LogFAQs > #973311477

There really isn't much story in BotW to miss out on. Some fun worldbuilding and such that fleshes out the lore, which is interesting enough to be worth exploring, but the whole story boils down to "Ganon kicked Link's ass 100 years and kidnapped Zelda, now Link feels better after a big nap. Go wake up the four giant robots that will shoot big lasers at Ganon and then you can stab him and win and save the princess." There'll be some characters and locales in TotK that might not mean as much to you without the background of having played BotW, but as far as I know it's mostly standalone and so long as you can guess that Link ended up stabbing Ganon and saving the princess last time, you're sufficiently caught up.