1/5 ★ – SomeLostGamer's review of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.

As a life long Zelda fan, this is the most disappointing game in the entire franchise. I get what they're going for, and even respect the fuse mechanic since I imagine the coding was an absolute nightmare to get right. But none of the additions they added makes up for the fact that you're still exploring the same exact map, and it doesn't feel anything more than just a glorified DLC add-on. The sky islands and depths is a neat addition, but both sections are completely barren with little to no reason to explore them. The sky islands are just a bunch of repeated Shrine content with only a couple of mini-games with no interesting traversal options since you can just use two fans and a steering stick to get to wherever you need to. The depths is just as big as Hyrule, and somehow even emptier with few rewards (whoever thought that to get unrusted higher tier weapons is to break unfused weaponry without letting the player know about it, is an ***hole). The Divine Beasts were disappointing main dungeons in BotW, the dungeons in TotK are even worse (don't even get me started on the "water temple" what a ****ing joke of a dungeon). On top of that, the game is even more repetitive than BotW since there's even more Korok puzzles that no one likes, hundreds of shrines that are either ridiculously easy to solve, or can be absolutely shattered in half with just a rocket and a shield fusion. Even the story is screwy, I appreciate that they're trying to appease the fan's desire for a story like classic Zelda, but it's a half measure as it's still not a proper story since YOU'RE NOT INVOLVED. It's once again relegated to memories, but even worse since there's a clear beginning, middle, and end. Due to the fact that you can watch it in any order, there's no structure to it, and you can go from seeing Zelda travel to the past in the first memory, to then instantly know she's a dragon in the next memory if you're exploring. It's an absolute mess, and it's all the more disappointing hearing Aonuma disregard Early Zelda titles as just "Nostalgic pieces". Playing this game makes me worried about the future of the Zelda franchise and how they'll handle the pure open world design they're gonna go forward. I like this open ended formula, I really do, but if they continue to stick to this BotW formula like they did after A Link to the Past, then they might find themselves in the same situation after Skyward Sword.