The game is sooooo boring as a casual that’s only playing on commute. It feels like no progress and only grinding. I really wished there was an option to disable grinding/breaking of stuff.

The isometric Zeldas on 2DS/GBA are all much superior experiences, especially for a commute imo. Link Between Worlds is one of my favourite games of all time.

The 3D Zeldas have always been kind of meh in my experience. Although I did love BotW for the first 20 hours or so.

That’s been my problem with Zelda games since maybe OoT… well, maybe not exactly my problem.

My problem is mostly that if I don’t play it for a week or two, and come back to it, I can’t remember what’s going on at all and it seems like too much of a chore to re-build my context.

They do such a good job with Mario odyssey on showing you what to do and letting you teleport between worlds… there is no grinding at all I feel like. I wish they’d adopt that paradigm for Zelda too.

Yeah this is why I never picked BOTW back up, I'd no longer remember anything. I keep meaning to, I just haven't done so, and each time I consider it, it seems like too much to take on that weekend. I did beat 3 of the 4 Divine Beasts before that. I know I never tackled the Castle or the DLC.

At least with the sequel it's kind of expected I start fresh.

I have been stuck on the Lynel in the castle since last year.

I am afraid of picking it up again because I absolutely cannot remember where I was and what I was doing.

I do agree that progression is slow, but I never felt it was grindy. Stuff broke, but my inventory was always full of other stuff so it hardly mattered. I guess if you felt like you needed to complete all the shrines it could feel grindy? They’re all different at least.

Inventory was always full with sh*t. Nothing really helpful. Sure you had to collect some stuff in OoT too, but at least the sword was always available and mostly enough to get around. The shrines are fine for me, it's just annoying to spend time to have meaningful weapons, not just sticks. I stoped playing it and wouldn't recommend it to anyone. Would rather tell them to play TP or OoT.

Did you just play the tutorial and stop when you didn't have a master sword half an hour into the game?

Weapons are literally everywhere. You kill a monster, it will generally drop it's weapon. They're scattered all over the ground. They're in chests. There is never a lack of weapons, and that is one of the core points of the game.

Literally the only way you could be stuck with tree branches is if you stuck to the opening part of the Great Plateau or intentionally pretended all the weapons didn't exist.

I’ve been playing since it came out here and there, probably at least 100-200 hours by now, and haven’t even defeated a single main boss. It probably tells you something positive about the game that one can get so much enjoyment just from running around and exploring! But I do sometimes wish the world felt a bit less empty of characters… and it doesn't sound like the new one improves much in this regard.

There are loads of characters...they're all in the villages near the divine beasts

Same, I've been putting in baby steps of progress in the game over several years. The story is quite boring and once you've been introduced to the main gameplay mechanics they get old fairly quickly. Feels like a chore more than anything. I used to love Zelda games like OoT and Majora's Mask. Maybe I've just gotten older and my tastes have changed.

No, BotW is more like a theme park than a game, and I don't understand the love for it.

The game is sparse and sterile, the characters are boring and generic, the story/dialogue is cringe inducing, the world is empty and plain, and there's nothing to do.

It borrows heavily from open world game tropes, and it doesn't add anything. Once you've played about 5-6 hours you've seen the entire game, just not all of its permutations.

This is the first game where I've had a real disagreement with everyone else about its fun factor. Previously I was extremely disappointed in Diablo 3, but there were plenty of people who understood and agreed with my sentiments quite vocally.

With BotW it's like people are playing a different game, or they're somehow mentally wired differently. I sincerely don't understand what happened there. I'm usually very good at acknowledging high quality games, even if I don't personally like them... BotW is not a great game, it's mediocre at best.

The people who liked BotW the most are likely people who never really played many open world games, or none. To long time PC gamers it's nothing new of course.

I liked the style, I generally enjoy world exploration and that was fun in BotW, and there were many cool experiences scattered around, but it does end up feeling a little empty.

I still played it a ton mind you, but I don't consider it an important or ground breaking game the way many seem to.

I have played plenty of PC open world games and I think BOTW is better than any of them.

I think it's done fairly well, but the novelty isn't there for an older PC gamer.

I have heard plenty of people talk about how new the open world is to them in BotW (in a way that clearly suggests they've never tried it before). The novelty factor of any (to the user) new game genre amplifies the positive reaction.

I don't know any prior open-world game that makes the physical exploration of the landscape feel as natural and enjoyable as BOTW. That felt like a new experience to me. The closest I could identify would be Just Cause 2, but movement on the ground in that game feels much more clunky. There's certainly an aesthetic aspect to it as well.

I was SHOCKED reading BOTW reviews. So, so, sooooo many of it's supposed "strengths" had been touted as failings of other open world games. Like the big but empty world, or the grindiness, or the "sameness" of the different things on the maps (like shrines, towers).

Very well and consicely put.

Zelda and MegaMan were always two franchises where I always thought the characters were interesting but just never could get into the majority of the games.

With a Zelda I've only ever played the original NES one and liked the time I spent. With MegaMan it's always been the off shoots. MegaMan Soccer was constantly rented growing up and Battle Network was great.

But what's weird to me is that I've never enjoyed any of the 3d Zelda games, but still consider the MegaMan Legends series among the best games I've ever played. I'm still bitter I bought a 3ds specifically in anticipation of the third game and it was then cancelled.

Try Links Awakening

Same, I've been playing it for about 4 years. I had a tonne of enjoyment just creeping around the map and figuring out how to get onto each tower to unlock that area of the map, finding the portals and doing those challenges. Story wise I'm way behind though!

Try riding a bear or a stag instead of a horse to mix it up a little.