Very much agree. BoTW is a good game and definitely worth playing but it isn’t a great game. My biggest gripe with it is that there is clearly a RPG leveling/XP system that they desperately try to hide. They don’t want to be an RPG but it is difficult for an open world game to not use those mechanics.

So once you realize this you ask yourself why am I breaking all of these weapons just to get more weapons when the only outcome is that the enemies get harder. Blood moons are probably just world resets when you go up a level, which also makes higher level enemies appear.

They also very apparently apply this to the rain patterns as well. Right away I went all in on exploring and getting shrines to increase stamina because it sure is handy to be able to climb large cliffs to explore the map. But I didn’t actually do much fighting during that time. Once I had stamina maxed and started just playing and clearly as I leveled up the chances of rain as soon as you approached a cliff side went up considerably making all of that work feel worthless.

The end result was that playing more just meant things got worse, instead of a normal RPG where leveling up meant you gained abilities/stats instead the world just got harder. Sure the weapons got better but once you have the master sword you are always using that first and the harder the enemies get the less effective it is since its stats don’t change.

The game also has some serious balancing issues with those levels. Until you get protective clothing it see a like nearly every enemy does exactly your health minus one heart in damage. Have 8 hearts? Ehh 7 of those don’t matter if you weren’t at 100% health you are dead anyways. Go through shrines to increase those hearts? Doesn’t matter enemies still nearly one shot you every time. Easily rectified if you buy/upgrade armor but if you are a cheap bastard like me and don’t want to spend money on items that might not be useful you end up playing quite a while before you understand that the deck is stacked against you.

Also in general the map is very lifeless, and there is so little variation in enemies. They certainly are limited by the WiiU/Switch so can’t fault them too much on that front.

ToTK fixes a lot of problems compared to BoTW but using the same map feels like it should have been DLC. Everything above/below the map feels like they just told an intern here is your spot go make a change in this area without having to make a change to the old map. And the story line feels very copy+paste from BoTW (go fight the four things in the four corners then go kill the big bad).

Obviously the devices you can make and the increased variation in enemies fixes a lot of the complaints with BoTW, and helps keep you engaged with the game.

ZD has a top tier storyline, but you need to be the type that cares about that to get the most out of it. I suspect most of the folks that don’t like Horizon are the type that don’t bother to listen to the audio files/read the text messages which really fills out the story. Gameplay is good but gets a little repetitive towards the end (once you are grinding thunderjaws for fun on very hard everything else is just too easy). Some enemies are just variations but the variations change how you approach fighting them.

HFW the story isn’t nearly as good (still good but HZ is a high bar), but the variations in enemies and how you have to fight them is much better. If you are trying to get end game weapons the grind is a bit too much. Do yourself a favor and just change to story mode difficulty so you don’t have to waste hours of your time fighting the same enemies. If you just want to explore/fight across a huge beautiful map HFW is great for that.