The initial sky island is as easy as the beginning of BotW. The initial constructs are easy to defeat (a few hits with a branch, and they’re gone).

I think by the time you jump to the surface, you’re expected to know how to fuse weapons. This will give you an advantage, and makes enemies easier to defeat. But if you don’t fuse weapons and play the game like in BotW, it becomes really hard, since enemies are designed to be attacked with stronger, fused weapons.

The depths adds another layer, as there you find resources that will make defeating enemies extremely easy: bomb flowers, muddle buds and puffshrooms are extremely useful when used strategically. As long as you avoid large enemies and bosses, the depths difficulty level is not hard. But again, you need to use fused weapons.

The main point, in my opinion, is understanding the new mechanics you can use, and play the game using them, and not like you played in BotW. It’s really a different game in a lot of aspects, specially combat.

Edit: Oh, I almost forgot: in TotK, you have the help of the sages avatars. Contrary to BotW, this game is designed to play with them, and not completely alone. A lot of people just dismiss the avatars and go alone against enemies, but this game is designed to have them around you almost always. If you’re not using them, try summoning them and having them by your side always. They help a lot.

I agree, the early game is definitely harder in ToTK than in BotW. The vibe feels a bit similar to Noita, IMO, in that the odds are stacked against you, and you offset the disadvantage by making liberal use of as many overpowered combos as you can think of.

Anyways, my advice is really just that. Find good combos, and spam the hell out of them. One easy thing to do is to burn chuchu jellies to create red chuchu jellies. Then, fuse them onto arrows to create incendiary arrows. Great for dealing with crowds, and the explosion radius isn’t as big as a bomb flower, so there’s less chance of you accidentally killing yourself. Red chuchu jellies’s function similarly to fire fruits, but I just find that it’s easier to get a ton of red chuchu jellies.

If you’re in snowy areas, you can also shoot down some icicles and fuse them onto spears. That freezes any enemy that it hits, which is good if you get surrounded easily. You can also collect ice fruit/white chuchu jellies to make freezing arrows.

In general, you get way more arrows in ToTK than in BotW, so your playstyle will naturally need to lean a bit more into long range combat to make effective use of your resources

Here’s a couple other interesting interactions you can take advantage of:

• find (or ultrahand) a heavy object. Drop it onto the enemy.

• wind staggers enemies. If you find an enemy charging up an attack, take out a guster and blow wind at the enemy

While I think the overall game is harder than BOTW (especially some enemies), I found some boss fights to be less challenging while others were more difficult for me. When I started out with BOTW I was rather disappointed with the game as I had struggled with the mechanics but eventually got better and ended up loving it so much it became my favorite game. TOTK might feel easier for me as I already was familiar with the core mechanics from the start. Either way I ended up enjoying it like no other game.

I think it’s definitely harder, but it also gives you much more tools to work with.

I finished the game without realizing you could upgrade your armor, so I just ate a lot of buff food and healed myself up a lot.

I feel like the game is designed to force you to think more like an engineer than a melee fighter. You get smoked for charging in so youre supposed to hang back and figure out better weapon fuses and build gadgets to take out enemy groups. The tools are there for you but you have to use them. I think of totk as link as engineer.

It’s not so much that it was difficult, it’s that it felt a bit more unfair than BotW. It seemed like the regular grunts (Bokoblins etc.) were far tougher than they needed to be. Every single encampment of them would have a few silver ones and they’re just damage sponges - you just get through all your weapons just clearing out a small camp. Even the master sword felt like it used up a whole charge just taking out a few of those buggers. I shouldn’t have to completely rebuild and restock my weapon arsenal every time I clear out a small camp of fodder.

The game itself didn’t really feel much harder than BotW though. It’s just all these little encounters that annoyed me.

I play these games by barging as fast as possible away from the main plot. In TotK I was punished quite hard by this as I didn’t get all the skills until very far into the game (the auto build was maybe at 150+ hours until I unlocked and had all of the depths mapped)

Yes, definitely harder and especially the end game.

I basically never used food in BotW and didn’t really have to seek out equipment upgrades, but found it was pretty much mandatory for the final area after banging my head on it over and over.

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I felt the same at the very begining, however I missed like the first NPC and explored the whole sky island without unlocking shrines. Afterwards, I did the water temple first and had a hard time both with the boss there as well as the mud thing before you even get to the dungeon. Kind of sabotaged myself there twice in a row, the remainder of the game felt quite easy.

I feel like the beginning of the game was relatively easy compared to TotK

Wow, I had the invert experience. Game gets easier with time.

This is why the pros are paid the big money.