Okay let me start with two heavy hitters right from the get go and don’t forget these are only personal oppinions and I absolute understand if you like those games. Good for you!
Zelda: Breath of the Wild - Not a bad game per se, but I don’t get the hype behind it. Sure the dungeons are fun but the world is so lifeless, the story non existent, the combat pretty shallow, the tower climbing is very much like FarCry but for some reasons it’s okay here while Ubisoft gets the blame…like I said I dont get why the game is so beloved. Never finished it after the 20 hour mark and probably never will.
Red Dead Redemption 2 - Just like Zelda not a bad game, but imho highly overrated. Graphics and and atmosphere are amazing but the controls are clunky and overloaded, nearly everybody is an unlikable douchebag who I would love to shoot myself at the first opportunity (maybe except Jack and Abigail) but I have to root and care for them. The game is just so long and feels very stretched, you already know that you won’t get Dutch because it’s a prequel and for an open world game you often get handholded in your weapon selection or things you can do because you have to wait for them to be unlocked by the game. I’m now nearly done with the game, playing the epilogue at the moment and I would say the last chapters are more entertaining than the rest of the game, but I still can’t understand why this game was on so many game of the year lists and I really wanted to put the controller down a dozen times.
So there they are, two highly controversial oppinions by me and now I’m really curios what your takes are and how highly I get downvoted into oblivion 😂
Breathe of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom are at the top of that list for me. The “old” style Zelda games are objectively better in terms of pacing and exploration. And I absolutely hate the weapon durability system in the better ones. I’ve read their reasoning behind it, but they’re wrong. It sucks and makes the game more about hoarding the good weapons and avoiding combat whenever possible, which is boring as shit.
BOTW was fun for like 15 minutes and then I’m like “Wait, the whole game is like this? I’ll never see new dungeons or items that change the gameplay?”
Zelda can give me a call when the “OpEn WoRlD” fad dies down and they have something to offer that isn’t “Size of an ocean, depth of a pond.”
Ocarina of Time was the peak Zelda game. 👍 Not played any others since.
I hate that I cannot follow the quests and progress in the story without looking up how to. If your world wasn’t built for a player to figure out by talking to NPCs, you built a crappy world.
I really think the weapon durbility system is a mindset problem. It’s the same problem with any rpg where at the end of the game you have hundreds of unused potions “just in case”. Don’t get me wrong, it is still on the designers to change a players mindset about items.
But I found myself enjoying BotW and TotK waaaay more when I switched to: “I don’t care about my weapons, everything is expendable”
I never really got into 3D Zelda (but had some fun with most of them) and Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom are a absolute low for me mostly because of the ugly as hell art. Both games have the worst cell shader look I have seen in a very long time and it makes both games unplayable for me. I get kind of sea sick playing them (I tried at a friend’s place who loves both games).