Levi Lindsey

Don't play Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Play Zelda: Breath of the Wild instead. BotW was an amazing 5-star game. It had some flaws (boring dungeons, story-line not as deep or compelling), but the exploration was amazing, the collecting was satisfying, and the balance with constantly trying out different gear was good. TotK was a day late and a dollar short. TotK is a minimal copy/paste/edit from BotW. All of the interesting overworld parts are copied from BotW, with the additions of a very minor sky-island layer, and an extremely boring and featureless underworld. Also, each sky island feels the same, so they don't feel worth the effort of exploring (which makes sense, since they all re-use the same geometry with slightly different arrangements). Even the characters--expect a few of the new main-story-line characters--are repeated from BotW. And Nintendo took even longer to make TotK than BotW! The single most compelling aspect of BotW was the amazing sense of discovery as you explored the world. That is lost in TotK, since they copied the overworld from BotW. The main additions that TotK adds from BotW is the ability to fuse items together to make janky vehicles, and the ability to fuse items to your weapons. Both of these abilities make the gameplay less enjoyable and less-well-balanced from BotW. Fusing items to make structures and vehicles is really cool the first time you use it. Maybe even the second time. But it then quickly feels repetitive and tedious. And unfortunately, TotK relies heavily on this mechanic both for traversing the world and for solving shrine puzzles. Fusing items to your weapons similarly feels interesting the first few times you do it. But you quickly discover that it conflicts with the drive to collect things for armor upgrades, and you don't want to use the most important items that would actually make your weapons useful. Also, this mechanic has made the balance worse for cycling through new weapons as your old weapons break. Your weapons break just as quickly as in BotW, but now the loss is twice as great, since you fused something valuable to the valuable base weapon in order to get something that had barely enough attack power. Also, it becomes very tedious to have to constantly go through the motions of fusing something for every single weapon you want to use. Lastly, the guardian robots in BotW were amazing. They were terrifying, compelling, challenging, and rewarding. They led to some of the most immersive and satisfying gameplay. Sadly, TotK removed guardians and replaced them with construct robots. The construct robots feel very dumb, easy to fight, easy to avoid, and not at all rewarding to fight.