It’s not even a bad game as such, but fuck Nintendo and fuck whoever produced and directed it. It’s not just lazy, it literally pushes back games as an art form.

Yeah, some parts of it are cool and/or innovative (the dungeons are great), but the main questline overall and especially at the end is pathetic in the way that it leans on set pieces and cinematography as a crutch in a game that is supposedly centered on freedom.

Remember like a decade ago when every single fucking game that was “good” was one that just pretended to be a movie that you push buttons to advance, and that produced a swamp of QTE bullshit and games that only exist for the cutscenes? That trend had clearly been receding in recent years even though Last of Us (the main example of that trend) is still quite popular.

But Nintendo found just the way to revive it! “Hmm, games that pretend to be kino are old-hat, so what do we do to market to masses that we treat like slack-jawed yokels to impress as many of them as possible? I know! Instead of pretending to be kino, let’s pretend to be Infinity War!”

It’s the same shit! It’s just a fucking Marvel formula transplanted to Breath of the Wild’s setting, with vapid not-even-scavenger-hunts to watch cutscene after cutscene where cool things happen that are completely disconnected from player input.

Everyone knows that the beast ganon fight in BotW was dogshit. You know the dragon fight at the end of TotK? Literally the same thing! You get on a fucking mount and zoom around the big scary monster that doesn’t actually do anything, strike the big glowing weak points along its body, and then stab it in the fucking forehead and it’s done. But now, because it has some Avengers-ass “Oh, I recognize the thing!” direction with Dragon Zelda suddenly becoming [almost] an actual participant in the plot and Dragon Ganon shooting a billion fireballs that aren’t even fucking aimed at you while you fly circles around him, now it’s cool? Or because the fucking Force Ghosts pop in and contradict the rules about the dragon transformation being permanent so that Link can get his waifu as a prize for fighting the monster, but she has some voice lines so it’s egalitarian!

And don’t get me started on having the bosses come back along with the Sages (“It’s just like Infinity War!”) to just fucking negate each other offscreen. Absolute horseshit that makes the Divine Beast business at the end of BotW look elegant by comparison.

Fuck these fucking hack writers and their pandering bullshit that we will now get a thousand other games imitating. We’re just going to get compounding dark ages of writing as paradigm after paradigm is added to make it worse and worse as these shitheads optimize the formula for selling both to credulous 13-year-olds and otaku 35-year-olds. I hate it.

7/10