The weapons durability bothered me at first. I kept thinking I'd eventually be able to repair them or something. Eventually I realized it was kind of fun because it forces you to try new weapons constantly. The only mechanics that I find tedious are buying/selling and cooking. I'd way rather a Skyrim style interface to set up a transaction with all the items you want and then confirm it. BOTW is exhausting when you want to unload a bunch of junk or cook 100 hearty durians.
I also really don't like the BotW cooking mechanic, but mostly because it's so tedious to sit through the mini cooking cut-scene.
Cooking and crafting in Stardew Valley have zero ceremony, you just click on the recipe and boom you're done, it's exactly as fast as any other inventory operation.
I don't know why certain cooked foods in BotW stack and some don't. Searing meat is a good way of stacking up a huge amount of cooked food, because it stacks.
I kinda like the charm of the cooking animation. I feel like it's more fun than other games that turns crafting into "just press the button in the menu". Especially with the environmental cooking methods, why shouldn't I be able to cook my meat on the ground with a flaming sword?
If I was designing the Zelda cooking system:
- definitely some sort of bookmarkable known recipes book that gets brought up from the cooking pot instead of paging through the inventory
- asynchronous cooking; I don't mind the cooking animation, just give me multiple cooking pots and let me move around while it (quickly) cooks
- holding more than 5 items at a time, like hold 50 drumsticks to throw all at once onto a firepit to sear
- big batches (upgradable cooking pot sizes), why not throw 100 apples into the pot for 20 servings made at once?
TOTK added a recipe system where once you cook a meal, you can select an ingredient to view all meals containing it and automatically select all the ingredients for a specific meal. Which is at least part of what you want.
I would definitely agree that things like cooking 100 hearty durians gets really painful after a while though.
The cooking mechanic was kind of broken because there were a tonne of in-game guides and quests leading you towards the "mix and match different recipes, experiment and find the best buffs for a situation" when it became basically "four bananas" was the only one I ended up wanting to use.
it's a little bonkers that there were so many recipes in that game, but cooking a single yellow-heart item was more effective than any healing recipe, and there was no bonus effect for mixing or being thoughtful.
