Some Zelda Things

[A Black Falcon]

On the subject of story in games, I'm not saying all game stories are bad, but yeah, I don't care that much about game stories in general, they're mostly very forgettable... and whatever extent I did like game stories when I was younger has gone down even further in this past decade as I've mostly played endless storyless (in the modes I play them) games and not games with stories.  The games I've played the most in the last few years are Starcraft: Brood War (online multiplayer), Geoguessr (dropped single player mode quickly, I play single maps or multiplayer), Super Mario Maker 2 (I never finished the single player campaign despite having like 1300 hours in the  game), Dead or Alive 6 (never got more than like a quarter of the way through the campaign despite playing like a few hundred hours of multiplayer), Diablo IV (this one I did finish the main story, but I hated it, it was so bad...)... there have been some story-based games which I enjoyed, but they are usually the exception, not the rule.  Game stories are usually just an excuse for the gameplay to happen. I do remember really liking the story of Starcraft, but that's not why I keep playing it, I haven't played the campaign in over 25 years.  The best game story I've ever seen is Planescape: Torment, which has a story about on par with, eh, a decent fantasy novel I guess.  Not one of the best ones.

But anyway, true, MKW is still a mostly traditional MK game, with an open world.  I know a lot of hardcore Mario Kart fans dislike the point-to-point races, but as someone who definitely isn't a hardcore series fan I quite like them, the straight line driving is fun.  The game has circuits, regular races, a regular championship mode with circuits and point to point races, it's a much more traditional game for its series than the Zelda games are.  There is also an open world to drive around in and do challenges in if you want, and I've done a bit of that, but I do mostly play the races, online or offline.

Like, in BOTW (which I've only played a bit of on Wii U, by the way, I don't have the Switch version), the temples or whatever they are are the closest things to dungeons the game has, but they have no enemies, right?  They're just puzzle rooms!  It's so lame, sure the puzzles may be neat but the rest of the dungeon experience is missing.  As for the overworld... whatever.  Exploring open world overworlds has never interested me much.  I strongly prefer a more structured experience over 'wander around and do whatever'.  BotW lost me very quickly, it's such a boring experience... what's the point?  Games are better when you have something to actually do, as you had in the 3d Zelda games from OoT to SS.  So yeah, I like gameplay over story but I don't want to have to 'make my own gameplay' or whatever as open world games seem to think people enjoy.

As for the new ones' stories though, BotW, does it even really have a story?  As you said, the whole thing is basically a flashback with little relevance to the actual game.  As for TotK, I have no idea what its story is; I basically checked out on it plotwise with that first trailer where they were like 'Zelda's lost, go find her again!'.  That's about as lame a plot as you can have.  As I said I haven't played TOTK at all but that sure didn't make me interested.