[TotK] just isn’t hitting right

I loved the first 30 or so hours of this game, and then I took a break. I put a bunch of time into Xenoblade Chronicles 3 to finally get close to the end, I played a bunch of Horizon: Forbidden West, hell…I read half of 11/23/63 by Stephen King. All of that was in the last 7 days and I finally went back to Zelda and it felt so same-y.

I want to love this game like I loved Breath of the Wild…I spent 100 hours in that game in like 3 weeks…I played it nonstop and I hold that gaming experience in a special place in my heart because I bought my first video game console to play that game…6 years later, Tears of the Kingdom just isn’t doing it for me. It feels like it was a quick asset flip of Breath of the Wild…but it wasn’t. If it had released less than 5 years after, it might have an excuse for not feeling like a new experience…but I played this game like 2 weeks after I binged Jedi: Survivor…and I liked the Star Wars game more. I can’t believe I live in a world where a Star Wars game is beating Zelda for my personal game of the year…

The first 30 hours were really fun, but they felt the same as the game that came out 6 years ago…I know the core abilities are different, but today I found myself running to buy heat resistant armor before I burnt to death and then running and climbing to get a shrine, then I climbed the wall of a maze to get a vantage point to scope out the path to the shrine and it struck me that I had done all of this before…I got struck by the feeling that I wanted to play Skyward Sword instead…Skyward Sword!

I guess I’m just sad. We’ll have to wait another 6-7 years to get a new Zelda that doesn’t just reuse the same land mass, mechanics, and art style…I don’t even know if Metroid Prime 4 is coming out anymore, so it just feels like my love of Nintendo has finally been snuffed out…at least Xenoblade 3 is good, but Jesus Christ, they better have something better to show for the next 7 years of work