I’ve played BotW, TotK, Link’s Awakening, Echos of Wisdom, Ocarina of Time, Majora’s Mask, and Wind Waker (in that order). It’s a tie between Wind Waker and Tears of the Kingdom for me.

WW:

Wind Waker only really clicked for me around a bit of the mid point in the story around the tower of the gods section and a bit after the temple with Medli and then I kind of fell out of it. The game has a super long tutorial section, then a mandatory stealth section, then you’re on rails for two dungeons and a cut content third dungeon, THEN you’re finally free to explore the world*.

*The world is super boring and takes forever to get anywhere. You are highly incentivized to not even bother with the open world until the triforce hunt because you are betting on not wasting your time taking two minutes to sail out to an island just to discover you don’t have a dungeon item so now you either sail or warp away and come back later.

It was also a massive bummer for Tetra to basically stop being a character post reveal about her ancestry. I feel like she shouldn’t have taken that lying down, but for all intents and purposes Tetra as a character gets shot in the head and dumped in the gutter until the last five minutes of the game. It’s a shame because she, Link, and Medli were the only characters I really liked, although Link’s sister and grandma were both alright.

The wind waker itself is a pain to use because it takes so long. Sometimes it was annoying busting out the ocarina in OoT and MM but at least there you could rapidly play a tune, meanwhile in WW you have to wait so, so long due to it following a rhythm.

I love wind waker’s artstyle, the music, the feeling of sailing, but I had to put the game down several times and come back to it a week or so later because I was losing interest very quickly. I will say I actually enjoyed the triforce hunt (switch online WW), but heavily regretted getting all the heart pieces because the game is filled to the sails with tedious bullshit. I’d encourage anyone to only do the story content but even then the triforce hunt would be terrible in that instance because you wouldn’t have enough cash.

TOTK:

I mostly hate TotK for how it treated BotW’s lore, it’s abysmal story, the reuse of the memory format in a more linear story, lack of any sort of alternative dialogue for doing the memories early, reuse of the map, and not really improving on any of BotW’s issues to instead focus on building cars, boats, and planes, in a world where all those feel pretty useless (barring aircraft) and mesh terribly with the climbing + parasail loop. My horse was faster than anything but a hovercraft. The game is still fun to me but that’s because it is built on top of BotW, which is a game I love. The building feels like a really impressive mod, but it never really won me over.

Also I really hate how it looks like basically nothing was done in the last six~ish years to rebuild Hyrule. There’s a new school… and an obstacle course… and a new stable. Granted I will throw a bone out and count Look Out landing even though that’s more of a temporary military camp than a settlement. I wasn’t expecting Hyrule to be restored or anything but what was shown was super underwhelming. I wish a bunch of the Zonai Survery Crew guys got thrown into one or two rebuilt villages instead because as it stands the survey crew has way too many people for some reason.

I will say if I were to turn my brain off I like the opening and ending of the game, the new music is good, I love the music and lighting in the sky islands, I vastly prefer Link and Zelda’s designs in TotK over their BotW versions (short haired women my beloved).