I’m not going to deny that they are good games, they definitely are. However, there are some design choices made with BOTW and TOTK that really make me separate them from the rest of the series.
The item degradation, the voice acting, the open worldness, all these things aren’t what I want from a Zelda, and because of that, I doubt I’ll ever replay those games again. Again, not bad games at all, and if anyone said they were their favorite games, I’d totally understand that.
But does anyone else wish that we would get a more traditional Zelda game again?
I don’t think your opinion is as unpopular as you think. In the zelda discussions I frequent, this is a reoccuring opinion, especially from long time fans.
In my opinion, the last 2 Zeldas sacrifice a well designed linearity for freedom at every turn. The games offer so many different approaches to playing, that in their entirety, they feel completely different. However, depending on your playstyle, this freedom can fall flat. Once you figure out how to solve a certain challenge, you can adopt this and keep using the same solution for the next 100 times this challenge is thrown at you, OR you can force yourself to creatively come up with a new solution. Some gamers really like optimizing how they play and “powergame” and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. Once they figure out the optimal strat for anything, the games become boring and monotonous to them, as they are more interested in solving the challenge in front of them, than in messing around with different approaches. This happened to me when I was playing Breath of the Wild.
With Tears of the Kingdom, I thankfully managed to avoid that trap and keep myself entertained for longer, but I can definitely see how one could have the same thing happen again: Find optimal strat -> Use it everywhere -> get bored with how monotonous the game is.
While this freedom approach offers a lot of new things, it fails to statisfy the same itch, that a traditionally designed zelda game would with it’s plentiful dungeons. Yes, the physics puzzles are great and the creative approaches offer a lot of various solutions to the same thing, but they aren’t a SS Ancient Basin or a TP Snowpeak Ruins.
Too much freedom can be a bad thing for games. Think about how many open world games there are, it’s overdone. The older Zelda’s had an openness to them, but with restrictions, and I think that was it’s golden formula.