In praise of Tears of the Kingdom's most underrated design decision: muddle buds

gamedeveloper.com:

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom has been praised for many reasons since its April release. It's a brilliant open world game with jaw-dropping physics implementation, allowing players to really play with (and sometimes, delightfully break) the entire world before them. It has nooks and crannies to explore for months, enjoyable side quests, and a tight core gameplay loop for exploration, combat and crafting. It's not a perfect game, by any means (I find the dungeon design very dull), but it does so many things well, and some things so well it's hard to even find comparison points.

An aspect that bored me initially (and never wowed me in Breath of the Wild, also a game I consider an all-timer) was combat. Sword slinging has never been my favorite part of the Zelda series: for me, it's simply one part of a glorious flow state. Most of the games in the series feature a cycle of exploration + puzzle solving + fighting + chill side adventures/village time. No one single part of this is complete (or even great) in itself, but pieced together with clever dungeon and world design, the experience is elevated. To linger too long on any given part of this cycle is to invite fatigue, but the linear design kept most players in the flow.

Starting with Breath of the Wild, the more open design did away with the prescribed order, for better in many cases (I love flying and climbing around the world and discovering this gorgeous landscape in my own way), and for worse in others—the aforementioned dull dungeon design is a side effect of this. So is combat, if you don't mix things up for yourself. In TOTK, the prospect of smacking four thousand bobokins with a sword (mostly for crafting parts) seemed tedious. It was, at first, until