>>717139219
I like the game a lot more now than I did for the first 3 years. In 2017 I struggled to keep playing it. I felt like after Divine Beast #1 I had "seen everything in the game" already which is kind of true when you know what that means. And I actually stopped and didn't see the rest of BotW for like 3 years.

First time I finished it I cursed at the final boss and ending because I thought it was so awful after all the time you spend and it just kinda ends "on that".

It's like a lot of other games that have gone open world. They're wide as an ocean but deep as a puddle. The issue I had wasn't that the game is shitty -- it's a really good game. What bothers me is the amount of people saying "it's a masterpiece", because to me a "masterpiece" is a certain kind of experience you get as a whole after a game is done. I don't ever play 50 hours of a game and say "This is a masterpiece because I'm having fun." It's a feeling that emerged from games that, as they go from being "really good", to being "more than the sum of their parts" especially as you reach the finale, I look back and say "everything went to a higher level".

I got the opposite feeling from BotW. When it ends I'm just kinda left with "All I did was zoom around, do 1 shrine and 1 more shrine. Pick up 500 korok seeds, and ride my horse."

it's a game full of activities but as a larger experience it never reaches that "other level" for me. The reason people said that about Ocarina of Time in 1998 wasn't that it was just so huge and epic and "wow 3D!" it was that the game really builds to an "experience" over its full course, and the finale really tops off the game in a fantastic way, after the game is already more and more surprising and consistently solid.

So what Zelda fans are sad is gone isn't that the games are too open-ended or too huge... it's just that they fail to build to a sense of momentum and story-composition through whatever you're able to do in them.