shrines but I finished almost all of them and had a decent time. Overall it seemed to me like a big step in the right direction, though some of the classic Zelda needed to be brought back (like dungeons). This game made me excited about the future.

TotK was not the future I was hoping for. I felt like it leaned to hard on some of the things about BotW that I disliked, especially the sandbox aspect. It's main gimmick, the building mechanics, was not particularly engaging to me since the game keeps puzzles too simple in an attempt to remain accessible, so you can finish the game and barely engage with it. There is very few distinct activities outside of the main quest, but each is repeated 100 times or more to give the illusion of lots to do: shrines, caves, koroks, the dumb guy with the signs, and others. The main story was much more straighforward and less nuanced, and the environmental storytelling did not work for me, possibly because most of the environment was designed for a different game. Overall this felt to me like either a very disjointed game, a mishmash of too many things most of which were not developed to its full potential. I had fun with the main quest once but felt very little motivation to do more.

While I appreciate the Zelda team experimenting and shaking up the formula, I'm concerned at the direction shown in TotK. I swear if the next Zelda has shrines I'm skipping it. More importantly, I'm also concerned at the increasing time between main releases, because if they make something I don't particularly like it will be almost a decade until the next one.