Nintendo took the same map and made it feel new again by handing you the tools to take it apart yourself.
I put about two hundred hours into Breath of the Wild and then didn't touch it again for four years, which is roughly how I assumed this was going to go as well. The first time I fused a boulder to a stick and swung it into a Bokoblin camp I laughed out loud in my living room, alone, at eleven at night. Nintendo took the same Hyrule, added a sky full of floating islands and a subterranean layer called the Depths, then handed you four new abilities that let you build things, glue things together, climb up through ceilings and rewind time on individual objects.
Ultrahand ate my weekend, and I should be honest about what I produced with it. The internet was building working cars, cannons and a functioning crossbow turret by day three. I built an ugly raft with a fan bolted to the back to cross a lake I could have swum, and then a cart, and then a worse cart. Seventy hours in, my proudest creation was still a plank with five wheels, three of them load-bearing. The game never once made me feel bad about that, which I think is the whole design philosophy sitting inside a single interaction: it trusts you to work out what a vehicle is, and then it accepts whatever answer you come up with.
“Nobody told me I was doing it wrong, because there wasn't a wrong way to do it.”
Fuse is the better of the two abilities and I'll defend that against the flying-machine crowd all day. Ultrahand takes the headlines because a homemade hoverbike screenshots well, and Fuse is the one that changed how I played minute to minute. Weapons still break, except now you can staple a rock or a fan or a monster part onto a stick and get something usable out of nearly anything in your pockets, so durability stopped being the thing I resented in Breath of the Wild and turned into a puzzle I was constantly and happily solving.
My favorite all game was a boomerang fused to a Keese eyeball, which homed in on enemies from clear across a courtyard.
The Depths sit under the entire overworld as a pitch-black mirror of it, lit only by the glowing seeds you throw out ahead of yourself, and unsettling in a way this series almost never attempts. It's also one biome repeated across that whole map, and somewhere around hour twenty of darkness I started teleporting out the moment I'd grabbed whatever I came down for, so the mood ends up doing the work the variety doesn't, right up until the point where it can't do it any more.
It's memory fragments scattered around the map again, and finding them out of order means your own thoroughness can spoil the plot's one big reveal, which is precisely what happened to me at maybe the worst available fragment, so the story didn't hold me at all. I read the argument that this is the point, that the fragments are built to be found in any order and the reveal isn't really a reveal, and I don't buy it.
The four sage questlines each end in what is functionally the same cutscene, four separate times, nearly word for word. I stopped caring somewhere inside the second one and I went back to building bad carts.
Shrines are shorter and punchier than Breath of the Wild's were, and the four regional temples are proper dungeons with real identities this time, which is the single biggest fix carried over from the last game. The Lightning Temple is the consensus pick for the best of them and it probably deserves that.
The Fire Temple is my favorite of them anyway, a five-story minecart puzzle under Death Mountain that most players I've compared notes with found tedious, and I'd replay it tonight given the chance, because something about laying your own rails toward a solution scratches the exact itch the entire game is built around.
The Switch is well past its prime and you feel it, mostly down in the Depths, where heavy particle effects drop the framerate low enough to notice. It never cost me a fight, though it did cost Nintendo some of the illusion, and I couldn't tell whether the drops came from the hardware or from the way the Depths handle fog, because it happens in some caverns and not others with no pattern I found.
I still haven't seen the credits, and the save file has been sitting at the same point for months now. There's a lake in Lanayru I keep meaning to cross, and every time I load in I end up somewhere else entirely, usually underground, usually building something that definately doesn't work.