watched a few minutes of the nerrel totk vid and immediately got the vibe of "oh no it's Normie Gamer Takes nerrel time"
the matthewmatosis vid on botw is one of my favorites, it feels like a sincere conversation with the design ideology of the game. how it tries and sometimes fails to push against the treadmill mindset, making a case for inconvenience as motivator for ingenuity, and ultimately praising the commitment to player freedom while still noting its drawbacks
I know he's busy with game dev, but I hope he comes back to write something on totk with the same creator-lens framing. whether he likes it or not doesn't matter, he's one of the few essayists who gives you something to chew on, rather than settling for surface-level assessments of Content™️
(chris franklin had some posts recently that overlapped with MM's video: botw and totk don't all the way commit to their resource-management systems and eventually hand you ways to conveniently circumvent those impediments, making the games less mechanically robust as you get further into them)