My problem is mostly that if I don’t play it for a week or two, and come back to it, I can’t remember what’s going on at all and it seems like too much of a chore to re-build my context.
They do such a good job with Mario odyssey on showing you what to do and letting you teleport between worlds… there is no grinding at all I feel like. I wish they’d adopt that paradigm for Zelda too.
I am afraid of picking it up again because I absolutely cannot remember where I was and what I was doing.
At least with the sequel it's kind of expected I start fresh.
Weapons are literally everywhere. You kill a monster, it will generally drop it's weapon. They're scattered all over the ground. They're in chests. There is never a lack of weapons, and that is one of the core points of the game.
Literally the only way you could be stuck with tree branches is if you stuck to the opening part of the Great Plateau or intentionally pretended all the weapons didn't exist.
The 3D Zeldas have always been kind of meh in my experience. Although I did love BotW for the first 20 hours or so.
The game is sparse and sterile, the characters are boring and generic, the story/dialogue is cringe inducing, the world is empty and plain, and there's nothing to do.
It borrows heavily from open world game tropes, and it doesn't add anything. Once you've played about 5-6 hours you've seen the entire game, just not all of its permutations.
This is the first game where I've had a real disagreement with everyone else about its fun factor. Previously I was extremely disappointed in Diablo 3, but there were plenty of people who understood and agreed with my sentiments quite vocally.
With BotW it's like people are playing a different game, or they're somehow mentally wired differently. I sincerely don't understand what happened there. I'm usually very good at acknowledging high quality games, even if I don't personally like them... BotW is not a great game, it's mediocre at best.
I liked the style, I generally enjoy world exploration and that was fun in BotW, and there were many cool experiences scattered around, but it does end up feeling a little empty.
I still played it a ton mind you, but I don't consider it an important or ground breaking game the way many seem to.
I have heard plenty of people talk about how new the open world is to them in BotW (in a way that clearly suggests they've never tried it before). The novelty factor of any (to the user) new game genre amplifies the positive reaction.
With a Zelda I've only ever played the original NES one and liked the time I spent. With MegaMan it's always been the off shoots. MegaMan Soccer was constantly rented growing up and Battle Network was great.
But what's weird to me is that I've never enjoyed any of the 3d Zelda games, but still consider the MegaMan Legends series among the best games I've ever played. I'm still bitter I bought a 3ds specifically in anticipation of the third game and it was then cancelled.