I couldn’t dislike Breath of the Wild any more than I do. BotW changed Zelda for no good reason, and IMO, was not an improvement. A 6/10 at best if I ignore “Zelda” in the title. Put simply, BotW is among the worst games in the Zelda franchise, up there with Zelda 2 and the CDi games, as a Zelda game.

While the clip you provided is interesting, it features gameplay that was absolutely not intended by Nintendo, and part of the reason why they removed a lot of the abilities that let you do this from Tears of the Kingdom. Nintendo would patch the game to remove that if they could do it without kneecapping the entire rest of the game.

Combat is tedious. Weapons have less durability than literal glass weapons in the Elder Scrolls games. Why should I get into combat when I know I am going to end up destroying 80% of the weapons in my inventory at minimum? This is completely ignoring Master Mode, which is really just “Enemy Health x10 Mode” or whatever the multiplier is. Youre not going to be able to get into any fight in the game with more than 4 enemies and have enough weapons for that, even with max Weapon Inventory slots.

The Master Sword, legendary blade that rends evil in a fell swish? Yeah… you can only use it for like, 10 minutes. And then its locked away from you for another 10 minutes while it “recharges.” What, do I need to make a reservation with the sword so it can check its schedule before I get into every fight? Make sure its back from its vacation?

The puzzles are easy. Like, mind numbingly easy. No dungeon-wide puzzles that take thought and spatial awareness in this game (or honestly, Tears of the Kingdom either for that matter). Zelda dungeons were the cornerstone of the game design. Each had a unique theme, memorable music, and complex design that essentially turned the entire dungeon into a puzzle itself. BotW “shrines” are cookie-cutter, copy-paste, made-in-3-minutes lookalikes. All of them easily solvable in less time it took you to get the shrine to spawn out of the floor. The “divine beasts” are even worse, but at least they are kinda unique in their textures. Unless you do more than one, because all 4 of them use identical textures.

The story was garbage. Not only because it barely existed, but because all the interesting parts happened off-screen. Same exact problem Halo had with Halo 5 and Infinite. I want to play the story the randomly shuffled cutscenes showed me, not see all the cool stuff happen when I can’t do anything. That cheapens the experience.

Oh yeah. That mountain you want to climb? Rain. Always rain. Go ahead, start climbing. The game will force rain to start.

Literally the best way to play BotW is fully modded with infinite weapon durability and changing Link into Linkle. At least then I can pretend its a spin-off.