Tears of the Kingdom: Defeated 2 temples in a day - but at what cost?

I don't have any idea how far along in progression of the main story I am in Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom but based on how much of the map I have explored I would guess that it is a fair amount. I still think I have a long ways to go and that is just fine with me. I haven't yet gotten very involved in the myriad of side-missions that the game has to offer and I think I will wait to do those until I get hopelessly stuck at some point.

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The reason for this is because I have ruined many open-world games and got sick of them because I tried to do too much and got side-tracked badly then started feeling like the game was "too long."

Yesterday I had a day off work and returned to monke nerd and played TotK for like 7 hours straight and completely two of the main objectives in the game.

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My first temple that I conquered was the Water Temple and to me this was one of the most interesting parts of the game thus far. When you get there the place has weak gravity or something along those lines and this enables you to jump and then glide all the time, which is nice because generally speaking I feel as though walking feels a bit sluggish in this game at times.

There was a downside to the weak gravity though and that was you could easily mistime a jump and fall to your death. Thankfully Zelda implemented a feature that would only take a single heart away and reposition you at the side many years ago rather than insta-death that was so annoying about many other games in the past and even made to this day.

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The next temple, well, the next one for me, was the Lightning Temple and while I didn't find the temple itself to be all that difficult I found getting to the damn thing to be profoundly difficult and something that might have made me walk away from the game altogether had I not looked online for a little help.

In this area there is a constant sandstorm that makes your map useless so most of the time you are simply wandering into the distance hoping that something will appear in front of you. Eventually if you do enough walking around you are going to find Garudo Town, which honestly, wasn't spelled out very well for people that are playing this for the first time.

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once you do actually get into Garudo Town, which is necessary to progress the story, you basically have to mess with everything and sadly, speak to quite a few NPC's in order to progress the story. This was the only part of the game that I have encountered thus far that I found unnecessarily tedious. I think there are a lot of people out there that enjoy drawn out cinematics, but for me, I would rather play a game that never had them at all. TotK's only weak side that I have experienced thus far is the voice acting, which is surprisingly shite when you consider the massive quality of the rest of the game.

The price of the Zora "fish frogs" had a voice actor in it that sounded like multiple characters from South Park only it was being done in a serious fashion. It just sounded really out of place but to be fair, none of the voice acting including that of Zelda, has been particularly good.

As far as the main quest is concerned I only have one more temple to complete and then who knows what? I have been intentionally avoiding any spoilers at all unless I get hopelessly lost. One of the only things I have looked up was how to navigate the sandstorm because while it was fun at first, it grew to beyond annoying when you would wander aimlessly for ages only to be one-shotted by some massive mega-boss in the middle of it all that I didn't even see before it killed me. I will say that I enjoyed the main bosses of both temples immensely. They recommend you to to the Sky Temple or Wind Temple first but the boss of that was huge and most of the time I was trying to simply navigate towards it rather than having any sort of real strategy in its defeat. Had I not brought far more food than a person should really consume in a single battle, I would have constantly lost that one. The subsequent boss battles I found to be much more "fair."

The cost of these battles being won was that I used a lot of arrows in both battles and from what I have read arrows are a valuable commodity that you need to use sparingly. I guess I'll cross that bridge when I come to it but I am hoping that it isn't a game-breaker because I don't know any fast way of gathering arrows.

Also, the damage I am taking will likely be the next thing I need to overcome. I feel like I have been getting much better weapons over time but my armor remains awful to the point where even rather minor enemies will take away like half of my health bar with a single strike. Elemental attacks from enemies will normally take away my entire health bar and this can't be the way the game is designed. I must be doing something wrong.

If you have any tips that aren't super-spoilers I would appreciate it.