By Loose I mean the game doesn't feel tightly designed. People praise the game for letting you do whatever you want, but I think that it makes the game feel repetative and tedious, since you never have to think about what you're doing In terms of combat, storytelling, puzzle solving, world-design, and difficulty, things felt too loose. Let me Explain:

SHRINES ~ In most shrines, there's an almost infinite number of solutions due to recall - this ability let's you "cheat" almost any shrine. Add on top of that rocket shields and bomb arrows (which can activate most green circular switches) and you have a lot of broken tools at your disposal.

I can't be alone in this: Did anyone else want more engineering-style puzzles? Where the game forced you to make some sort of contraption with the tools provided? This would require the player to think about the solution instead of breezing through each shrine. There are so many Zonai tools, but you never really have to learn how to use them beyond the basics. I didn't hate doing the shrines, but I lost excitement walking into them.

Let's not forget that all these shrines look and sound the same and there's 152 of them and they never ramp up in complexity. You can build so many amazing things in this game, but there's never really a point beyond just messing around. Personally speaking, I didn't think they were as creative as they could've been.

1. COMBAT ~ Fuse completely breaks the challenge of the game, you're basically carrying a bunch of broken weapons in your back pocket. Flurry Rushes also have a MASSIVE window for activation, not that you really need them either way. I'm not expecting Sekiro combat, but I would've liked to THINK when approaching enemies, they all behave the same! Expecting your player to come up with unique solutions can be a good thing. I know you can build machines that help you fight, but the game never requires you to do that. I know freedom is the point of this game, but that results in really boring combat since enemies don't stand a chance against Link's abilities. It's not always fun to be OP

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1. STORYTELLING ~ Just like a film story can be tight (little to no plotholes, no unnecessary scenes) a game story can be the same way. It's hard to write a good Zelda story, and I don't think they did a terrible job. But the amount of plotholes and weird moments get in the way. They make things up as they go along (why can Mineru hide her spirit in Zelda's tablet, that makes no sense). They revealed in 2019 that this game would be dark, but I never got that impression. The story isn't bad, but for me, it's just kinda there.

You know which Zelda game has a tight story? Majora's Mask. For me, this is the ultimate Zelda story and TOTK doesn't even hold a candle.

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1. Dungeons ~ I could probably write a whole essay just on the dungeons and why I thought they were dissapointing. The worst dungeon in most Zelda games is better than the best dungeon in Tears (probably the Lightning Temple). They're really disappointing in almost every way except the music (which is excellent most of the time). I could write so much more about the specific dungeons but it would take too long to get into. The worst offender is the Water Temple, which is just awfully designed and incredibly simplistic

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1. World-design ~ The Sky was a letdown outside of the incredible first area. They feel copy-pasted most of the time, and the crystal puzzles were repeated endlessly. There were a few cool islands that felt unique, but they were few and far between. Just like the shrines, exploring the sky became tedious. I actually liked the depths, I just wish they had more significance. There's a lot of good materials down there, but the game is so easy to the point where you'd never need them

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TLDR: The amount of freedom this game gives you hinders the experience by making the game feel repetitive. I would much prefer to face a problem with one or two INTERESTING solutions than a problem with infinite solutions, because this way, finding the solution would be more satisfying and challenging, it's not a bad thing to demand more from the player. I'm not just talking about puzzle-solving here, I'm talking about everything. I played for 80 hours and while I enjoyed the game, I spent too many hours with my brain turned off.

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I know people won't like this comparison, but I think the Zelda team can learn something from Elden Ring. While there aren't really puzzles in that game, it asked you to think about your actions and your approach far more often. It had a much smaller world, but it was tightly designed world. You constantly had to think about your approach and go back to the drawing board when your strategy failed, I loved it. In TotK, your strategy can't fail because the game is lenient with everything.

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At the end of the day it's all subjective and I'm happy most people love it, but I think I think the game sacrifices too much for the sake of giving the player freedom. You can have an open-world Zelda game be tightly designed, but they deliberately didn't design the game like that.