This meshes pretty well with my feelings of thing. On the whole, TotK is more refined more of the same. I’ve enjoyed seeing how the world and characters have moved on, I enjoyed the side quests, and I enjoyed that feeling early on of the depths being new, mysterious, and dangerous.

One of the things I decided early on was that I didn’t like the Lego Technic stuff, and I committed to using it as little as possible. Especially for speeding up travel. I’m an old, and my internal Hyrule is deeply and strictly… medieval? Mythical? Legendary? Electric drones just don’t fit into my schema for Zelda, even though the developers gave been slipping more and more magitech into the setting for going on 20 years now. I feel that this has given me more of a sense of the game as a meal, to use your analogy, but it’s definitely an indulgent one.

I wasn’t looking for more BotW. I was just looking for more Link, Zelda, and Ganon. I got what I wanted, and I genuinely don’t understand the ire the game has drawn, other than, maybe, a lot of people getting what they wanted, discovering they were wrong about what they wanted, and being unwilling to accept that.