there is NOTHING IN THE UNDERGROUND! just bosses that you've already fought a dozen times already, some useless 'schemas', zoanite to enable you to go and see MORE of the empty underground, and thousands of tongue-in-cheek references to the previous BETTER games in the series via the costumes.
This is not entirely true. The Depths has two dungeons, 120 Lightroots, Master Kohga fights, previous boss fights, Frox fights, Hinox/Talus/Gleeok fights, Bargainer Statues, coliseums and armor sets, the Great Plateau Mine quest, schema stones, Zonaite mining, dragons, and the final boss.
i have rarely been so frustrated with a game in my life: some times in my playthrough rivaled elden ring and hollow knight in that regard—AND THAT'S NOT A GOOD THING!!! the way the planes would just crash into a wall because you can't see anything in front of you in the underground and so fall to ground destroyed, OVER AND OVER AGAIN, wasting many many minutes of your time as you try to explore, almost drove me to madness.
There are other strategies for navigating the depths. The entire point of the game is finding the strategy that works best for you. Do not waste your own time and then blame the game.
85% of the time the structures and machines you build just don't work or else collapse pathetically because the system was designed by ****-heads who should be working as basic microsoft representatives and not game-developers. and when they do work the time and tedium it takes to build them is usually not worth whatever they are being built for.
This is ridiculous: game designers, reviewers and fans largely agree that the vehicle system is completely revolutionary in its integration of the physics system. If you are struggling to build, use the schema stones.
many of the shrines in this game BARELY have working solutions to them, and are otherwise some of the most frustrating, boring, tedious and painful things i've ever had to do in a video-game.
This is largely true, at least compared to BotW. I think that the ultrahand/recall/ascend combo is fun, but the fact that that is the solution to practically every puzzle is disappointing
the sky is painfully boring to explore, hours spent slowly gliding across it with the paraglider or a plane that times-out inexplicably after 60 seconds. and then there's nothing at all even to be found up there except repeated bosses, the occasional shrine-puzzle and two light-reflection puzzles.
I agree with this.
there's a star-island in the middle of the map that's too high to even reach! so have fun wasting your resources and time trying to get there!
The journey is the point. That star island is like the top of the guardian pillars in BotW: you go "wow, I made it" and smile
often zonai devices you select to take out don't appear for several seconds so you go to your inventory to take them out again thinking you didn't do it correctly the first time, only to then end up having taken dozens of them out because then the first ones catch up.
Once you learn this is a problem, why would you continue making this mistake?
the way the caves with wet walls or ice-walls cock-block you from climbing is easily as frustrating as anything elden ring spits at the player: the ceilings are too low to use the rockets or springs and so you are forced to painfully, slooooooowly inch your way up with a couple of ****ing hover stones.
Use a hot air balloon
the way zelda-ganon forces you to follow her around the whole castle before the phantom-ganon fight is just inflationary bull****.
This is absolutely true: TotK Hyrule Castle is one of the worst dungeons in the series.
almost every single npc paraphrases the same stuff! either "zelda's vanished, isn't that odd??!?" or "there are mysterious ring ruins in kakariko...". or else they just repeat the same sentiments they had to express in botw with a different spin. they almost never have anything new to say that hasn't already been presented in the official exposition of the story.
This is also true: the story and NPC interactions make Link feel like a total stranger despite us knowing that he would no longer be a stranger. It creates this weird disconnect. The only time I didn't feel this was with Impa and Riju, but with everybody else, I felt a total disconnection. It makes the world feel significantly less cohesive than in BotW, or in many other Zelda games, and the focus on community (which I would largely praise) is squandered by this disconnect.
the way it constantly tried to emulate feelings and moments experienced in oot or botw or ww in cutscenes or otherwise was just painful, like making an enormous fanfare over giving link the sage rings for his figers—trying to emulate the medalion acquisition bits in oot—or zelda's final vapid words in the post-credits scene, vainly trying to recreate the feeling of the final scene in botw; or cece trying in vain to recreate moments from windfall island. giving the gleeok majora's mask musical motifs for literally no reason whatsoever other than to stuff another self-reference in there.
This is ALSO true: there is a reliance on previous Zelda conceptions, but the story is not cathartic nor epic enough to warrant this. I would say that the game has uniquely epic moments (Wind Temple climb and Colgera, Moragia, Gerudo Town defense, Demon Dragon, final fall)
the construct temple boss was one of the most painful things i've ever had to endure in video-games.
I would apply this to the entire Spirit Temple. The Construct Factory has fun but basic Zonai device puzzles (essentially 4 shrines) with little cohesive atmosphere, then there's a walk with Mineru through the depths (I just ran ahead and hoped she followed), and then a great sumo boss fight that has three hits and is not a good culmination, nor epic, nor interesting. I wouldn't be as hyperbolic as you, but I grant your point.
the way the gleeoks for some reason can catch you with their beam attack when you run around them, but not when you run away from them: i guess they have trouble lifting their heads but not turning them??
You want them to have infinite range? What's the criticism? They have an area where the boss fight is active so that players can exit their range and not have to fight the boss.
from the get-go, copy pasting almost everything—map, enemies, npcs, etc.—from the previous game is NOT A RECIPE FOR A GOOD GAME!! and probably cripples the game outright even IF the rest of it is exceptionally good. majora's mask was very VERY VERY different to oot!
I largely agree with this, though I do find novelty and familiarity with the similiarities. I like the idea of "revisiting" the map and the NPCs. The lack of new enemies is a major problem (Horriblins, Boss Bokoblins and Constructs being the only new basic enemy types is a nightmare).
the cutscenes and story are terrible and bland and simple and boring, FULL of plot-holes and inconsistencies. the dreadful nickolodeon voices of all the characters almost made my ears bleed. ganondorf was about as dull a villain as you could ever imagine, riding as far as he possibly could his cult-reputation built by previous games. we see the exact same slow boring cut-scene FIVE TIMES after every temple! yes botw's story was simple, but it embraced that simplicity and delivered the story in a clever and engaging way, and though the voice-acting in that game could be a little grating at times, on the whole it was good, unlike this cartoon network cookie-cutter rubbish.
This is very true. The inconsistencies I can ignore, I genuienly like the voice acting, but this Ganondorf just does not do it for me at all. After Wind Waker, and the menacing throne scene in Twilight Princess, you can't revert to "Mummy Ganondorf sits on a tree stump in the Depths." The same cutscene problem is genuienly unforgivable: I get cutscenes take forever, but then just do dialogue boxes! Why are we having different voice actors record the same goddamn lines.
i've rarely felt more apathy for a main character in a piece of entertainment as i did for sonia and rauru—they did NOTHING to make me care about them!! you have cute floppy goat ears, I DON'T GIVE A ****!
I think Sonia is a great character that we get to learn not nearly enough about: I agree that Rauru is boring and not even close to as intriguing as Rhoam.
the gerudo boss is bugged in that direct hits to the face sometimes will and sometimes won't make him collapse when he's in his sand state, so just chuck lynel bombs at him and hope for the best. also it's very unclear when the gibdo hives are actually vulnerable to burst and the game never even mentions this about them. you very much have to go out of your way to find the sand boots, and if you haven't found them then the gerudo boss is even more painful.
idk wtf ur talking about, the face hitbox is consistent, at least in my playthrough. Attacking the sand state
before elemental weapon-ing it off is an interesting strategy.
you're really going to force me to COLLECT AGAIN EVERYTHING I ALREADY COLLECTED IN THE PREVIOUS GAME!!! without even so much as a feeble attempt to explain why link somehow lost everything he owned when ganondorf cooked his arm?
the game seems to think we never played botw and so basically needs us to pretend link has again lost his memory so it can tell us all over again what everything and everyone in the world is, just so it can inflate itself even more.
The lack of explanation for these inconsistencies is a major problem. The verisimilitude that is destroyed by recollecting armor, interacting with friends that are now strangers, etc. really screws up the game. There are some characters where this isn't a problem: (the sages, the Great Deku Tree, Hateno Village, Lookout Landing), but other Link interactions are super odd.
the final phase of the king gleeok is purely down to chance whether you die or not, unless you want to spend hours grinding it to speed-runner level of perfection, so it's either hope you have a shield-rocket in order to shoot it down before it gets too high, or you die.
I think the final phase of the King Gleeok fight is super fun once you learn the pattern.
the akkala thunder gleeok was designed by someone with **** for brains.
What? Why this one specifically? I found it to be the same as the others: challenging and fun.
the rain in general is almost insufferable in this game due to how rockets and springs are not the most common things to come by in the game, and besides it's good to save them for gleeoks, and revali's gale is gone. also swimming is horribly painful because cryonis is gone and trying to build a raft that works well is like having a stroke.
Ok it sounds like you only used rockets and springs and never used schema stones or autobuild. This is a you problem. I agree that swimming without cryonis is very annoying, I don't understand why they couldn't have given us our Sheikah Slate powers after we complete the game.
have fun with some of those froxes whose arenas are covered with gloom unless you want to cheese them with bullet time and arrows to eyes.
Cook a meal with Sundelions and the gloom doesn't effect you. Or wear the gloom armor set. Lots of solutions to this puzzle.
you're always fighting mobs of enemies on assist mode because tulin's always there at the ready because i'm not going to open the menu every single time to put him away, and then get him out again when it's over.
The design of the game incentivizes the theme of COMMUNITY, and so yes your sage partners can attack enemies for you. That's a thematic part of the game and removing it would be an issue.
using the avatars is often annoying because they won't spawn if the terrain isn't perfect for them and then you have to run over to them to grab them blah blah blah.
I found the Avatars to be enjoyable, but I understand this criticism.
good god having to cycle through my whole inventory every time i want to use a fie or ice arrow, or even just an arrow that's going to do more than 1% of damage, is horribly painful and absurd game-design.
The Fuse mechanic is awful for precisely this reason. Echoes of Wisdom repeats this problem. I know it doesn't bother some people, and the different sorting systems can be helpful, but "put everything in a menu and hope the player can deal with it" is not a good solution
the gloom hands are just another unfun, annoying, unsatisfying thing to deal with that drag the game down even further.
The gloom hands are perhaps my favorite part of the game: use bombs.
NO i'm not going to collect a single korok more than necessary having already spend dozens if not hundreds of hours collecting them in the previous game, so there goes another crutch the game was probably leaning on for the player's interest.
I found korok hunting much more fun in this game because of vehicle building and the new tools. But I get not wanting to do that: Koroks were and have always been padding.
just getting around the map is a pain now because there are less warp-points because half of them are now in the sky.
What? There are 120 shrine points and 15 towers in each game.
And I don't understand your other three points.
Overall, I do not see how this rivals the worst games of all time for you. You seem to have a number of nitpicks with individual mechanics, but I don't understand your broader criticism of the game as a whole? Is it that there's too much to do? Not enough to do? It feels too familiar? The puzzles and story aren't captivating? Or is it all of them combined?
It seems like you have a larger hatred of the entire state of the Zelda series and Nintendo. ALBW, BotW, TotK, EoW are all enjoyable for me; I get maybe you disagree, but I don't think it's fair to call the current state parasitic. The same people are working on the games (except Miyamoto in EoW), and the future of Zelda is looking brighter than ever tbh.
