Zelda Breath of the Wild exceeded my expectations completely. I played it years after it came out and was gobsmacked by how good it was. A strange mixture of pleasant, mildly challenging, big and awe inspiring world.
> Content sparsity. Like many open world games, most of Hyrule just feels dead to me. Towns aren't as populated and lively as OoT / WW / MM, the main reason being that there aren't as many overlapping storylines that have you return to the same location as you progress through the game. The game basically encourages you to clear a region and never return. The random encounters are repetitive.
> The shrines, what the heck were they thinking?! It feels like Nintendo hired a bunch of interns that year and needed to give them something to do. All the shrines were clearly made in a generic level editor. Felt really out of place to me.
> Most of the music in BoTW is quiet and subdued, unlike previous entries in the series. This is good for setting a certain tone, but it's less effective unless there's some flashier music to contrast with. To me, the lack of music made the game feel even emptier.
> Shallow combat mechanics, even compared to other entries in the series like OoT. Just mash buttons until enemy dead. Armor / weapons don't really matter beyond the stat boosts and occasionally some elemental matching. Guardians / Lynels require some strategy, but once you figure out the tricks it's not hard to brute force those too.
I had fun playing, for sure. It just doesn't rank very highly on my list. I'm looking forward to BotW 2, where hopefully they'll use their game engine to make a great game!