The OP is not wrong in any of the points he's making. They're all very solid arguments against the game being hailed a "masterpiece".
In roughly 120 hours with game, my thoughts and feelings on BOTW bounce back and forth between complete adoration and total bafflement.
At it's very best, BOTW is exhilarating in how open and freeing the world is. There is no open world game which encourages exploration as much as BOTW. For this reason alone, BOTW succeeds in many respects. It is pure adventure, and it's glorious. The game rewards experimentation; wander in any direction with no purpose and you might find something cool, eventually.
This is why, when it comes to the portions of the game that funnel you into linear, "story-driven" events, things get bogged down in tedium. There's no emotional thrust to the narrative, no sense of urgency to the unfolding plot points due to the anachronistic template they chose upon which to lay the story. Characterizations are thin and rely wholly on exposition. Therefore, there's no one point in time during the story-driven events where I should be compelled to care, and so the linear bits of gameplay become a chore to slog through so that I can get back to the freedom of the open world adventuring. The Divine Beasts are, essentially, just slightly bigger iterations of the myriad of puzzle rooms you're already tackling. The only game mechanic they offer that helps to delineate them from their smaller counterparts is the ability to change the orientation of the room. Yay?
That's not to say the Divine Beasts don't provide moments of "ohhh, so THAT'S how that works!"
The tedium of the Divine Beasts is punctuated by the atrocious boss battles that have zero nuance and have been bested by my basically knocking down xblight Ganon and slashing the fuck out of him. It's really disappointing, especially considering none of these bosses incorporate more than one game mechanic as a strategic means to win.
These sections are wholly unremarkable and hamper the overall presentation of a game that's supposed to be endlessly epic in scope and mythology.
I need not say more about the story or characters, because the centerpieces of the narrative are tied to the beasts, and so I feel I've managed to cover why I feel the elements of the story that are present don't really lend themselves to the world or mythology. It works, to a degree, but it's not a complete success and feels more like an afterthought.
What's really worth talking about when discussing BOTW is obvious: the world. That's what it's all about. And for all of the dynamic and wondrous aspects that are present in this world, there are some major grievances that hold it back from feeling "complete".
Take the posts we see about the "post apocalypse" trope in gaming, and how BOTW offers a vibrant and refreshing take on this. I agree. To an extent.
This version of Hyrule, making its slow recovery from total devastation, is massive, sprawling and beautiful. Terrain is varied. Traversal is fun, relaxing, and oftentimes rewarding.
However, this sprawling expanse comes with a tradeoff; for long, long stretches you can wander without ever finding anything truly remarkable. Yes, the way you interact with the environment has an effect; but to what extent? To what extent is the player influencing the game environment? I blew open a hidden cave buried in rubble. I chopped down some trees for some firewood. I ignited a bomb barrel at an enemy camp by shooting down a flaming lantern.
When I'm not walking through large patches of flat grass, or climbing a mountain to see what might be at the top (50% of the time it's nothing, the other 50% is a Korok seed), what am I actually DOING? Attacking the 125th moblin camp? Finding a shrine?
My biggest hurdle in finding my way to the "GOAT" status that many people bestow upon this game is, what are some truly deep and intricate ways in which the game mechanics affect the world, and vice versa?
Enemy types are extremely limited; almost embarrassingly so (consider Horizon, as the inverse of this). Weather is dynamic and changes frequently, yes, but how much does it really affect the player apart from making climbing pretty much impossible when it rains, or avoiding lightning strikes that are attracted by metal weapons? Does weather force the player to seek shelter? Not really. Are there massive snow storms that cause visibility to be severely limited? Nope. Do the rain storms affect the waters when you're on the open ocean? Probably want to play ACIV for something like that.
This is just one area in which the game is dynamic...on a surface level. It's dynamic...until it isn't.
So the world tells its own little mysterious stories? Bits of the landscape have remnants of a devastated world. Okay. The post-apocalypse has never been more beautiful...or more bereft of detail.
The game world is not detailed (to say nothing of the actual in-game textures being used on the ruins). It's not lined by ruins that have meaningful visual details or hints of lore. They pretty much all look the same, varying only by size.
Last night I found the "Forgotten Temple". I was tracking a shrine which lead me to it. I actually landed on top of the temple. This was probably the most boring bit of walking I've ever done. I had to walk the length of the roof, all the way to the front of the temple where there's a drop off down to the entrance. Every. Single. Bit of that geometry was a prime example of "cut and paste".
What did I find once I was inside the "forgotten temple"? A bunch of Guardians shooting at me which I had to cut down. The shrine was a blessing shrine. And so I was rewarded for surviving the guardians. What else did I find in the temple? Nothing. It's massive. It's empty. There's a single chest containing yet another, rupee, opal, sapphire, amber, etc
The length of the canyon that leads to this temple (and it is one long-ass canyon) plays host to nothing but a few packs of wolves, 6 or so hidden Korok seeds...and that's it.
For nearly ten minutes l walked through this canyon, and when I finally got back to my original path all I could think of was "that's it?"
I had fun exploring, to be sure, but there's not a whole lot more here that makes it anymore dynamic or interactive than the next world, aside from the "go anywhere, anytime" angle.
Your exploration, however, is hindered by the stamina system. In concept, the stamina system lends itself to the survivalist urgency the gameplay boasts. It's great. But it's not doing anything remarkable. It's actually a shame they didn't try to do more with the food/stamina system.
Take MGS3, for example. The hunting and foraging in that game is how I would define "dynamic" or "nuanced". The implementation of this system in MGS3 deserves to be lauded, more so than any one thing BOTW is doing.
In MGS3, the stamina gauge is crucial to Snake's ability to function. Not only does he need to eat in order to keep the stamina gauge up (the very basic execution of the idea found in BOTW), but if his stamina gauge runs low, Snake's abilities take a hit. His stomach growls, and enemies who are close to him will be alerted to his presence. Aiming weapons becomes difficult because he gets "hunger shakes". Soon, his health gauge slowly begins to deplete. Wounds don't heal as fast if he's running on an empty stomach.
THIS is something that, back when Snake Eater was first released, had me feeling like the developers were thinking 2, 3, 4 layers deep.
I've not encountered anything even close to that in my 120 hours with BOTW.
The food and stamina system don't coalesce in any meaningful way.
I've got all of this food...why doesn't Link get hungry?! Lol
It would be sweet if Link had hunger tied to stamina, and so eating occasionally helps to maintain the necessity for food. I could see something really cool where, if you go hungry long enough, Link passes out from exhaustion and when he wakes up he's surrounded by moblins and has to fight (or try to flee) in a weakened state. That kind of shit would really make the food/cooking system meaningful.
This isn't to say that hunting and cooking aren't fun, because they totally fucking are. Very fun.
But to say that any of these mechanics come together in a deep and meaningful way that goes beyond surface-level implementations is hyperbolic. Or maybe I'm just blind.
The game is also held back by baffling technical inconsistencies. I consider the "approach the combat in a number of ways" to be a farce, since the abysmal draw distance doesn't allow me to use the Sheikah Scope to see enemies at their camp until I'm close enough to be spotted by them. This isn't MGS5, to be sure. I can't plan an approach or know the threat a camp is housing because I can't see the fucking moblins due to the draw distance.
I won't go into the button-mashing combat, countless fetch quests (shrine quests are awesome, though), the sparse population of the game world with travelers who pop in and out while only a few feet away as you trot along the road, the godawful disguised Yiga clan members who are fucking EVERYWHERE and get tiresome after your first two dozen (awesome the first few times, now it's just a fucking ridiculous chore)....I have a long list of gripes. The basic enemies are cheap and some of them can take down your hard-earned hearts (a row and a half of them) in just two hits...
The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild is still a fantastic game and is best when taken as a straight open-world exploration game, and nothing more. This is the definition of a jack-of-all-trades, master of none. It's still one of my ten best games of the generation, but falls somewhere in the bottom half of that list.
It's still pretty crazy to me that this gets chosen as "the greatest video game of all-time".
