I haven't actually beaten the game yet, but I'm right before the final dungeon and I've seen all of the memories and done all of the other major side quests, as well as a ton of the minor ones. 100 shrines. I've got enough experience to critique everything but the game's ending, basically.

The story hardly respects the previous game, and the non-linear structure spoils its own story. I had to tell my friends specifically to watch the dragon tears in the order they appear on the forgotten temple circle room or whatever, the one with the map, and even then they still got confused and one of them watched the Master Sword one first and got the whole thing spoiled. I watched that one third or fourth, pretty lame.

I think they really should have had much more of a focus on Ganondorf doing things in the here and now, not in the past. He seems a lot less like a malevolent force and a lot more like some guy who did bad stuff a long time ago, and you're still feeling the effects of that. Maybe that was the goal, but it just falls a little flat. Calamity Ganon is a present threat who is taking over entire Divine Beasts, but this Ganondorf, even though he's revived, just feels not as powerful, and the game even straight up tells you that he isn't as powerful when you go to fight him with the sages for the first time.

You also have to REALLY suspend disbelief with all of the fake Zelda stuff. Like, Zelda was with Link 24/7 since he is her personal knight. If people have seen Zelda, they have seen Link, and yet they still have delusions that she was by herself when she came to them and told them to do weird stuff that didn't make sense. Not only that, but Link himself could just be like "oh yeah, that wasn't her, she's missing right now" and it would smooth over so much stuff.

Then there are the sage quests, that don't feel like they are part of the same game but rather their own games that don't recognize each other's existence. Every single one plays out the same way story-wise, with the voice of the old sage getting stronger over time and the sage being like "whoa what's this?" and Link, once again, just saying nothing, even if he's seen three of them already. Then, when you get to the end and meet the old sage, it's literally the same copy-pasted dialogue and cutscene every single time. There's no individuality and it makes the moment incredibly flat.

I guess it can be assumed that all of the old tech was repurposed into new tech, but that's something that is just completely vacant from the story as well. There's basically no trace of the guardians, old towers, or divine beasts anywhere, and nobody says anything about them as far as I know. Maybe the sages mention them? I can't remember if that's the case. Yes, they were probably decommissioned, but it's of absolutely zero importance to the story, as is most of the stuff from Breath of the Wild. I would go as far to say that Tears of the Kingdom actually becomes a worse game if you have played BotW already, but if you haven't then you shouldn't play it because it is technically not as good as TotK.

There is a severe lack of anything you do in the main story really connecting with other parts of the main story, which is odd because this isn't the case for a lot of the side quests and the random NPC dialogue. A lot of that changes based on things that have happened in the main story, side quests, whether you have found the Master Sword or not, if you have been to certain areas yet, etcetera. The main story doesn't have any of this at all. Not even something as important as finding the Master Sword. When I got the Master Sword I actually didn't know that Zelda was the Light Dragon yet, so it made more sense to me that it was a simple sequence where I just pulled it out of the thing. It's really sad though that, for people that already knew, the situation plays out exactly the same. It would be so damn cool to see Link show even the slightest bit of emotion during that sequence if it was already known. He's so much more expressive in even Ocarina of Time of all things, let alone something like Wind Waker. Everything in the main story just lacks impact, you feel like you haven't really accomplished anything because nothing is really reactive to what you have done, at least anything that is relevant to the main story. Side characters can mention that they have read the newspaper and heard that the skies around Rito Village and the snow have all cleared out, but Sidon and Riju won't acknowledge it whatsoever and Link doesn't tell them anything, not even stuff that could be relevant to their mission, like the Zelda they're seeing not even being real.

All of these issues I have with the story are issues I think anyone would have, but then you get into the actual lore, the real nitty gritty of the Zelda universe, for the less casual Zelda enjoyer, and things become extremely confusing. I get that the goal is to take Zelda down a completely different path now, so they want to leave the rest of the story behind in a sense, but this is the wrong way to do it. If that's really what their goal was, then they shouldn't be including so much stuff from older entries and pre-established lore and changing it, or using the same name for different things, or rewriting the same plot under different conditions. We're led to believe that this is an entirely different Ganondorf, in an entirely different version of the Kingdom of Hyrule, yet the events still happen in a very similar manner to Ocarina of Time. I view these last two Zelda entries as a completely, entirely separate world that just works on some extremely loose versions of past games, and the Zelda lore enthusiast that I am hates that this is the case.

They had such a good plot and they squandered it by making it feel so disconnected from everything else. Disconnected from Breath of the Wild, from the rest of the Zelda timeline, and even from itself. It is by far the worst story in the series. Not to say that it is necessarily bad, in fact I think it's probably fine if it's the only Zelda game you've played, but it does still have some pretty big glaring issues where nothing really connects to each other, and that affects how well the story lands. It's not very impactful because of that.

I know this probably won't happen now, but I really hope that the next Zelda game we get returns to a more linear structure, if only to solely let the writers focus their attention more into something more cohesive that connects throughout the story out of necessity.

I'll reply to this after I finish the game with a review of the gameplay/music/art/etc and give it a kind of final score. I just wrote this part about the story in response to someone's Reddit post asking about it so I figured I'd chuck it here as well.