>You're proving my point.
The opposite, I'm showing your point doesn't hold up to different interpretations of noteworthy. It's your weakest point. You repeated it (and others), so I'll repeat in turn.
Caves in TOTK are one of the most noteworthy additions, not "barely noteworthy."
Not barely noteworthy in time, with more content than most Zelda games' main stories. Not in uniqueness, they're memorably different, each with identity, a giant leap from OOT grottos reusing the same small room. Not in size, some are huge. Not in number at 147, beyond any Zelda. Not in content density, which you criticize other places but overlook here. You can't have it both ways. Caves are handcrafted with designs that encourage spelunking. Finding hidden passages and alternate routes to get their Bubbul gems, treasures, items, and armor demands attention to detail, sources of light, and an overall careful exploration of nooks and crannies. Great climbing physics made me feel I'm really exploring caves. They're noteworthy to Nintendo, who put Blupees near their entrances, counted them in completion, had Satori blue beam them for completionists, and worked them into many quests. They're noteworthy to players, who love them, and they're celebrated in reviews.
>caves look and feel the same as each other
They're memorably different, each with identity.
For examples, in the Southern Mine Cave has a mine cart theme park mini game with 2 difficulties where Link flings arrows at balloons while traversing a multi-lap track. In the Eventide cave, while on a mysterious island you enter a hidden arch via watercraft on the unseen side of Koholit Rock to discover a pirate hideout, complete with pirate ship. After battling these pirates, you use boards to bridge their ship to a hole in the cave wall to discover the Marari-In Shrine. In the Meadela’s Mantle Cave you discover a lore book about a Skyview Tower blocked off on the surface, then raft through a vast underground waterway, drop down a waterfall, and construct a platform so you may ascend from below into the very same mission-critical Skyview Tower foreshadowed before. In the Ancient Tree Stump cave you enter the base of a hollowed out mega-tree to find beneath it a tangled system of gnarled roots to skillfully navigate while Keese bats try knocking you off. Memorable moments take place in caves, like how YunoboCo HQ's cave features a bespoke boss battle with an old friend, now under an evil influence, where the slopes of the arena accommodate the fight mechanics.
I could continue. These are just normal caves. I'm not even talking sprawling mega-caves like the Royal Hidden Passage that branches off the Emergency Shelter, which took me hours to explore.
>Thank god you can get checkmarks on the map once you got the frog in a cave, or else it would be absurd to be expected to remember which ones you've been to.
The checkmarks are convenient to completionists, to skip targeting Bubbulfrogs with Sensor+ or jotting notes on paper.
>I don't think anyone was saying those were good in the first place
Quality's relative so I demonstrated the quality of TOTK's caves through comparison. They surpass caves in all Zeldas, none come close.
>There is a labyrinth in BotW that functions the same as the ones here. The only difference is that there is more of them here. The ones in the sky are better only because they're easier and you don't waste as much time in them
The sky mazes aren't the same gameplay experience to the ground mazes. As I said, they work TOTK's verticality and sky theme into the gameplay as you bob under and weave over aerial gates by skydiving then catching updrafts. When little, I had fantasies to fly with a jetpack and these scratched that itch. Some like the Lomei Sky Labyrinth, in Akkala near the Ancient Tech Lab, were high enough to be fun exercises in Hyrule engineering to even approach.
I explained the appeal of the ground mazes, and you repeated yourself, so I'll repeat in turn. They're a homage to Maze Island from Zelda II, which are like The Maze Runner (2014), maybe inspired. Director Wes Ball is doing Zelda's live-action movie. They're epic, imposing, and grand in presentation, with larger-than-life walls that feel a mile high, threats that maintain tension, and treasures to reward you for going off the beaten path. They have fun gameplay for people with a modicum of navigational ability. I enjoyed every minute of them.
>There are a couple moments in the game where it tries to get you to make devices to get to a place, but really all it is is that you need to upgrade your energy capacity.
Like grinding levels in an RPG, one can brute-force some TOTK engineering puzzles by grinding early for crystallized charges. I wouldn't want to cheat myself out of limits that drive the creativity that makes those puzzles fun.
>I really think you're overstating them.Those are all small changes overall.
The differences in the Gerudo area fundamentally change the gameplay experience. Stop the gameplay at a random moment and your engagement with TOTK's world probably feels novel. I explained how, and calling changes small doesn't negate how. For the desert the flooding totally changes your navigation strategies and gameplay approach. New caves and shrines are everywhere, so novel discoveries are constant. Ground's broken apart from the Upheaval so terrain is often new. The desert now has quicksand and sinkholes all over (some leading to caves and sprawling undergrounds) that change navigation and affect quests like Sand Seal racing. The whole desert's now shrouded in a sandstorm. The Gerudo took shelter in a new subterranean village to explore. You raise a whole pyramid from the desert sands as a major feature of the landscape, which you explore in full. It's not just the desert either, like I said the Goron area has cooled, you rebuild Lurelin after it's attacked by pirates, the Rito area is frozen, and other changes.
>the Gerudo area doesn't feel like a new area
How the player experiences that area has fundamental differences, with new quests, new story, new areas, new caves, new terrain, new sinkholes, new shrines, new bosses, new cutscenes, new people, new monsters, new sky islands, a new sandstorm, new flooding, new quicksand, a new mini-game, a new settlement, a new dungeon, and a new companion. Is it the same area? Probably, but not only. The problem's people without much info hear "TOTK's the same areas," think it's only that, and get wrong ideas. Those wrong ideas feed myths like "expensive DLC."
>I also didn't even mention how I don't like the skydiving because I feel like it trivializes traversal in the overworld. On the other hand, if you played the previous game, you're already so familiar with the overworld that I guess giving you even more precise fast-travel to start with makes a degree of sense. That's what the caves and wells really are, a thing to motivate you to not just jump from key location to key location.
Beyond caves and wells, the new shrines, new quests, new people, new geography, new seeds, new armors, new chests, new mini-games and other new content also motivates traversal.
It's your best criticism, though fast travel's elective. Players can opt out or limit usage if it's not for them.