i don't know how else to put it. breath of the wild had these kind of basic ideas that combined to make an emergent physics sandbox people used to all kinds of comedic effect, but as someone who kind of only dabbled in that game in the end a lot of the launching and interactions tended to be painfully finicky even for basic use. minor spoilers from here on out
the ascend ability being described by the developers as a debug tool they decided to make a player mechanic really says a lot about what this game is as a sequel. it's a core aspect of numerous shrine puzzles and i feel like there are a bunch of caves and wells that are difficult if not impossible to climb back out of manually, but it also just has this aspect, even when you're using it in places that are obviously 100% intended, of feeling like something you're not supposed to see. or at least, that you wouldn't in a normal game
it feels like a huge understatement to say that this is not a normal game, and that feeling of seeing behind the scenes colors the other main powers in the game. the rewind feels even more like cheating than ascend, and the fact that it works at all, even on a gigantic mess of a walkway made of basalt that makes the game drop frames as i drag it around through the air, is baffling. it's not that i actually think that they made most of the hardcoded objects in the game literally with the ultrahand interface, but the feeling of assembling and unleashing your weird/cool/failureific constructions and janky weapons like spring-loaded shields on the world similarly gives a feeling like you're wearing the designers' shoes, and participating in a sense of...puzzling out the nature of the world itself, with them. i'm often reminded of this interview i was introduced to recently (although, it's really rather old, given that it's from an "Iwata Asks") https://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/3ds/zelda-ocarina-of-time/1/6/
'(Kazuaki) Morita-san17 at SRD programmed that. You don't just cut the sign, but float it in the pond. When Miyamoto-san saw that, he burst out laughing and said, "Now that's The Legend of Zelda!"'
the ideas that the zelda team have aspired to since ocarina of time and before of having disparate elements interact are brought to the forefront more than ever, particularly since you can do all kinds of utterly meaningless things like stealing a shrine elevator to put on a stick and club robots with. just because the elevator is there, and it's interactable
and to some extent this manifests in the more thoroughly designed areas being increasingly "cheatable" the more power you gain to fly around and climb on things, even more so than in breath of the wild. i pretty much feel like i went through the last of the main cycle of four dungeons backwards! i know this was something that already bothered people who'd loved the ocarina of time style, and there's a sense of irony in the idea that the same ambition that made that game one of nintendo's most influential has slowly taken the series so far from it
last year when i was playing a bunch of zachtronics games back to back, i was...well, first of all sad knowing that last call bbs would be the final game like it, but also struck by one of the central thematic undercurrents of the studio's work: the recognition, for good and ill, that everything on earth has been shaped by human hands and/or minds by now. and i'm hit by the same feeling playing this game, but even more strangely. the wild hyrule is a facsimile of nature, featuring rolling plains and tall mountains with boulders and trees everywhere. all of that stuff was put there by people, too, and that fact is unmistakable with minor puzzles and little guys hidden under rocks at seemingly every turn. there may be a narrative explanation for why there's a pile of wood and wheels every quarter mile down the road, but more than that, it's a reminder that you also get the privilege of building this world, if you want
you can also not. but even then, i feel like just seeing that stuff around once feels like the sort of thing you'd see just out of the shot in a little behind the scenes documentary
there's a bunch of other stuff i also think is interesting, but it's not related to this very directly. somehow this game is also my favorite sequel to final fantasy xv