Hot take:
BotW is significantly better than TotK, for the reasons listed below.
1. Reused main world in TotK. The sky islands and underground might be new, but they are a tiny percentage of the world. The vast majority of the world is exactly the same as in BotW, same regions, same landmarks, same climates, same animals, same enemies, same everything. After such a huge game as BotW (and likewise huge TotK), who wants to go through the same exact thing again? It completely kills the sense of exploration and wonder in TotK, compared to the original.
2. The huge downgrade in the quality of combat in TotK. What do I mean by this, when all the morons keep insisting combat is better or harder in TotK? Well, the combat system in BotW was very elegant, in that it allowed almost anyone to find their sweetspot for combat. If you were a casual or a kid, you could just use your abilities or the bow and arrow to fight in easy mode, explode camps with barrels, drop heavy stuff on enemies, shoot in slo mo while dropping, etc. If you were a mid level gamer, you could try the dodge system and flurry attacks. You had to time your dodges, but the flurries would make it easy to kill stuff, and mistiming your dodge often got you out of harm's way anyway. If you were a hardcore, Dark Souls type player, you could try the perfect guard, a precise timed parry with a shield that could defend against any attack in the game, even ranged, but you had to learn enemy patterns. This was fucking great.
In TotK, they did increase the difficulty of enemies, but in a way that basically destroys the entire combat system. There are more enemies everywhere, the enemies are more aggressive, they have a lot more abilities, they hit harder, etc. The problem with that is it significantly nerfs the skill-based ways of engaging in combat. Try to use perfect guard for example, and it's pretty much impossible in many situations. Yeah, good luck timing your block when you got 2-3 enemies swinging at you at the same time, as their buddy is shooting arrows from behind them, and enemis constantly alternate between very fast and very slow attacks with a million different animations.
So essentially the combat in TotK encourages the player to use easier ways to destroy enemies, whether it's using the now available mechanical contraptions that you build, or fusing different types of crap together, or bow/arrows with attached OP effects, or other stuff like that. Maybe some people find this fun, but to me, they basically removed the pure feeling of getting better as you mastered dodging/perfect guard, and replaced it with "meh, I just wrecked some enemy with this gizmo I built". Boring and uncool.
3. The puzzle difficulty. BotW hit the sweet spot for that, imo, it had some great puzzles, but they were mixed in with combat, exploration, etc, in a nice proportion. TotK, on the other hand, has much harder puzzles, where sometimes you really have to think about stuff, try different things, etc. Normally this wouldn't be bad, but it's basically Portal type gameplay in a huge open world game. After a myriad of shrines, and especially the 4 major temples, it just gets a little tiring, I mean Portal was a self-contained 5-10 hour long game, doing this stuff for 80-100 hours is a bit much.
4. Recycled flaws. BotW was a great game, but it did some things less than perfectly. For a single game, that's ok, nothing is perfect. But when you make the sequel, and it doubles down on all those flaws, it becomes annoying. Things like weapon durability, not only does it come back in TotK, but it's now combined with an even shittier weapon fusing system, which is basically busywork to disguise the fact that your equipment still sucks just as much. Shrines being a separate thing with many loading screens, instead of being organically integrated into the gameplay. NPCs talking forever about some inane shit without being easily able to escape the dialogue. Horrible UI in some cases. Etc, etc, etc.
Anyways, this is not to say TotK is a bad game, it's better than many games out there, and I genuinely enjoyed some of the dungeons and quests and building/mechanical aspects, but whereas BotW is an amazing gem, TotK is a significantly inferior recycled effort, where some of the new stuff actually makes things worse.
