That's what I did. I'm apparently in the minority. though, because I HATE it. But since I bought it digitally, I can't return it so I'm counting towards those 10M sales. I guess I'll just go back to my Game & Watch Zelda and keep playing Adventures of Link.

I also bought the Dragon Quest Builders game and hated that. It turns out I like classic RPG and action puzzler games but I don't like crafting and sandbox games. Now I know.

Yeah, I was surprised at the direction they took with this. Adventure + crafting is... Well, it's Minecraft's killer recipe, but those two modes of gameplay are different pacings. I think it was risky to assume Zelda fans would enjoy hitting the relative brick wall of strategic structural building.

I don’t know if you’ve discovered this, but you eventually get plans for your constructions. So you don’t have to constantly build stuff. You just need to build one very good car once.

Now that I've hit that part: yes yes yes they cracked the nut. :)

The addition of that game mechanic creates for the player a new type of puzzle in addition to the raw crafting puzzles: pattern recognition. Coming up on a jumble of nonsense, mentally parsing it out, and recognizing you have a template that can be applied to it is actually really fun (and even more exciting when you're doing it in realtime because some monster is bearing down on you).

I'm happy you like it. I felt the same when I started using blueprints in Factorio as I did when I unlocked blueprints in Zelda: profound elation.

This is why I always prefer physical copies of games. I actually really appreciate that Nintendo offers this still.

BotW was literally the only game I’ve played to completion in the last 5 years.

Nintendo knows how to lure in casual gamers.

eh? it had nearly universal high praise from reviewers.