4/5 ★ – Annaki's review of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.

It's Tears of the Kingdom's one year anniversary, so here's a small mini review When this game came out and people were calling it high effort DLC, I kept trying to deny it "no it's not DLC! It's got the depths and the sky islands and cool new temples and... and..." But alas, the more I thought about it, the more I somewhat agreed, to explain why, I'll bring up that when I got Breath of the Wild, I constantly came back to play it for like 2-3 years, seeing the new things I could discover, fun things to do etc, but I didn't do that with TOTK, hell I haven't touched the game in months because I've already seen the world of Hyrule, so the experience just didn't feel Fresh, for example one of my favourite things in BOTW, was discovering those hot springs at the herba mountains, it was so incredible to me, seeing a freezing area with such beautiful hot springs, it was amazing to me, (fun fact, if you go to the same area as the hot springs in the depths in TOTK, you'll find lava pools which explains why the hot pools are there, very good attention to detail) with TOTK, I never really had that "Amazement of discovery" because I had already discovered everything in Hyrule, the depths while nice got pretty boring after seeing the samey looking scenery 100 times and the sky islands... Do I even need to talk about them? We ALL know just how disappointing they were. The temples, while an undeniable improvement from botw's, were still pretty bare bones compared to the incredible ones in games like ocarina of time and wind waker, the less said about the water temple, the better. The story was also... Really bad, or at least the way the story is told and presented to the audience, a lot of Youtubers have already brought this up, but depending on the order of how you discover the memories, things can get completely ruined, like if you discover the memory of Ganondorf killing Sonia before beating the 4 temples, the entire plot twist is spoiled and you're just left wondering "why isn't Link telling anyone that the Zelda going around causing problems, isn't the real Zelda?" Still despise all of this, this game is amazing The refined gameplay of the original, the added boss fights especially with the Frox and Gleeok, the abilities like recall and fuse making the game more fun, being able to create a Bad piggies-ese contraption or maybe a simple hoverbike for quick easy flying, the pure horror of encountering a gloom spawn, journeying through the Thunderhead isle, experiencing the new and improved shrines, the improved sound track (especially the one that plays as you descend towards the stormwind ark, that shit was beautiful) even with its faults, I can't help but love this game, even if I don't see myself returning to it any time soon, I still love it. Happy birthday Tears of the kingdom