The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (2023)

The critical and popular success of Tears of the Kingdom is understandable. The “multiplicative gameplay” concept developed for Breath of the Wild and taken to new heights in this sequel undoubtedly rewards resourcefulness, curiosity, and experimentation, thanks to a wealth of game “building blocks” that can be combined (almost) without restriction and a (seemingly) flawless physics engine. This formula is all the more effective because it is underpinned by art direction and a world that remain as captivating as ever.

However...

By pushing the boundaries of crafting and creative freedom to the limit, within a framework that was designed—and appreciated—for immersion and freedom of exploration, the game seems to cater to crafting enthusiasts at the expense of others.

As a result, it’s harder to recapture that sense of wonder at the open world—that blend of contemplative (yet never aimless) wandering and exhilarating rides—that the world of BOTW offered and that TOTK promised to elevate even further. In this regard, the new Hyrule struggles to distinguish itself from the old. Neither the sky islands nor the underworld fully rekindle the joy of discovery that the main area—already largely familiar to most players—can no longer provide. This may not have been their primary objective, but precisely: as has been noted elsewhere, it wouldn’t have been unreasonable for Nintendo—given the resources and energy invested in development—to follow through on the logic of the kingdom’s “tearing apart,” as announced from the game’s earliest presentations and in its title. For the player, it would have been all the more compelling if the cataclysm that concludes the introduction had left behind only “debris,” sometimes suspended in the air, sometimes buried in the earth’s crust, to astound us and draw us into a literal reconstruction of this world we had grown attached to a few years earlier—particularly by multiplying sequences of falls, glides, and propulsions across all dimensions of space. While failing to reproduce the “breath of the wild” from the first game, this “BOTW 2” would thus have breathed new life into the epic nature of its universe and narrative, both of which could have gained in depth and gravity.

As for the gameplay, it has been said that this game “goes off in all directions.” While this is primarily meant to highlight its generosity, the expression also suggests a certain futility: something that “goes off in all directions” often risks “getting nowhere.” In gaming terms, this amounts to cutting off the final part of the objective-challenge-reward loop, thereby depriving the player of any sense of fulfillment. That’s why the prominent role given to the “Ultrahand” and “Fuse” powers in this Zelda game ended up turning some players off. The endless assembly of artifacts, resources, and other gadgets to achieve results that are more or less useful and fun can become tedious... especially when the process requires crafting projectiles piece by piece—even in the middle of combat—that were previously easy to purchase from the armorer and store in the inventory. Even if said ammunition (for example, flaming or explosive arrows) isn’t essential, the tedious process required to obtain it limits the enjoyment their use should provide.

This last example is, in fact, typical of the changes made to the laws and lore of BOTW without proper narrative justification. The same goes for the Sheikah ruins and technologies, which may have become obsolete from an extradiegetic and gameplay perspective, but for which a few in-game references would not have been out of place, given how pivotal they were in the previous installment. It’s also a shame that the use of save files from the previous game seems limited to retrieving old mounts, which, incidentally, lose their appeal in this sequel so ostensibly focused on verticality. Taken individually, these shortcomings are minor, but when added up, they dampen the nostalgia of fans who are a bit too sentimental.

[Translated from French with DeepL.com (free version)]

Overall, an impressive game in terms of scope, and technical achievement, but several shortfalls that keep it from being perfect. Lots of people have written about the amazing things, I'll focus on the stuff that I didn't like, main ones being:

• re-used main map was a mistake, feels too much like BotW and makes one lose interest quickly

• start of the game is way way too meandering. I actually stopped playing in the summer because I lost interest, picked it up again to finish it a few weeks ago

• HOT TAKE - I personally think most of the main story quest is weaker here with the strong exception being the opening sequence and a few hours near the end. The sages in this game suck compared to the Champions.

Despite all that, it's an amazing game well worth the time, but certain elements hold it back, and some of the biggest achievements in it are not enough for me personally to keep playing and tinkering with it at this stage of my life.

I don't think I'm ever going to get around to finishing this game, so now's as good a time as any to do a write-up.

Breath of the Wild is my favorite game. It got me back into gaming after putting it down after a few years, and back into Nintendo games after not caring for nearly a decade. I was excited as anyone for Tears of the Kingdom. The early marketing was excellent, presenting an ominous, Majora-esque asset flip of the more melancholic BotW. I imagined deep crevices carved into the ground, exhuming all sorts of long-dormant horrors, forever altering the Hyrule with which I was familiar. I had faith that the long development time would be used to add all sorts of interesting content and well-designed dungeons.

My initial impression of the game was good. I enjoyed the tutorial island. Helping the overpacked Korok get to his friend was cute. On the surface, one of the first caves I found was the Majora tree stump cave. I remember feeling excited by the Japanese aesthetic for the shrine housing the piece of Fierce Deity armor, and wondered what other kinds of ancient architecture I'd find. Diving into The Depths for the first time was thrilling.

Disappointments, however, quickly crept in. The oddly specific over-packed Korok scenario quickly became contrived as I found dozens more. The tutorial island turned out to be the most interesting sky island by far, as the others were sparse and often copied multiple times. The tree stump cave turned out to be one of the few interesting caves, with most of the others largely using the same mossy aesthetic, with the same Horriblins and the same Japanese architecture housing the same BotW DLC armor. The Depths turned out to have a dearth of interesting content, my time largely spent stumbling around in the dark, avoiding the same enemy camps that absolutely litter the surface.

My biggest problem with TotK is how much it mindlessly copies from BotW. For BotW, the developers went back to the drawing board, and thoughtfully reconsidered all of the rote Zelda tropes that had accumulated in the series since Majora's Mask, like so many fleas. All of the pieces fit together. Take the memory system, for example. For BotW, the developers smartly crafted a smattering of nonessential vignettes, where the order in which you found them was not important, because it suited the open world structure of the game. Anyone with a brain can see that this structure does not fit the essential, linear story that TotK wants to tell. It felt like watching a movie with its scenes out of order. It also leads to big problems like Link spending all his time "trying to find Zelda," when he already knows exactly where she is, but doesn't bother letting anyone else know.

No one held a gun to Aonuma's head and said he had to use the same damn Korok seed inventory system, or shrine health and stamina system, or combat durability system, or memory-based narrative, or music. BotW was great in part because of how new everything felt. But Aonuma's team is already resting on its laurels, and I fear BotW's revolutionary template is already ossified convention.

The worst is how TotK handles BotW's map. Many previous points of interest are utterly devoid of content, including Thundra Plateau, Gut Check Rock, Hyrule Castle Ruins, and The Forgotten Temple. Areas with affecting environmental storytelling in BotW like Fort Hateno are downgraded to dumps littered with ugly brown-gray sky island slabs. I was baffled and offended when I made my way to Akkala Citadel, only to find an inexplicably generic monster cave where the citadel entrance should have been exposed. They really should have made sure there was enough to do on the surface before bothering with the dull-as-dishwater Depths.

Speaking of environmental storytelling, how bad is TotK's? What's the point of introducing another heretofore unmentioned technologically advanced ancient civilization? What happened to the Shiekah tech from BotW, including the army of laser-spewing spider robots and Divine Beasts that devastated the countryside for 100 years? I don't think they're even mentioned once. It almost feels like The Calamity didn't even happen. This created a huge disconnect from the world for me. All the ruins that felt so meaningful to explore in BotW felt like they belonged in a different game in TotK.

I haven't mentioned Ultrahand until now, because it felt largely superfluous to my experience with the game. On the tutorial island, I learned to my great disappointment that walking more than 50 yards from a boat I'd built to cross the first lake caused it to despawn. I was further let down after my first exhilarating flight on a wing part was cut short by the extremely stingy 30-second use time limit.

Ultrahand is barely integrated into the game. It feels like someone took the building mechanic from Garry's Mod, shoved it into BotW, and dumped a bunch of Lego parts everywhere. The game almost never requires its use outside of scripted events like the Death Mountain approach or boring green crystal sky island shrines; it's often faster and more effective to deal with the game's many enemies using the vanilla BotW combat.

So many elements of the game disincentivize its use. The building mechanic itself is finicky and time-consuming, and the distance and time limits are even more demoralizing. I was lucky to find auto-build early in the game, but the heavy Zonaite cost kept me from using it much. Maybe it wouldn't have mattered if going in to The Depths was fun, but mindlessly mining Zonaite felt like the worst kind of grindy MMO filler. I think the biggest tell is how many people complained when Nintendo removed the duplication glitch from the first build of the game. I normally side with Nintendo in these instances, but here, I think it exposes just how unfun and stingy the game is with resources.

I'm just scratching the surface of TotK's serious flaws. The "dungeons" are lackluster, and their "press these 5 or so buttons in any order" design uninspired. The repetitive sage cutscenes after the fairly enjoyable but too-easy boss fights are pathetic. Shrines are often just tutorials for Zonai parts, and can often be cheesed in unsatisfying ways. Sage powers are horribly implemented.

I'll balance all the negativity I just wrote by saying that I recognize that TotK isn't a bad game. If I hadn't played BotW, I'm sure I would have enjoyed it more. Maybe my expectations for the sequel of my favorite game were too high. And there are truly excellent moments that incentivized me to push through all the middling content, like launching off the roofs of sky ships into the eye of a snow storm, or exploring the super interesting Gerudo underground shelter, or fighting a Boss Bokoblin squad for the first time. But I can't deny that I resented most of the 100+ hour grind I put into this game, and I regret ever buying it.

I find it very difficult to rate and rank this game.

First of all, I love it. This is definitely one of the greatest games of all time, in my opinion.

I also like it a lot more than Breath of the Wild. And yet, somehow I think I like it less than I liked Breath of the Wild at the time. In hindsight, Tears of the Kingdom has made me like Breath of the Wild less. In fact, it has completely replaced Breath of the Wild in my mind. I feel like I have no need to replay that game now. Tears of the Kingdom is just Breath of the Wild, but better. It has made Breath of the Wild genuinely feel like a tech demo.

Right off the bat, I was very disappointed by the main quest. It felt copy and paste from Breath of the Wild. Start in a large but isolated area, learn the game as you complete three shines, meet an old dead guy, jump off that area into the real map, learn that you need to fix problems in the four main areas, go forth and do. Find a bunch of shrines along the way.

And oh man, am I absolutely sick of doing shrines. I did all 120 shrines in Breath of the Wild, twice. Now doing more of them in Tears of the Kingdom felt like an absolute chore. All I wanted to do was explore this new world, and every time I found something I would have to exit the immersion and do some dumb puzzle. And I'm a guy that loves puzzles. I well could have done without shrines this time.

Then there's the four main areas themselves--Goron, Rito, Zora, Gerudo. They're all kind of fun to revisit, and I do like the temples better than the divine beasts. But none of these temples are making any sort of top temples in Zelda history lists.

So yea, didn't actually love doing the main quests.

And yet, exploring this world is still such absolute fun. There are just enough changes in Hyrule to make exploring it again interesting, with new landmarks, tons of caves, and new boss battles. But now they've added the sky and the depths. Between those, you can spend dozens of hours just wandering around and doing side quests. And I did. I largely found the side adventures and side quests to be more interesting than the main quest.

So I went about going wherever I felt like it for about 60 hours until I felt like I was about ready to finish the game, so finally I went and finished the last few main quests. Only to find out that it's not like Breath of the Wild... there's still a bunch more main quest after you solve all the regional phenomena. By then I was already a little tired of the game, and I found out there's still several more hours of main quest to go.

The good news is that the late game did give me a renewed energy, and even though I got all the way up to 95 hours before I fought Ganondorf, I did really enjoy my time with the game.

That's the thing. I really enjoyed it. In almost every way this is so much better than Breath of the Wild, which was already my third favourite game of all time. But it's difficult to rate and rank because I still have so many complaints.

Here are a few:

• Exploring the kingdom is amazing, but moving around is not. Link's movement makes it easy to see how it was developed about a decade ago by now. I just finished playing Metroid Dread and Shadow of Mordor, and movement in both those games feels so smooth. Link, on the other hand, feels very clunky to move around.
• How in the world did they spend so long on this game and we're wearing the same darn equipment? I had to stare at Link for 95 hours. And he was largely wearing the same stuff he wore in the last game. Yea, there are some new pieces, but in my playthrough I just happened to get the items that allowed me to upgrade the armour pieces that are rollovers, and I wasn't about to waste too much time farming for items.
• Farming for items is somehow worse in this game! The drop rate feels really broken sometimes. Enemies that drop multiple items seem to have one item that is a lot more rare. Farming for things like Hinox Guts and Lizalfos Tails was incredibly frustrating.
• 90% of the voice acting is just "Link, you must hurry!" Bro, I'm not hurrying, I'm exploring. Leave me alone.
• Why do the Sages know exactly what to do as soon as they become a Sage? "Hey Link, I got this stone just now. Now I know how to make a carbon copy of myself. By the way I'm 10 years old."
• Speaking of Sages, why are you telling me how to beat the boss I'm fighting, as I'm fighting it? Let me do it myself! Give me hints if if I die once or if I go a while without dealing damage or something.

So yea. There's a lot frustrating about this game. And yet, somehow it's still probably one of my favourite games of all time. I'm just really going to have to consider how to rank this and re-rank Breath of the Wild now. Good luck me.

Spoilers.

After playing BOTW, I was most definitely looking forward to this game. Better yet now that I'm an adult and have money, I was so looking forward to seeing the memes, cool tips and tricks, lore, and the silly creations people have made with the new mechanics that they've added, all while the game was still relevant. Although I wasn't a first day buyer, I managed to get it a week or two after.

Grabbing the Master Sword the second time felt even greater than the first. (Especially finding out its location and who was keeping it.) The Side Quest have massively improved, new and faster ways to travel, even more fun ways to help (and probably torture) the Koroks and an awesome upgrading system, from outfits to making your weapons a WHOLE lot stronger. At times when I'm fighting an enemy, I completely forget about the new build system and items given to us that can fight these guys easily. It's hilarious what players have done to kill enemies at light speed. (Please tell me you guys have seen that one guy build an entire mecha)

Besides that, it seems we've jumped a couple of years. So, areas that weren't there before such as Terry town which was just a pile of rubble in BOTW is now available. Another find which has set many peoples alarms off is finding out that Links house is now... Zeldas?!? Now I would go into the theory that maybe their together but that would be an entirely different review, I will say though, that I totally ship it.

It's not often side quest leave a lasting impression on me and when they did, it was Nier Automata. Hunting for Bubbul gems seemed silly, Koltin, the person who we trade these for the items he offers, has a dream of becoming a mystical creature. This seemed silly at first but when you finally complete it. It's bittersweet and kind of hits home for me. I don't want to go into it much because I'd love it if you guys completed it and experienced it for yourselves.

Finally, I don't complain much but I would give this game a lower score because this game was 10$ extra, but that would be the companies fault not the game. )-:< (Please for the love of God do not do this.) It was either wait until Black Friday 2 years from now or pay it and enjoy its relevancy and be involved with the community.

Tear of the Kingdom to me is the climax point of the Zelda series. Taking many of the aspects of the huge 2017 smash hit Breath of the Wild (open world, weapon degradation, shrines, towers, etc.) and combining them with elements that people love from the "traditional" Zelda games (some more linearity, plenty of puzzles to solve, big bosses to fight and yes, dungeons), you get what I think is the apex of Zelda.

When I started Tears of the Kingdom, I felt a brief sense of deja vu. Hyrule looks very familiar from the 2017 game. However, it wasn't long before suddenly it felt like a much different game in many ways. Whether that is because of the new abilities or the new "worlds" you can explore, it truly feels like a unique game and not "premium DLC" like some folks claimed it was.

I'm not the biggest fan of "sandbox" type of games, but for some reason, I don't mind it in this one. Whether inventing crazy contraptions, cooking interesting meals or creating massive weapons, the possibilities are endless and it's so much fun to try things out, even if they fail. Trail and error is one of the things I like best about great video games, and this one has that element down almost perfectly.

The size of this game is huge. I still have a lot of game left to play, but I've done enough that, barring something drastically happening, I feel I have a good idea of the game.

The Switch is an aging platform that is struggling to run some of the latest titles. However, the Nintendo magicians did it again, and made what is an absolutely beautiful game that runs for the most part smoothly. Yes, later parts of the game sometimes chug a little bit, but never even close to the point where it's "game breaking."

One bone I do have to pick are the controls. They can be awkward at times. I was finding myself often accidentally throwing weapons when I didn't mean to, or the camera zooming in at times I didn't want it to, or just forgetting things like shooting special arrows.

Overall, this is another masterpiece and more proof that nobody can top Nintendo when they are "all in" on a first party title.