As someone who hates both Zelda BotW AND TotK it's hard finding likeminded people. Most people just hate TotK because it's BotW DLC but still love BotW. And I'm here like "no they're BOTH GARBAGE".

To give an analogy that everyone here will understand, it's like being a Nazi during the BLM riots. Conservatives are all like "we need to learn from MLK and be colorblind again!" NO NIGGA FUCK MLK WE NEED SEGREGATION AGAIN

@suquili TotK kind of sucks but i still had a fun time playing it. I really liked botw for its vibes and lore and world building but the gameplay and dungeons definitely left lots to be desired. Ocarina of Time and Wind Waker are still my favorites for sure.

Basically same feelings. Enjoyed TotK more than BotW though. Didn't see much of a quality difference in story aside from the more overt problems like time travel paradoxes and things from the previous game being completely missing/forgotten. Fundamentally I think the writing is lackluster in both.

@suquili I think the writing being "distant" worked really well for botw. They come right out and tell you what happened almost immediately. There aren't really any twists. A lot of it is just picking up pieces to learn more and a lot of it feels like ancient stuff people don't really have any answers for. It gives a certain mysterious mood to the game that I liked a lot. Like a total dismantling of Hyrule as we knew it but there are still little remnants here and there, as well as hints towards other things and some more lore building for other races, it was really cool.

TotK on the other hand was written like a linear story that was better on paper, but since they kept the same open world structure it really fell flat for me. I spoiled the Zelda twist almost immediately and so the rest of the story wasn't that impactful. The story in the past was kind of cool but it was mostly a rehash of ocarina... The story in the present was really bad and every sage's sequence felt like a copy paste. It was so detached from botw that I just couldn't get into it at all. It sucked that they delivered on basically nothing that botw set up, even opting to make it take place in a completely different iteration of Hyrule that is like an alternate universe one that still uses the same names for stuff but has completely different histories behind them. Felt like surface-level fan service.

Either way, I really hope the next game is more like a classic Zelda. I would honestly take a smaller open world with bigger dungeons that actually have dungeon items too. That's REALLY missing in the last two entries. It almost feels like Zelda got a little bit commodified again.

What do you think about the movie coming up soon? Next year, I think?

I don't think the movie will be bad, but whether it's GOOD is unknown. Will have to see a trailer first. Seeing as tranny Zelda is deconfirmed, it's got potential. Seeing as I enjoyed the Sonic movies (and those are hardly great movies) I'll definitely enjoy the Zelda movie. My biggest question is how much, if at all, Link will speak lol.

I say it constantly but my hope for the movie is that it inspires the Zelda team to go for a more cinematic game and to that end they'll have to reintroduce linearity. I can see Aonuma saying something like that in an interview in 2029 or whatever lol.

@suquili linear story with awesome side quests. That is the way.