I grew up on SNES and N64 Zelda, so admittedly I'm biased towards the old gameplay loop and mechanics.
And you are listing pretty much the lower priority parts of the game - the exploration, density of content, core mechanics, innovation, insane freedom, variety of content, is absolute magic. It definitely plays like BOTW so you may not like it if you didn't like BOTW, but to say it doesn't have a lot of meaningful improvements is simply inaccurate.
It’s not going to fix the desire for the game to be like the old games, no. But for those that did already find something to like in the original BOTW, TOTK is most definitely all around an improvement on the original and substantially more fun.
This is an interesting perspective to me. I bounced off Ocarina of Time hard. It felt like I was being shuffled along a story that was already fully written.
Contrast that to my first experience with the series — the Legend of Zelda on NES — where you’re essentially dumped into the world without instruction and need to make your way.
For me, a huge draw of Breath of the Wild was the same as the NES version: being dumped into a world and being able to go wherever I wanted. I felt like that was a return to the old gameplay loop and mechanics. There was even item breakage — the Like Likes eating your upgraded shield.
I had essentially resigned myself to Zelda games from Ocarina on not being what I wanted, so it was refreshing to get BotW. I’m guessing similarly with TotK, but others in my household have made it such that I haven’t had a chance to try it yet.
The only thing I can think of that Nintendo could do to make me happier than with BotW is make a playable 3D game that is essentially the art that was in the original NES Legend of Zelda’s instruction manual.
And in 15 years, people will have the same level of adoration for this game and ignore any rough spots, like FPS or weapons breaking
That is a feature, not a flaw. They improved the feature in TOTK with Fuse. Now you're forced to try out hundreds of different weapons. You could play for ages and not use the same weapon twice.
Compare to something like Elden Ring, where I felt like the game was almost discouraging me from trying out different weapons. You have to sink so much into a build that just kicking the tires on a different kind of weapon is almost impossible. It's almost guaranteed to feel underpowered.
