Ok, I guess I'll bite. To me, BotW feels more like a game engine and less like a game. My biggest issues:
> Content sparsity. Like many open world games, most of Hyrule just feels dead to me. Towns aren't as populated and lively as OoT / WW / MM, the main reason being that there aren't as many overlapping storylines that have you return to the same location as you progress through the game. The game basically encourages you to clear a region and never return. The random encounters are repetitive.
> The shrines, what the heck were they thinking?! It feels like Nintendo hired a bunch of interns that year and needed to give them something to do. All the shrines were clearly made in a generic level editor. Felt really out of place to me.
> Most of the music in BoTW is quiet and subdued, unlike previous entries in the series. This is good for setting a certain tone, but it's less effective unless there's some flashier music to contrast with. To me, the lack of music made the game feel even emptier.
> Shallow combat mechanics, even compared to other entries in the series like OoT. Just mash buttons until enemy dead. Armor / weapons don't really matter beyond the stat boosts and occasionally some elemental matching. Guardians / Lynels require some strategy, but once you figure out the tricks it's not hard to brute force those too.
I had fun playing, for sure. It just doesn't rank very highly on my list.
I'm looking forward to BotW 2, where hopefully they'll use their game engine to make a great game!
I had the opposite experience running around though, it felt very satisfying to just go "what's that over there" and run into totally skippable content like dragons, simple korok seed puzles, tracking down shooting stars landing in enemy territory, finding and riding the lord of the mountain, watching enemy bokoblins try to hunt a wild boar, solving the puzzle of how to get a shrine to appear, snowboarding, landing on a far away island and taking down the slumbering cyclops that rules it, goron golfing with giant rocks, etc etc. It's like a big yard where you can go anywhere and there is something delightful tucked in everywhere.
I think the sparsity of people is deliberate, it's post apocalyptic where most travelers you encounter are probably assassins from an enemy cult.
In general I felt like it was the result of a very different game approach than something like cyberpunk, where they added small things to the game one by one while making sure they meshed and were polished to a mirror finish.
The shrine decorations are monotonous but some of the puzzles are absolutely fantastic.
The one in the Korok forest where you have to figure out the relationship between the star map and the stones took me a long time and felt so satisfying to complete.
The game is polarising because it works only for a certain kind of player. I love just jumping in a random point of the map to chill and explore and suddenly find some surprise in the middle of nowhere, but if you prefer some linear and story-driven game I don't think BOTW is for you.
I enjoyed the shrines, but not many of them were hard once you realized that they all follow a Chekhov's gun pattern. Anything given must be used in the solution, anything that reacts to one of your skills (magnet, etc) must be important.
The main problem I had with BotW is that it doesn't have proper dungeons, it just isn't a Legend of Zelda game to me if it doesn't have dungeons. The divine beasts are the closest thing to it, but having them as optional and not driving the story forward just doesn't scratch the itch.
> Most of the music in BoTW is quiet and subdued, unlike previous entries in the series. This is good for setting a certain tone, but it's less effective unless there's some flashier music to contrast with. To me, the lack of music made the game feel even emptier.
Hilariously, I had the opposite experience. BotW was the first Zelda game I played extensively (I have some memories from OoT and MM because a friend had an N64 back in the day, but never played it myself for anything more than 10 minutes).
After finishing BotW, I wanted to play the Link's Awakening remake. But I had to walk away from it after about an hour because the endless barrage of music was annoying me to no end. (I have since adjusted to it.) I'm currently playing Age of Calamity, where the soundtrack does not feel as obnoxious because there's actual action going on all the time. After that, I might be able to go back to Link's Awakening.
Also:
> it's less effective unless there's some flashier music to contrast with
IMO there is tons of flashy music in this game. The cities' motifs, the champion's motifs, the castle music, the Divine Beast tracks, the fight tracks in general. I have hours-long playlists of all of that as my go-to background music for work.
> Content sparsity. Like many open world games, most of Hyrule just feels dead to me. Towns aren't as populated and lively as OoT / WW / MM, the main reason being that there aren't as many overlapping storylines that have you return to the same location as you progress through the game. The game basically encourages you to clear a region and never return. The random encounters are repetitive.
> The shrines, what the heck were they thinking?! It feels like Nintendo hired a bunch of interns that year and needed to give them something to do. All the shrines were clearly made in a generic level editor. Felt really out of place to me.
> Most of the music in BoTW is quiet and subdued, unlike previous entries in the series. This is good for setting a certain tone, but it's less effective unless there's some flashier music to contrast with. To me, the lack of music made the game feel even emptier.
> Shallow combat mechanics, even compared to other entries in the series like OoT. Just mash buttons until enemy dead. Armor / weapons don't really matter beyond the stat boosts and occasionally some elemental matching. Guardians / Lynels require some strategy, but once you figure out the tricks it's not hard to brute force those too.
I had fun playing, for sure. It just doesn't rank very highly on my list. I'm looking forward to BotW 2, where hopefully they'll use their game engine to make a great game!