Tears of the Kingdom ascends Zelda to new heights
Breathing life into a familiar Hyrule
No series in Nintendo’s library has seen a meteoric rise in popularity like The Legend of Zelda. The success of Breath of the Wild as the Switch’s launch title and sendoff for the Wii U catapulted the franchise into the mainstream, providing players both new and old the chance to experience the world of Hyrule in an expansive, open world.
It’s been years since Breath of the Wild released, and arriving upon us is its sequel Tears of the Kingdom. While its predecessor consistently found ways to break norms and expectations in gameplay, Tears of the Kingdom aims to return some series staples while still providing enough nuance and innovative ideas to breathe new life into its returning Hyrule.
Its unique combat mechanics and traversal gives players the building blocks to perfect their own adventure, while offering a new story that raises the stakes high above the skies of Hyrule.
The game prominently features the sky islands floating above the surface as a traversable area, provided you have the right abilities to make it to any one of these islands early on. The centerpiece of these, the Great Sky Island, acts as a tutorial for the player to get their bearings together and learn the game’s main mechanics. Shrines are reintroduced here, and like its predecessor act as fast travel points. Link is imbued with new abilities channeled through his left arm, similar to Breath of the Wild’s Sheikah Slate, and they’ll be unlocked through the game’s initial shrines.
Focused on object manipulation and travel, Link can pick up and attach most objects found around Hyrule with Ultrahand, similar to Magnesis from the previous game. Ascend grants Link the ability to travel upwards through solid objects, while Recall allows Link to briefly reverse time on a single object. The Cryonis and Remote Bomb runes do not return, but their purpose lives on through new items you can throw to affect the world’s elements and enemies. Losing unlimited access to bombs adds a bit of challenge to combat, but you’ll have plenty to options to work with by using the Fuse ability.
Fuse adds a new wrinkle into combat, as Link now has the ability to combine some objects and consumables with swords, shields and arrows. Doing so enhances their power and durability, a main point of contention among fans of the previous game. You can combine two swords to create a longer one, or even fuse a mine cart to a shield to create a skateboard. The new mechanic removes the need for its predecessor’s elemental arrows, as you can fuse items with different properties to replicate these features.
These new abilities open up a whole new world for players to experiment with, and find combat methods that better suit their play-style. The world is your sandbox. But that’s not even scraping the surface of what’s possible, as Tears of the Kingdom features new Zonai devices capable of turning shields into flamethrowers and jetpacks, even allowing you to build hot-air balloons and vehicles to better traverse Hyrule. While you can freely create what you like with these devices, you can find schematics for specific creations.
Hyrule has expanded not only to the skies above, but to the depths below. Aptly titled as the Depths, the area below Hyrule serves as a dark and dank mirror of the surface. Shrouded in darkness, the Depths house gloom-infested monsters and labyrinths amongst the ruins of Hyrule’s ancient past. While this area lacks the same nuance and discovery the surface and sky islands have, it does offer the player various opportunities to gather new items found exclusively underneath the surface. You can even dive straight from the sky islands into chasms leading to the depths, although you may experience some slight pausing as you do.
The game has an expansive cave system that further encourages exploration, typically rewarding the player with a gemstone or cosmetic from the previous game. New puzzles and returning ones, such as the Koroks, breathe some life into an open-world that’s often criticized for its lack of interesting things to do. While a welcome addition, the rewards from these puzzles typically don’t feel as beneficial as they could be, often relying on meals that give low-effort resistances or buffs, or free sleepover tickets for use at the game’s stables. The same goes for the game’s side quests, although the addition of side adventures more than make up for it.
SPOILERS BEYOND THIS POINT
Tears of the Kingdom takes place an unknown number of years after Breath of the Wild, and while it may seem intimidating for new players to jump into the sequel without playing the first game, there’s rarely any mention of the previous game’s events outside of a few instances. This was disappointing, as the Divine Beasts and Guardians are such important machines within this Hyrule’s era that their near complete omission in Tears of the Kingdom feels unnatural.
Gone in Tears of the Kingdom is malice, having been replaced by an even sinister life-sucking substance called gloom. Reports of soldiers and citizens being infected with the substance near Hyrule Castle lead Link and Zelda to investigate, discovering that it’s being secreted by a mummified corpse deep below the castle, a glowing hand holding it at its chest. The hand loses its grip and gives way, a strange gemstone falling towards the two. Zelda recovers the mysterious gem, but not before the corpse reanimates and attacks, leaving Link severely injured, and the Master Sword in pieces. The two are separated as the corpse uses gloom to lift Hyrule Castle into the sky, an event known as the Upheaval, with Zelda being transported away and Link seemingly rescued by the glowing hand.
The game’s introduction is dark and dreadful compared to the grand and magnificent feeling expressed by Breath of the Wild. The game still has its opening moment, and as impressive as it is, it almost doesn’t feel as majestic the second time as it did before, perhaps due to the now-familiar nature of the game’s large world.
The game follows a similar structure to Breath of the Wild in which Link is tasked with solving strange phenomena across Hyrule’s major regions before facing its root cause, this time being Ganondorf, who hasn’t appeared in a new mainline Zelda game since Twilight Princess. The Zonai are prominently featured across the game’s world and items yet rarely appear in the game’s story, with its only exceptions being King Rauru and Mineru, his sister. Link can discover Dragon’s Tears which show small recounts of events from Ancient Hyrule’s Imprisoning War, and these eventually lead to information that will help Link in his journey to stop Ganondorf. Unfortunately, the structure in which this story is told is erratic and inconsistent, meaning you may recall parts of the story earlier than anticipated.
I am not a fan of this game’s narrative progression. While the story itself is an improvement over Breath of the Wild, I expected the sequel to feature a more linear storyline. In truth, the story is more complex than its predecessor, yet reutilizes its similar method of relaying information. Completing the game’s dungeons rewards you with new details, but only once, as its information is repeated several times over.
Just like Breath of the Wild, you can forego the game’s story and advance straight to its final act without ever completing any main quests. I take no issue in this being a feature, as it provides a grueling challenge for speed-runners and those who don’t care to seek out the game’s story. However, the amount of freedom given to players in Tears of the Kingdom feels like it diminishes the game’s story, which isn’t told as satisfying as it could be.
Outside of the main story, side adventures are a new addition to the game, and add a bit of world-building to Hyrule. These are often multi-sectioned side quests involving conflicts amongst the game’s side characters or mysteries across some of the more notable areas in Hyrule, such as the Forgotten Temple. These provide better rewards than standard side quests, and provide a small escape from the game’s main quest, as well as showing the passage of time between Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom.
Hyrule has a whole has experienced quite a bit of cataclysmic events between the two games, and it shows across its world. Enemy encampments can be found in notable areas such as Fort Hateno, pirate ships occupy parts of the East Coast, and parts of the Gerudo desert have succumbed to quicksand. Some of these play into additional features the game has, while others are just consequences of the Upheavel.
The Verdict
Tears of the Kingdom often doesn’t quite feel like a sequel to Breath of the Wild, but rather, an enhanced reworking of its properties and elements. There’s plenty of content to experience throughout Tears of the Kingdom, whether its the game’s side adventures, shrines and main quests. They are virtually all improved over their predecessor’s offerings. Hyrule feels livelier than before, with much more things to do.
Not all of it hits for me though, and it’s mostly due to the game’s reused storytelling function that Tears of the Kingdom misses its mark of being a perfect game. The story works, but leaves me craving more yet again. While unlikely to receive any downloadable content, I think the game could undoubtedly benefit from it, as disappointing as it sounds.
All things considered, I enjoyed my time with Tears of the Kingdom, all 300+ hours of it. It is a technical achievement that a game this large is able to run fairly smoothly on the Switch. Keep in mind this is Nintendo’s first $70 game. One can only hope that Nintendo continues to improve the open-world experience, as it’s fair to say that the new age of Zelda is only just beginning.
Total Playtime: 335 hours
Total Completion: 66.69%/100% (Koroks really do count for a lot of this)
Final Score: 9.5/10
