Developer: Nintendo
Available on: Nintendo Switch
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom should be a case study on how to do a sequel right.
Not only does it bring forth a mountain of innovation that sets it apart from its predecessor, Breath of the Wild, it also expands upon everything that made it great, fixes everything that proved to be annoying, makes dozens of balancing changes and quality-of-life improvements, and crammed even more content into its huge map.
Just like in Breath of the Wild, the player starts in a tutorial area to ease them into the world before letting them loose. This time around, the tutorial area is even more linear and restrictive, but it’s for the best. All of the runes from the first game have been replaced with brand-new abilities, and these have bigger learning curves.
With the Ultrahand ability, you can move virtually any object in the game and glue them to others, allowing you to make just about any structure your heart desires. With the Fuse ability, you can attach virtually any object or material to your gear, making them stronger and/or giving them useful effects. With the Recall ability, you can reverse the trajectories of objects, and with the Ascend ability, you can swim through ceilings that are directly above you.
For the developers, it’s a much more ambitious arsenal of tools to make work. It’s impressive that they didn’t shy away from the challenge. It’s mind-blowing just how well they executed it.
Tears of the Kingdom comes with an incredible physics engine. Every mass moves exactly as you’d expect it to. Every structure you build, no matter how many components are on it, behaves realistically. The way they shift when they’re struck by a moving object, the way they tip over when one side is too heavy, the way they sit just below the surface of the water when they’re only barely buoyant enough to float — everything is realistic, intuitive, and predictable. In my over 100 hours of playing so far, I’ve only encountered two minor instances of jankiness. To get it to work so well in a game with so much freedom is a huge technological feat, and the developers made it look easy.
The first few hours of Tears of the Kingdom had me just as awed as the first few hours of Breath of the Wild. Not 20 minutes after getting the Ultrahand ability, I was chopping down trees and using them to build makeshift bridges, boats, and trollies to get from one sky island to another.
Everything is taught organically. There’re no pop-up tutorials or annoying NPCs holding your hand at every step. The game simply puts obstacles in your path and places the tools needed to overcome them nearby.
The utility of the Ultrahand is even further expanded with the game’s many Zonai devices, such as fans, wheels, rockets, flamethrowers, cannons, etc. With them, you can quickly whip up all sorts of vehicles and weapons of war. Attach a fan to some wood, you have an airboat. Attach some wheels and a steering stick to a stone slab, you now have a car. Attach some fans, a steering stick, a construct head, and a cannon to a wing, you now have a fighter jet complete with an AI-powered wingman.
Whatever contraption you can think of, you can build. The world is filled with delightful puzzles and engineering challenges that put your problem-solving skills to the test.
Building stuff is what gets the most buzz on social media, but it’s far from the only thing that makes Tears of the Kingdom a step up from its predecessor. Just as striking is how much the original game’s core mechanics have been tweaked and improved upon.
Resources are much more evenly distributed around the world. Thanks largely to the Fuse ability and the ability to throw materials, many of the materials that were practically worthless in the first game now have uses. All sorts of convenient items that once felt scarce, like bomb arrows or those wind-generating korok leaves, can now be put together using the everyday stuff that you pick up in the thousands.
There are a lot of other little improvements. To name a few, weapons and gear can now be dropped without diving into the menu, the sensor’s noises are a lot less annoying, the waterfall-climbing ability from the Zora tunic was redone, nighttime monsters are much less common, and Yiga clan members no longer ambush you every 30 seconds (thank god).
The developers also didn’t shy away from healthy nerfs. The stamina bar refills a little slower (or at least it feels like it to me), hearty items are less useful and rarer, the Bomb rune is gone in favor of bomb flowers, and there’s now a cooldown after harvesting an item from a dragon before you can do it again, among others.
Perhaps the most impactful alterations deal with weapon durability. In Breath of the Wild, combat rarely feels worth it because the weapons you break in the process almost always outweigh the rewards you reap. Though I technically don’t have the numbers to prove it, it feels an awful lot like weapons last longer and enemies have less health in Tears of the Kingdom.
Additionally, thanks once again to the Fuse ability, powerful weapons are never too far out of reach. With materials picked up from defeated enemies, you can quickly transform weak weapons into big damage dealers. Stronger monsters now carry stronger materials for your weapons, meaning there’s more to gain when you take them on. Without the fear of being left with nothing but sticks afterward, I’ve found myself much more eager to charge into combat in Tears of the Kingdom.
What didn’t change was the key that made Breath of the Wild so great: there is no wrong way. From the moment you obtain the glider, every corner of the map is within reach. Where most open world games still force the player to do things in the order it wants them to, Breath of the Wild grants the player the freedom to do whatever they genuinely want to do, and in the manner they want to do it. Tears of the Kingdom maintains that structure.
At one point while playing Tears of the Kingdom, I noticed a sky island that appeared to be perpetually in stormy weather. Curious, I made my way over and, after walking around some, I came across a temple of sorts with a mechanism that made the storm go away. I then quickly noticed a mask-like object and approached it. It spoke, identified Link by his name, and told him (me) to escort it to a spot at the end of a beam of light. This led me to an elevator that took me to a spot in the Depths, and from there, I was asked by the mask to find the other pieces of its body and help reassemble it. Transporting each of its body parts back to the assembling machine presented interesting engineering challenges. Then, with all these tasks completed, the game unveiled that I had just resurrected one of the sages needed to defeat Ganondorf.
What started as “Huh, that looks interesting” ended in me advancing the game’s plot in a significant way. The game didn’t have to give me a novel of dialogue pointing me in the right direction or feed me some explanation as to why I should bother. I was driven by genuine intrigue and a desire to help. That’s the epitome of an adventure game, and in Tears of the Kingdom, that’s what every moment is.
Of course, no game is perfect, and even Tears of the Kingdom is no exception.
I’m not a big fan of the side activities that involve escorting a korok to its friend. Though they sometimes present interesting challenges, most of them just feel very tedious, and the game seems to have a knack for requiring me to go in the opposite direction from where I was headed to complete them.
I’m also not sold on the Depths, an inverted and more hostile version of the above-ground world. I like the idea of a more challenging area, but so far, the Depths feel mostly barren and tedious. Since it’s all the same color palette, and you usually can’t see very far ahead, it lacks many of the “huh, that looks interesting” moments that make the rest of the game fun.
There are other nitpicks if you go digging for them. Many of the sky islands are almost identical to one another. The dialogue from NPCs isn’t as charming this time around. The glider isn’t given to the player right away when they’re let loose, which is annoying.
That all said, I don’t know if there’s a single person out there whose expectations weren’t met by this game. At all levels, from broad concepts to the finest detail, Tears of the Kingdom outshines its predecessor.
I’m excited to see what Nintendo will have in store for the next installment of The Legend of Zelda. I can’t imagine they’ll top Tears of the Kingdom anytime soon, but then again, I thought the same about Breath of the Wild.