Was Tears of the Kingdom too Same-y?

I happened upon a video yesterday by Hyrule Gamer entitled: “Was Tears of the Kingdom Successful”. It's a great watch, and I highly recommend checking it out. The one section of the video I’ll be discussing is the ‘How New Did it Feel?’ section of the video - because I couldn’t disagree more with it.

The biggest criticism for the game in this section is the game didn’t feel new enough; by reusing the overworld from the previous game, the element of discovery was lost. That’s a fair criticism.

Here’s my take:

Tears of the Kingdom is to Breath of the Wild, what Majora’s Mask was to Ocarina of TIme - a game that uses the same engine, has a very similar feel, but has enough changes to make it a brand new experience despite feeling familiar. In Majora’s Mask, that was the three-day loop and mask transformations. In Tears of the Kingdom, you have a completely new interface for interacting with the game world.

Tears of the Kingdom expanded the game world vertically and completely changed the way you played the game. Link’s new abilities like Ultrahand, Ascend, Recall, and Fuse drastically enhance traversal and customization options. Mastering how these new powers synergize is key to solving puzzles and navigating the world.

My favorite part the entire game was the familiar overworld! Not The Depths. Not the Sky. But the Surface! I enjoyed seeing what changed between BotW and TotK. I loved pointing out the differences, getting updates on characters, discovering new caves to explore, searching for wells; the surface was just awesome - EASILY the best part of the game for me!

I was initially concerned about the reuse of the surface overworld leading up to the release. However, after investing over 250 hours into the game last year, I can confidently say that Nintendo did a fantastic job of keeping it feeling fresh to me.

Did I get everything I wanted out of Tears of the Kingdom? For the most part, yes. There was that one list of cool ideas I would’ve liked to see that Nintendo completely ignored but we’ll talk about that another time!