One year after its release, I understand my feelings surrounding The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom much better.
Nintendo's primary design goal with Tears of the Kingdom was to expand the multiplicative gameplay from Breath of the Wild. That meant reusing the same engine and art style.
By extension, it also meant reusing the same world map. The design of BOTW's Hyrule emerged from its systems. There's a snowy area that makes you cold, a volcano area that sets you on fire, a lightning area, a big wide open area, areas with more cliffs, areas with more water. You could rearrange these biomes and call it a new world, but even setting aside production costs, that doesn't buy you anything gameplay-wise. An expansion of BOTW's existing mechanics implies an expansion of its existing map. The question then becomes: how do you make map reuse interesting?
There was an opportunity here in that some people weren't motivated to play BOTW due to its lack of narrative structure. Nintendo's solution to their map reuse problem was to appeal to these critics by overlaying a ton of side quests and character dialogue on top of BOTW's world. This is thematically consistent with the setting too, since TOTK takes place in a recovering Hyrule where people are forging connections and building communities. The downside is that this explicit narrative structure can feel heavyhanded to those of us who fell in love with BOTW's quiet loneliness.
Where the increased focus on characters stops being a matter of personal taste is in its jarring implementation. The scripted sequences in TOTK feel like playing a different game that exists outside of the core loop, often even putting you into a unique minigame state. Context-switching is both BOTW's and TOTK's biggest shortcoming; these are games about emergent systems whose stories are told through scripted sequences. You have to imagine that the original idea behind the divine beasts was for the player to be able to board and conquer them without breaking out into a special setpiece for it. There are a few moments like this (the Naydra battle and the approach to the Wind Temple come to mind), but not enough.
A friend of mine once said:
”In Metroid, I want to explore organically, in true Metroid style. You know, by leaping around and shooting and bombing the living sh*t out of everything. I don't want to have to enter a new room, scan everything to make sure I don't miss any interesting bits or unlockable-related stuff (watch out for those one-time occurrences!), read the new items, and then explore and eliminate enemies. It's super-discontinuous, in a way that the 2D games never were (except, unironically, with the use of the X-Ray Scope). It seems crazy to jump around while scanning different parts and forms of a boss, just so I can add them to my logbook. That does not seem to me like something Samus would do. That does not seem to me like Metroid.”
In Zelda, I don't want to have a long conversation with an NPC (especially one written for a fifth-grade reading level) and then get loaded into a Sony-style linear sequence where I need to act out the exact steps the game wants from me. That does not seem to me like something Link would do.
A lot of players, myself included, complained about having the uncanny feeling throughout TOTK that we were playing the game incorrectly. I think that, rather than being a symptom of map reuse, this is actually a symptom of how often you context-switch away from the core gameplay loop. BOTW, outside of its own offenses, is a masterclass in inducing a flow state where you never want to stop exploring; TOTK rips you out of this state constantly. Revisiting the game after having completed all of its side quests shows that, in the absence of these interruptions, it really feels like an enhanced BOTW where you can just explore.
If Nintendo isn't willing to do away with NPCs in Zelda entirely, then they need to make them continuous with the rest of the game. Study Animal Well! Let characters express their personalities without breaking you out into a dialogue menu, God forbid a mini-game. While you're at it, let the player spend less time in the inventory menu too.
