Did we play the same game? BotW was the first Zelda game that I actually enjoyed!

As a die hard Zelda fan

I guess this is it, it’s quite a different game to all the others, and people like different things.

I will offer counters to all your points though:

• The story is “Ganon’s doing bad, stop him”, same as most of the others
• What about all the NPCs in all the towns?
• There are 120 shrines, 4 temples, and a big final zone, how’s that no dungeons?
• The music was great
• Aren’t there enough different enemies to fill up that huge photo album?
• The exploration was the most fun! Finding all the shines and secret seeds was great (clearly collectathons are my thing and not yours!), and the weapons breaking didn’t really seem like an issue after a while.

Did we play the same game? BotW was the first Zelda game that I actually enjoyed!

Well that sorta says it all. You don’t like Zelda games lol. Botw isn’t much of a Zelda game so it stands to reason you’d like it.

The story is “Ganon’s doing bad, stop him”, same as most of the others

So that’s just it, all the others aren’t like that. The fact that BOTW is, is just lazy.

What about all the NPCs in all the towns?

What about them?

There are 120 shrines, 4 temples, and a big final zone, how’s that no dungeons?

Because none of those things are dungeons. Not in any substantial way we’ve come to expect from a Zelda game at least. There are 120 separate and yet identical puzzle rooms with no unique characteristics between them, and 4 boss fights that sort of act like 1/4 of a Zelda dungeon that all share a single theme. There isn’t really a single dungeon or temple in BOTW.

The music was great

It was serviceable ambiance, not all that unique or memorable. It did its job but not nearly the level the series is known for.

Aren’t there enough different enemies to fill up that huge photo album?

Idk but BOTW had 15-30 base species types accounting for unique bosses but not every single sub variant. Ocarina of Time from 1998 has over 70. And there was more regional diversity compared to BOTW which is very same across the whole map overall.

The exploration was the most fun! Finding all the shines and secret seeds was great (clearly collectathons are my thing and not yours!)

Exploration in older Zelda titles had more rewarding, unique items and treasures to find when exploring, and the way you would explore would change as the game progressed and you unlocked more gadgets. BOTW is as you said just a collection of the same handful of incremental upgrade items copy-pasted hundreds of times. And it never evolves because the game is designed specifically so that the gameplay does not evolve over the course of a playthrough. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying a collectathon but BOTW used it in place of more substantial exploration rewards, and is the exact thing everyone would dog on if the game was published by Ubisoft and not Nintendo.

You don’t like Zelda games lol. Botw isn’t much of a Zelda game so it stands to reason you’d like it.

Haha maybe it’s as simple as that!

The recent Link’s Awakening remake was pretty well received, reckon they’ll keep making both classic and botw-style Zelda games in the way games like castlevania do?