If those are your complaints, I’m genuinely confused about what you think “real” Zelda games are. Zelda has always been so much more than dungeon crawling, but it seems like that’s all you care about. Plenty of other Zelda games had things that weren’t just dungeons (like horse riding, fishing, mini games, talking to characters, shopping, mini puzzles, etc.) and involved a fair bit of wandering and searching. Once you actually play BOTW and TOTK you don’t even really need to bother looking for arrows anymore, they’re fucking everywhere and you can buy them all over the place.
Sounds like you just aren’t a fan of Zelda, which is fine. But your claim that the recent games destroyed anything is just plain silly.
They’re completely different. Since you haven’t played them, the older games have a wide variety of interesting tools that unlocked a new area. Yes, exploration was linear, but things were fun and new instead of grinding out yet another segment of stamina bar to spend another several minutes climbing rock faces to get to more of the same glider/magnet/ice block puzzles.
If you think the new ones are the same type of thing at all you are willfully closing your eyes. It’s cool that you like a mid game about collecting various numbers of nearly indistinguishable plants and critters but I wish Nintendo had done it with a new franchise. It’s grating to have people claim they are Zelda fans when their favorite title is the soulless grinding entry.
Since you haven’t played them,
So wrong there. I’ve played nearly every title. My favorite has been A Link to the Past. But, there will always be a place in my heart for the original. The N64 games were okay, but don’t hold the same childhood nostalgia. There’s a good chance I’ve been playing Zelda longer than you’ve been alive. You don’t know what you’re talking about.
If you don’t want to hear people assert you haven’t played this or that, perhaps you yourself should not do so.
If you cannot tell there is a significant difference in gameplay that started in BotW you weren’t paying attention during nearly every title you played.