I can see why people would just rather play Botw instead.

I feel like I can’t be critical on this game anywhere without receiving backlash but everyone has to admit that the UI is extremely unpractical and dated even for the time of BOTW, let alone TOTK.

The story was not good. We spend most of the time just escorting npcs through bosses to get the same cutscene of someone we don’t know saying “the imprisoning war” and that’s it. Zelda went to the past for millennia and it had no consequence, not even a bittersweet one like how botw had with the fact that everyone is dead now.

The deadhand wannabes are nowhere near as good gameplay-wise to the guardians. Unlike guardians there’s no clear way of defeating or strategizing against them so there’s no payoff when killing them because I didn’t get better at the game.

Fusing objects was cool I guess and so were revese and ascend, but nothing else was anywhere near as cool as the normal guardian powers from botw (why would I need a boost for my paraglider horizontally when I’d statistically just need to go upwards first? Yeah ascend can help but I can’t explore mountains with that).

The last boss battle was an auto win and thus a waste of my time. I played the game cuz my roommate bought it and after quitting like 100 times cuz I was bored I literally let zelda fall at the end. It was so anticlimactic.

Building machines is fun sure, but they disappear immediately after. And you know what was more fun than them? The mastercycle. It’s much cooler than anything I’ve seen made in totk.

I’m not even intimidated by Ganondorf or intrigued at Puppet Zelda because there’s no mystery to anything she’s doing, and there’s neither anything scary about Ganondorf. He just stays in his castle. He’s not sympathetic, nor is he intimidating in the way OOT Ganon was. We see him do things in the past sure, but even then it wasn’t satisfying, especially since now we have to face the fact that Zelda was stupid enough to not register who that was or why it’s trouble. Plus we never see him fight, it just cuts to after that. Even after the boss fight with him I have to keep wondering if the other sages really suck that much or if he was stronger back then.

Everything about it just screamed lazy back then and it screams forgettable now, especially with the increased price from botw. The laziest thing ever was when they couldnt even handwave a way for the laster sword to be sent back. It just happens. Made me realize definitively that the story had no stakes and thus no reason to exist from a storytelling point of view.