Why would Zelda need to step back from its most popular iteration yet to go back to a formula that seemed worn out by SS?
That also does not sound like Nintendo nor do I think they would green-light a “mature” battle focused game like ER themselves.
You may as well combine both into a new ip that focuses on dungeons, puzzles, & battle rather then separating Zelda into two distinct styles or using Golden Sun as a proxy.
Oh no no no. You missunderstood me. i love Botw, Botw2 is my most anticipated game, and i was so happy about BotW because that was what i wanted for the most part.
I thin they overdid it on the dungeon front. I like the concept of shrines, but the sameness of the beasts, how short they fellt, the lack of theming, those are aspects that can and should work within BotWs framework. What they need to do now is, see where they moved to far away, and where they can push it even further. One aspect people did not like was "find dungeon key, enter dungeon, find dungeon item, finish dungeon", but we got another formula: find village chief, find champion ancestor, find resources, do minigame, enter beat, finish same looking beast, done.
The exploration spect was great, the more open nature of those dungeons was interesting, but not all of them need to be that way.
And in regards to battle: while it had the deepest battle system of all 3D Zelda games... in the end its still not the strength of this game, the exploration (and atmosphere) i, + the free form physics system.
But now that im thinking of it, one of the biggest aspects of GS was that it was a Story Driven JRPG that also hat great dungeon design, so that aspect would be overlaping with zelda...
(I barely finished SS back then, but played BotW i think 6 times)
And with mature i still dont mean the dark fantasy kind. Just a IP with more nuanced writing, less black and white good/bad guys...
Just look to BotW and its Inspiration, Mononoke: even with all simularities, the Movie was playing with the aspect that there was no good/bad seperation, but diferent goals, wished, etc. The humans were not just bad. Thats what i mean by mature.
(By the way, an aspect that GS did bettere, since you had the character switch between 1 and 2 and the discussion if its better to let the world slowly die but have it save for the most part, or open up the seal and risk geting it to the state it was where they decided to seal the elemental powers because it got to dangerous... in BotW you literally are fighting the essence of malice)
And no, its not nintendos style, i was more speculating what i would like to see them try.
