Tears of the Kingdom is a weird ass game. I put 80 hours into the game and I could have easily put another 40 hours in collecting clothes and the artifact weapons if I didn't stop myself. I really love the traversal mechanics in that game, having the ascend power in the toolkit really had things click for me even more than BOTW did. The combat was fun, the building shit was pretty fun, once I wrapped my head around the fuse system, the monster part based weapons made sense and worked for me the way that weapon durability in BOTW didn't. I had fun. I enjoyed myself and I'm glad I played it.

At the same time, the game sort of proved all the BOTW haters correct?

The best time to play TOTK is several years after you've played BOTW since the map is so similar that the more clearly you remember it, the less fun you have. At the same time, TOTK is definitely a direct sequel and does not stand on its own without the context from the previous game. At the same time yet again, the entire main story and all the struggles and suffering of the previous game are basically nullified and forgotten in the opening cutscene lol??

Tears of the Kingdom is such a polished game that nearly every single menial NPC has a unique version of their dialogue that acknowledges if it's currently raining. Some have dialogue acknowledging if it's overcast.

Tears of the Kingdom is such an unpolished game that three of the main characters have the exact same line of dialogue during their respective MANDATORY STORY CUTSCENES that occur after you complete THE MOST FEATURE RICH GAMEPLAY SEGMENTS IN THE GAME. (Nintendo you are already paying them to stand in the recording booth why the FUCK would you just give them the same line???)

Tears of the Kingdom has a lot to do, and there is just (barely) enough enemy variety that it's not tedious to do a lot of it, but only if you play the intended way and shuffle back and forth between the depths, the overworld and the sky islands. God help you if you have a lot of stuff in the depths you need to get through like I did.

Tears of the Kingdom is like BOTW and is a self reflecting narrative that looks back on and recontextualizes stories and lore of all the previous Zelda games that came before it. It plays with the tropes of the series and the expectations a long time player of the series might have, sometimes to really great effect.

At the same time, this game's Ganondorf is so badly done, he genuinely makes the story worse by being here. A generic evil goo monster with no dialogue would have served the story better than what they did.

Part of the problem is that Matt Mercer sucks fucking ass as Ganondorf. Like he is SO bad. Why the fuck did Nintendo hire this man, he is such a bad fit and the direction they gave him is SO BAD.

But the bigger problem is that this Ganondorf is so boring and buffoonish that he makes the rest of the story less interesting as a result.

Link and Zelda in BOTW were two characters that were suffering from the eternal cycle of destiny that the game series itself and its creators place on them. I thought that was an interesting meta narrative for them to have. These two characters are given their scripts and shoved onto stage but they couldn't fit the larger than life roles and everything went to shit from there. And because of that, I thought the figure of Calamity Ganon was Ganondorf's own version of that fate. He too was forced into this ancient role of eternal villain by destiny, and at the end of it there's nothing left of him. He's not a person, he's not even a character with agency anymore, just a mindless force like a natural disaster. I thought that was kind of tragic in its own right, heartbreaking in the way that Link and Zelda's stories were.

Well TOTK came around to show me that what I had in my head was all bullshit: Ganondorf is just some asshole.

Everything, all the suffering, all the disasters that occurred over thousands of years, all the monsters that harass people, all the toil that the Sheikah and Hyrule did to protect against, it's all because this one fucking guy was just a huge asshole, because he's a nasty evil meanie poopyhead. It's not destiny, it's not Demise, it's just this one guy and some handful of random NPCs that inexplicably follow him.

It'd be one thing if it was just OOT and Twilight Princess again and he just wanted to take over and rule Hyrule. Whatever, generic, but we've done this song and dance before. They could have even done something interesting with it and have him have a grudge against the Zonai and how they've ruled over Hyrule with their technological superiority and thus control of everyone else. But they didn't do that.

Instead Ganondorf is SUCH a meanie that he wants to kill all life in Hyrule with his nasty icky darkness goo because uhhhhhhh because uhhhh he's evil :) (YOU'RE GOING TO RULE OVER WHAT, JACKASS? YOU'RE GOING TO BE KING OF WHAT? EVERYONE'S DEAD IDIOT)

Miyamoto is still so fucking pissed that everyone liked when he accidentally made Ganondorf interesting in Wind Waker the one (1) time that he's never, ever going to let that happen again.

Anyway my main takeaways from Tears of the Kingdom is that Colgera's phase 2 theme fucking slaps and its Ganondorf fucking sucked, that's all folks. Thanks for reading, now I have to decide which of my 500 games I'm going to play next (jk it's Skyrim)