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

Well, after playing for 245 hours, finding all the caves, finishing all the shrines, roots and MOST the quests (f**k the wells, who cares lol), filling out the compendium, and finding around 600 koroks, I decided to wrap up my time with TotK. It's basically been the only game I've played since it's come out back in May, so it's been quite the journey filled with ups and downs, frustration and elation. I absolutely LOVED it for about the first 40% of the journey. I was completely obsessed and couldn't wait to see what was gonna happen next! It was so fun to come back to the BotW Hyrule and see what's changed! Couldn't get enough of the new verbs (ways of interacting with the world), especially Ultrahand! The weapon and arrow fusing was also incredible and singlehandedly addressed a ton of gameplay loops and player complaints from BotW. While overall I was obsessed, some cracks were already showing even during these first 40% of my playthrough. Things like the Shiekah tech vanishing without a trace and NOBODY mentioning it a single time, and many of the characters whom Link has spent considerable time with in BotW not knowing who you are, which killed a lot of the fun when it came to revisiting a familiar old world, as well as the memories being VERY spoilery and killing the narrative impact when viewed out of order (the only natural way to view them, cause who knows what the order is). Even with all those, I still couldn't get enough! The honeymoon phase was strong, Nintendo knows how to craft an immaculate sandbox. Now, the gameplay from the 40% mark to around 70% of my overall progress is what got me feeling like I got stuck in mud. Namely all the collectibles and the billion insignificant unimportant busy work completionist things to do off the golden path all around the open world. I understand that I technically don't have to get em all and see all the things, but what if I miss out on something charming and incredible that way? That's just how my obsessive completionist personality works, it can't be helped. I had to see the entire land of Hyrule and do everything it had to offer. This gameplay loop ground my story progress to a halt, since there are a ton of regions where nothing really happens, and it burned me out on the game, which made me quit gaming altogether for about a month, as I recovered from severe burnout. I came back and through sheer willpower pushed through the remaining mind numbing collectables in the regions where nothing happens (70-80%), so I could finally get back to the golden path! The final 20% of the game were pretty great! Maybe not quite as mind blowing as the initial 20, but it still felt incredible to finally wrap the story up, finish off the final boss and be able to put the game away. While the creativity of the puzzle and world design, as well as the insane stability of the game's mechanics nets the gameplay design an easy 5/5, overall I can't rate the experience at a 5. Unfortunately the gameplay loop got very old very quickly, overstaying it's welcome. The memory storytelling device was not a smashing success the first time around, and it was even less successful this time around. The Towers and Shrines structure of the world felt lazy and old, as it was a re-use from BotW. The game's cast, even the returning characters, somehow, felt a lot less vibrant, less real and less alive. Their motivations and needs and wants weren't as clear, they weren't as endearing, I didn't care about rooting for them, they seemed hollow and worst of all - incredibly stupid, only there to either serve the plot or serve as mechanics. DEMON KING?????? SACRED STONE?????? Bro plz stop. Zelda felt alive and curious and motivated and HUMAN in BotW. She failed, she felt things, she persevered, she went on a journey and we all rooted for her! In TotK, the game where the marketing material hyped people up, with the expectations of her role in the game through the roof... she ended up being a hollow plot driven nothing-burger husk of a "character" and it made me so sad. The dungeons were still not what people meant when they wished for old school Zelda dungeons. The game world's lore was a mess, which neither fed into any of the previous games, nor expanded on them, and even more tragically it didn't answer any of the open questions from BotW, instead stomping on a lot of the previously established lore in that game and disregarding it in various ways. The game gets a 4 through the sheer genius of the gameplay, GG TotK! Hoping they step the characters and the narrative up next time around, and do something about the boring repetitive open world. Of course I'll be there day one, as always :)