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.

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.

You can get really strong weapons really fast with Fusion, so I was able to take down black enemies with ease two hours after landing on the surface when in BotW, I was avoiding them for days. Other than that, I'd say the games are equal. The new enemies like Gleeok seem hard when you first run into them, but once you find a way that works, every enemy becomes a chump.

Shrines, on the other hand, I thought were harder but not in a good way. Where BotW asked you "Can you solve this puzzle?", TotK asks you "Can you get this to work?" and it's just annoying when you know what to do and still need to do it several times until it works.

In some ways I think players coming from BotW are at a disadvantage over coming to it fresh.

It took me hours (too many) to finally realize that it's a different game and I needed to play it as its own thing, not BotW 2. And as soon as that clicked it became much easier.

If you mostly play it as BotW, key additions like using thrown items take a backseat to dodge/flurry attack or such. Similar to how you might early on be climbing things as opposed to bouncing on a spring or finding a ceiling to pass through.

When it finally clicked, even though most of the BotW toolset was available to me, I barely touched it anymore.

Honestly the best learning experiences were the naked combat shrines. Don't skip those - they become incredibly easy after you finally get using the new mechanics available to you, but they are there to force you to adapt. Same as how some of the annoying puzzle shrines if you do them the 'right' way are there to force you to learn how to use reverse to solve nearly everything in seconds.

Many encounters can be solved as easily as an active Zonai flame emitter you just carry around with Ultrahand.

The bow in TotK is so much more OP than in BotW. Also, thrown stuff can straight up break fights - silver lynel in depths? Yawnfest with abusing puffshrooms and a near breaking royal armament.

The one area where there's a legit serious step up in challenge is the phantom Ganon world encounters. Those are hard fights even with all the tools at your disposal.

But the combat is much more tuned around preparation with itemization than in BotW. If you are having difficulty with parts, try using more items and play around with the options available to you. Shoot a powerful enemy with the muddle bud. Fuse a gloom sword to a gerudo dagger.

Playing it more like BotW is going to be unnecessarily painful. Forget what you knew, and don't be afraid to experiment with radically different approaches to combat from what worked in the last game.

Also, I recommend farming the spikes from the frost dragon when you see it in the overworld. Cheap and easy way to have a freeze weapon you switch between to set up your hard hitters (frozen enemies take 3x damage on the next attack).

I'm glad I'm not the only one that finds the underground creepy. I still haven't explored all of it. I cheese most of the fights with bows. If you have bombs, freeze items to fuse, keese eyes, and muddle buds you're pretty golden.

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

It's not difficult as much as it is tedious to fight regular mobs by just hitting them with a weapon since they are so spongey. You're intended to use all your gimmicks in combat to make quicker work of them.

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.

For me, it was hard because the button mapping made it incredibly difficult for me to sprint and jump. I cannot remember if BOTW was the same or different. I played through that just fine. Maybe I am just getting older.

The world of toothpick durability weapons killed it for me. Again.

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)

With enough hearts and stamina, the game is pretty easy, so I guess you can adjust the difficulty with the amount of hearts.

I found it easier than BotW. I died here and there, but I never thought any part was impossible to beat. I’m not a pro player, I’m a middle aged guy with a small family.

But in both games, combat is by far the worst thing in the game.

Maybe you didn’t upgrade your armors enough?

Overall it's not "difficult", I would say, but there are individual things I find difficult here or there. A couple bosses (looking at you, Water and Lightning Temple bosses) took me more than one try to beat, and there have been a few shrine puzzles I had to look up solutions for, but those are exceptions to the general difficulty. The most difficult thing to me for general difficulty is trying to figure out how to reach a lot of places in the sky. I'm on the " final push" to get all the shrines before I take on the final boss, and I'm definitely gonna get them all on the surface, but I may choose not to do all the sky shrines because I just don't know how I'm going to get up/over to them. In many cases, islands are just spaced out too far apart or too high for devices to last long enough to reach, and you can't really glide to them because you're always on a soft descent when gliding. Basically, sky navigation has me kinda stumped, and I may find getting all the sky shrines to then just not be worth it.