Was this really the best direction for the series?

>Only the very start and very end matter. The rest is optional filler just to make the end easier for people to beat.
Well if that's how we want to define closeness to LoZ then sure, Elden Ring is closer. I'm not sure how being close structurally makes it a better LoZ successor though. Better and close being two different descriptions and whatnot.

The problem with your example is that there's absolutely no relation between platforming and action-puzzle. Even worse since Tetris is defined entirely by its core gameplay mechanics and not by anything else. A long-running action-adventure like Zelda franchise has far more defining its identity by comparison. To insinuate that doesn't matter trivializes the whole point of succession to begin with, which requires innovation. Another reason the Tetris example doesn't work.

Even if we want to keep it in terms of what the gameplay does have in common with the original, the insistence that being closer is better still isn't true anyway. BotW and TotK accomplish far greater in its smaller resemblances to LoZ in a vacuum than ER does with even more similarity.

So what's the logic to closeness being the only factor in being a better successor? Better can be defined in a lot of ways after all.

I think it's completely fair.
Every single thing in human history that was exceptionally well designed had the angle or angles it would be approached, viewed, or used from in mind during the design process.
Maybe saying they didn't care isn't quite accurate- they just valued the ability for players to find it however they wanted more than the quality of experience inherent in discovering, approaching, and entering/interacting with it.

Because aside from individual parts of the game that turn off the "Freedom", e.g. shrines and temple quests, I didn't run into a single thing that even tried to control the angle from which I'd be viewing it. This freedom is entirely antithetical to the kind of thoughtful design that contributed massively to Zelda's old appeal.

Oh now you're ABSOLUTELY bullshitting me.
The story is insultingly bad on every level. There is not one cool, subtle, or unique theme to it, much less one that excuses the entire game being designed in such a way that nothing leads to or from anything else in any more than the occasional chain of two or three quests. Yes, the context and timing with which you discover something are PART of the design to how you approach. Letting the player approach the game with whatever pacing and ordering they want is copping out of things that could be handcrafted.
Now, maybe if I had some special moment of my own when playing either BOTW or TOTK, I'd feel different. Maybe if there was that one time everything just "clicked", where I rolled across something at just the right time for it to look and feel truly perfect, and I knew that this wasn't guaranteed to happen, and thus it felt even more special. But I never got that, and if your game is going to stake itself on that happening to everyone at least once then I'm allowed to be pissed when I fall through the cracks. Much less two games in a fricking row.

My point is that "themes"- which aren't even really present in the game, and which I assume are the result of you ascribing genius to the game and working backward from there to determine where it is- can't make up for a lack of design. Letting players approach the game in whatever order they want, at whatever pacing they want, with whatever items they want, is eschewing something that COULD have been handcrafted, and thus, is an area where the game chose freedom over design. Over and over and over again.
Game design should be a much higher priority than it is.

And I have not one but two counterpoints to that:
The themes you think are present really aren't.
And even if they were, linking a bunch of the game world back to a single "perspective" in the form of an overarching theme doesn't help with the amount of GAME DESIGN that went into the world. Just because it's somehow emblematic of something relevant to the theme of trauma and recovery doesn't change the fact that waltzing into Thunderhead early will make one of the game's major quests end in a disappointing, redundant arrow pointing towards content you already did rather than playing its part as the leadup to a temple.

>In media with no themes
I didn't say there weren't themes, I said the themes aren't what you say. The actual themes of BOTW and TOTK are just different from what you imply.
Both of them are pretty "what-it-says-on-the-tin".
BOTW's themes are hammered in pretty firmly, but never too explicitly: Isolation and its connection to beauty/hope. It shows in how the champions are written, including Link, and it's reinforced by the gameplay.
TOTK follows up closely after BOTW, putting a mysterious spin on the first game's isolation (zonai civilization feels both lonely and arcane at a glance) but dimming the spark of hope in consequence.

But both of them also have an overarching theme of simplification and decay. Up until BOTW, the series had spent a solid couple decades fitting characters into the classic triangle of "wisdom, courage, power", adding a layer of fallibility and inherent incompatibility to an otherwise rather flat morality. But then BOTW took the neutral-good Hylia and made her a continuous force worshipped by Everyone Who Was Good and not, say, a result of the primeval state of the world in SS. Now there's only two alignments: Good and Evil. Neutral sort of exists, but everyone "neutral" is just good but a bit of a jerk.
Both of them are also the first time in the main series that a force named Ganon/Ganondorf was not somehow causally related to the rest of the Ganondorfs. Ganon was obviously the same force in 1/2/ALTTP, OOT was clearly the events of the Sealing War as told in ALTTP, WW and TP were clearly the same Ganondorf having gone through each of OOT's end states. This is emblematic of the games' stances as a whole, where they'll feel free to reference what used to be canon at will while making use of it in no narratively interesting ways. Ganondorf is a clean slate and all they do with him in TOTK is have him repeat his plan circa OOT, minus the triforce and the sacred realm.

>There's got to be an explicit reason they're not there
No, there doesn't. A creator does not have explicit thoughts on every alternative they're "rejecting" when they select the themes they want to intentionally put into their work. The fact that BOTW and TOTK both have themes that actually are expressed throughout them and not ones you have to go off on an analysis tangent to find implies that any presence of the latter is coincidental at best.

>If you must know the reasoning for my conclusion
When someone refuses to tell you their reasoning, the implication is typically that they're bullshitting you or so stupid they think logic is unnecessary.
>the game itself places an obvious and heavy emphasis on piecing information together via the senses, instead of just what can be justified from a very literal frame of reference
The use of perspective as a means to explore a theme of isolation is an equally valid interpretation. It creates a stronger sense of difference between the one whose perspective is in play and those whose aren't. And being that the theme of isolation is once again supported much more obviously and directly through gameplay...
>you'd also have to explain how the sensory aspects of major things like the Guardians, Hyrule Castle, Link's memory/perspective, and so on, can't have a legitimate reading under the trauma narrative
No, I wouldn't. I just have to make a good case for something else being obvious enough to be the intended interpretation, which therefore renders yours objectively less likely.

>Well I'm clearly not coming in empty-handed for one
You'd be surprised how many people can type words they absolutely don't mean. Especially in defense of games that aren't as groundbreaking as people say.
>The isolation reading doesn't explain everything though
It does. The overall moment to moment gameplay has Link as the only sentient friendly thing for miles more often than not, literal isolation. The music is sparse, evocative of distance much more so than closeness thanks to its use of high piano and light strings. The visuals rely heavily on very "pure", blocky, silhouetted colors, feeling a bit primeval and simplified. Perspective creates a stronger sense of who is "you" and who is "other" in contexts where the ability to control one of the parties is stripped. The stories you see play out in the memories and with the modern champions all revolve heavily around "isolation" in some form or another. The use of eyes in Sheikah tech and symbology is first and foremost a holdover of older Sheikah symbology, and secondarily another tie-in to isolation, this time making a hypothetical ally faction responsible for the most alien/other type of enemy in the game, further alienating the player from the world.
>it's far from the only theme that matters in BotW, so I'm not even sure how you could stake my point being wrong on that alone
Your reasoning for the healing/recovery interpretation, which would be slightly more interesting but still not justify botw/totk's gameplay flaws, is so close to my reasoning for the isolation interpretation that it's clear it can only be one or the other.

>I just didn't want to bring my reasoning into it before understanding why you took issue with my point.
And you genuinely can't see how that came across wrong...? That's really odd. Anyway, to boil it down, I take issue to your point because I feel that ascribing BOTW a bunch of similar, inter-related themes is reading too far into it. The game is not written well overall, no matter how much nuance you find a way to read into it.
>The trauma quality is integral to BotW because the whole story would straight up not function the same without it
It absolutely would, that's what I'm trying to say. If you took out the trauma reading specifically, nothing about the story would change. Link isn't how he is because he's traumatized, he's been the way he is when you play him for years. He was generally quiet and a bit of a nut long before anything actually bad happened to him. Trauma is present in a few characters' stories, but it's not the central element. Trauma is used as the emotional climax of Zelda's arc and the impetus for her to take her role and abilities seriously in both games. But it's not an overriding theme throughout the game.
Likewise, themes of healing are... present throughout the game, sure- you do literally gain health throughout both games, after all. But elevating that from a gameplay necessity to a theme in writing is a pretty big leap; any game with a health system and some cute attempt at explaining health in-universe would have similar "evidence". Zelda's arc is all but over before she even begins healing, and the champions becoming friends with one another even if they didn't start that way isn't any more a specific indicator towards "healing" as a theme than forming friendships would be in any story featuring a disparate group. Really, a lot of the things that heal/improve throughout these games are so general that you'd be claiming almost any story where some circumstance improves would be making it a "theme".

>Link's memories are pulled away from him as he's "isolated" from everything but the here and now, and some overall skills
>Link becoming a healthier degree of solitary as he recalls his past and the friendships he earned there
>The major societies all feeling adrift because they don't understand their history fully, and thus cannot fully appreciate their place in the world
>The Guardians being the most alien looking enemies in the game, creating a very visible distinction between them and even other enemies
>Active Guardians not actually being relevant to 99% of the cast creating more differences between you and "the other"
>Ganon is just Ganon in this game, as TOTK shows, he's simply sealed and getting around it
I think you continue to give the game too much credit.

>I do however think that if you're being this dismissive that you likely didn't give the fair chance you think you did.
I never go into a game expecting to hate it. Sometimes I'll go in expecting parts I know I'll hate, but the whole? Never. I always try to look for the bright side of a game's story/writing, SOMETHING it does right. I don't operate in any kind of bad faith towards the medium that I've chosen as my primary hobby.
I still cannot bring myself to ascribe depth to BOTW. It was so thoroughly bad to me, on every writing and gameplay front, that I cannot possibly give it a likeable property.

>If the reading aligns with the most holistic explanation of the work, isn't reductive, and can't be better explained by an alternative, then there's no possible basis for it to be too deep a reading.
I'm arguing that it doesn't align with the most holistic explanation of the work. The presence of things that hurt people and moments in which they heal is not a trope, it's a fact of storytelling. If things don't happen that better and worsen peoples' circumstances, then there isn't a plot. The presence of a health system and gaining more via completion is not specific to BOTW/TOTK, not even within the Zelda series, so ascribing it a thematic connection specific to this game also feels inherently weak.
The gameplay, story, visuals, and music all agree that the "point" is isolation. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
>overthinking on purpose forces you to wrestle with concepts beyond what you would normally think about. Mistaken interpretation or not, you're adopting a dimension of thought you need to be holistic.
I can agree to this, though overthinking on purpose in defense of a game from a series that never had particularly amazing writing (at best, a few great moments and an overarching "unique feel" to the setting owing largely to its western fairy-tale style mythos) and which itself isn't even well written within the series (discards the setting's unique feel in exchange for revamped, much less western mythos) and then proceeding to engage a stranger using conclusions you admit might be severely overthought feels like an exceptionally questionable course of action.
>I still haven't seen anyone even give a definition that shows me they know
If I had to put it simply, I'd say it's displaying that all things happen logically, due to an interesting underlying system. BOTW fails to achieve it because many courses of action that actually interact with the deeper mechanics are never practical, thus the things that feel "logical" are largely uninteresting.

>Sure but pain affects everyone differently. The remnants of that pain are straight up the characteristics of trauma wrapped into a subtle aesthetic.
Or, occam's razor, the lingering pain is because not all problems are resolved by Link waking up, and you have to deal with problems for a story about dealing with problems to be resolved.
>I've had my overthinking phase done and over with.
You're reading value into a game that doesn't have nearly that much. I'm willing to bet even the developers didn't think as much about it as you currently are.
>That's not a deep system, that's a consistent system with a lot of possible branching answers
Well, I know that something truly inconsistent can't be deep- though something complex enough to appear inconsistent without rigorous study is very likely to be. And I know that something with few possible answers can't be deep, so I was at least on the right track, was I not? Maybe the part I missed because I was running out of characters and wanted to be succinct is that depth requires interaction between the many moving parts you have access to? You know, nothing is isolated, most inputs lead to some difference in the output eventually? This is an interesting thing to puzzle over.

I know my definition for depth is a bit of word soup but let me try and use some examples. You know how basketball is really just running, dribbling, and throwing a ball, right? But the truth is that in an actual basketball game, you're able to showcase a frickton of different skills in what should theoretically seem like a limited canvas. The possibilities keep evolving upon each other, not just in terms of what you can do, but what you should do. And there's a lot of possibilities since all the factors determining a situation are bound to get so dynamic. Feinting, three point shots, making the right passes, and even being able to move the ball around in a variety of different ways while moving in different patterns, host a frickload of depth despite being founded on very simple base skills. And there's great synergy with how situations can evolve with it too. Complexity would be looking into factors that don't matter in practice like exact knowledge of ball physics. To use a more vidya related example, fighting game motion inputs are (a necessary) complexity, but execution itself can't facilitate depth. If that were the case just doing 1 frame inputs in a vacuum which require hyper autistic knowledge to pull off would be super deep, but that doesn't seem right, does it? You can apply these same concepts universally to Chess, Go, Poker, art, music, etc. etc.

>And I argue you should because themes of trauma and recovery appear to the same extent they're present in BOTW/TOTK in virtually every story with conflict on an epic scale
>virtually every story contains trauma! I'm not some complete spoilsport closed off to all emotion, this is just not part of the game's emotional profile.
And I'm arguing you should because the specifics of trauma play important roles that cannot be removed from the narrative. BotW references a shitton of the same writing rules as OoT (don't show literal displays of sadness, no one except Ganon and his minions should be written as individuals to blame for the state of the world, etc.), but OoT despite being a comparable epic wasn't about trauma. It was about a kid losing his childhood. Trauma itself isn't integral to the motions of that story, even if you can infer at the end he was left traumatized.

>Your examples of these earlier were unsatisfying.
Judging by the way you take all those examples, it seems like the issue is that you keep taking everything given to you as a trope where the depth is embellished by literal details instead of what qualities they actually come with, or how that practically affects evocation. Examples...

>The presence of amnesia in general the the unlocking of memories in significant contexts are such general tropes
If it were only waking up with amnesia and self-rediscovery then I'd be inclined to agree. I've seen plenty of that myself. But Link was broken specifically because of a shattering event that was antithetical to what he knew of life until then. His quest to regain his memories are almost 1:1 with people that have CPTSD, even.

>The Guardians are only "traumatic" as much as they are "out of place and threatening"
And because music is essentially diegetic in this game, meaning Guardians are the only time you're signaled to feel true anxiety and terror. They're the very symbols of what destroyed Link's past security. Escaping them in particular is extremely difficult, and the game's presentation goes a particular way to stress how if you don't deal with them they're, you're going to die; little touches like their increasing beeps causing even more anxiety with high risk, low reward lasers. They're never seen active by anyone else but Link and Yunobo. And dealing with them requires for you to keep your mental state extremely focused on something difficult to perceive. Eyes are a recurring motif in BotW as well, and there's a reason the Guardians, the Corruption, and Dark Beast Ganon had them emphasized.

Look at the bigger picture and there's really no denying the smaller pieces add up to something more than meets the eye. That's what Breath of the Wild was trying to say since the beginning: Life is more than just the sum of its parts and that it was up to you to unravel that.

>Everything games are composed of IS a trope. By judging the specificity of a trope, i.e. exactly how often this "play" on it is seen, and balancing that with how prominently the game displays it, you can judge what should be elevated to a theme and what is simply a trope.
I mean this in the nicest way possible but I'm sorry American media has brainwashed you. Everything being a trope is true but this meaning anything for creating or reading media is one of the worst lies ever sold for the arts.

>Amnesia is primarily used for twists, and those twists usually come in the form of something antithetical to the character's world/nature that they either participated in or had to live through before the amnesia hit
This is proving what I just said too. Amnesia being used primarily for twists shouldn't matter. We're talking about Breath of the Wild. The way 9 billion other works use it shouldn't matter if we're talking about what's actually being portrayed with the amnesia element for this one. There's this recurring issue I keep seeing from this discussion where everything you argue is built on prescriptive assumptions on how things should ideally work, independent of context-specifics which contradict that. To be brutally honest it really just does seem like you have no idea how to piece things together once we fall out of that zone.

>Occam's Razor demands I first acknowledge that, as the game's "boss enemies", they're also signaling anxiety and terror because of the gameplay threat they pose
And because they're the only enemies in the game that have a dedicated, terrifying battle theme to them. Breath of the Wild is extremely careful about its use of music. It's not even debatable the composition is generally trying to be evocative through minimalism, more than it is formal and "full" like past Zelda OSTs. That's why the Guadian themes are given so much emphasis when their themes play.

I know I said I was done but this is too tempting to pass up.
>Everything being a trope is true but this meaning anything for creating or reading media is one of the worst lies ever sold for the arts
It's not "american brainwashing" to acknowledge that the most likely reasoning for the use of a given plot element in a story is the statistically most common reasoning for the use of that plot element in OTHER stories. I don't give a frick that it's not holistic; all stories are made based on other stories, it's just a question of how much their writers admit it.
>There's this recurring issue I keep seeing from this discussion where everything you argue is built on prescriptive assumptions on how things should ideally work, independent of context-specifics which contradict that
I'm not arguing that every trope should be played straight, I'm using them as the most likely starting point for their execution in a given story, in this case BOTW. And then you're not giving me context-specific information that contradicts the trope at all; you're giving me some wrinkle which is mildly flavorful and used to make it clear they didn't just do the trope because they felt it was necessary, and nothing more.
I can't believe I'm saying this, but to me you seem almost naive. I abhor the modern overly-cynical approach to games where everything has to be hidden behind a dozen layers of irony. I dislike the idea that games should be entirely impersonal, judged solely on their literal content and not their intent. And yet I cannot feel the passion you clearly do behind any element of BOTW's writing. I cannot emotionally connect to the people behind it like I could with the writing of basically every game in the series, even up to Twilight Princess. I don't know why. I know I definitely gave it a fair shake. But the emotional impression I get out of it is so... overly simplified. It's like I'm trying to empathize with a dog.

If a franchise counts, I'm not half bad at Touhou, for as little as it matters with how easy the last few have been. Not some kind of superplayer, but able to comfortably get my first clear of a game within a few good attempts as opposed to a few days of on-and-off incremental effort. Hard to judge whether the skill I have strictly required a month of work to achieve when I've now been good enough to feel fluent at these games for years.