2.5/5 ★ – JayTheCh1cken's review of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.

It's Breath of the Wild again, and it's pretty much the same as it was 6 years ago. Okay, the changes they did put in were pretty good, but again, after 6 years and with this game being even longer than Botw ever was its hard to not groan after you see the same shrines dotting the landscape. Of course it's the same regions having the problems and hiding the temples, the final boss is at Hyrule Castle again (now this time he's in a cave under it!) and the story is once again chopped up into pieces for you to find in whatever random order you find them in. The only thing majorly different is now there's the depths which is the biggest chore to do, there's islands in the sky which is kinda cool but definitely too little and copy and pasted many times, and there's caves which are just boring. Oh, and I guess you can build cars and stuff like it's Gmod, which again is cool but wears out it's luster by the end of the game. The characters are also much worse than in Botw, which is surprising because most of the cast there was dead. About the only character who is an improvement over their Botw self is Ganondorf compared to the generic monster Calamity Ganon, but this is still the worst Dorf in there series and its not even close. The new characters are kind of interesting at first, but wow are they just embarrassingly bad. Rauru's entire purpose is to be a walking Oot callback what with his name and getting betrayed by Ganondorf, and that's all well and good but it just makes him look like the biggest idiot while multiple characters repeat in game about how cool he is or something. Sonia is a plank of wood and her only purpose is to die, so who cares. Mineru is probably the most interesting out of all the new characters, but her main purpose is just to exposition dump on the player and to also be a surprisingly weak mech. As much as I want the next Zelda game to throw all this open world stuff out the window, I know it'll never happen so I guess I'll just need to live with the new way they're making these games. Hopefully we'll at least have a new map next game, but at this point I won't be surprised if I see this Hyrule for a third time.