Iwata’s dead, Shiggy’s checked out, and there’s no one to tell Aonuma no.

What the fuck is this.

I really shouldn’t be surprised, but I still am. This is the same game. It's the same people who made Breath of the Wild. I loved the first game, but still didn’t pay attention to the hype cycle of this one at all. I guess all the paraphernaleous cultural impact still seeped in somehow.

Remember when people thought there’d be playable Zelda? Fucking lol.

This review is only based on the five (5!) hours it took to get the paraglider, and I gotta say, it only kept making me appreciate the Great Plateau in Breath of the Wild more. The thematic cohesion. The mystery. The framing of how that whole game was going to work in miniature. What my abilities would be, what my relationship to game information would be like, what kinds of emotions I could expect to experience playing that game.

Maybe Tears of the Kingdom is a fine game. Maybe it is every bit as fun to exist in as Breath of the Wild, in theory. But in practice, it won’t be, can’t be. It didn’t start in the wilderness, letting me discover its game essence on my own terms. It started with a prestige-game walking-sim lore dump. A lore dump that ended with a bunch of Hot Anime Nonsense™.

Zelda and Link confronting mummy Ganon was like walking into the mid-season finale of a show that’s already on its second or third season. Except I’ve already played the previous season, and that context did not help me at all! Ganon’s no longer a miasma, but a dude with a voice? And there’s a goat dragon that’s Zelda’s great-great-grand-furry? And the Master Sword’s just useless?

Here’s my beef. All of this is great for trailers and generating “hype” because “hype” is fueled on speculation and curiosity. But the elements that generate hype are not the same as the elements that fuel a sincere emotional connection with a character, story, or world. I’m frustrated because Breath of the Wild knew this so well.

The old man on the Great Plateau was mysterious, but allowed to be goofy. He was generous, but mischievous. You could see him in different contexts, learn about him by exploring his house when he wasn’t around. There was a fun little emotional connection built up by being around him. The twist of his true identity, and the further twist of his ultimate fate, made me feel little pings of emotion. Nothing fancy, but he was the tutorial NPC. He primed me to think, “Oh, this is a game and a game world where it’ll be fun to get invested in people.” And he was the perfect segway into telling me what my mission was, what the stakes were, and why I, the player, should care.

The goat dragon great-great-grand-furry is none of this. We know he’s dead when we first meet him. His dialog makes no sense. There are a ton of slave robots on his little island that he comments with surprise are still running. Did he not program them? Can he not de-program them? Am I supposed to feel something about how he made a race of robot slaves? Are they sentient? I would have rather had signs in the ground Super Mario Style telling me all the tutorial things I needed to know. Because it feels weird for a robot to jovially say “Hey, there are some robots that’ll try to kill you, so, like, don’t feel bad about killing them. Here are some combat tips for killing them!”

And then his sequence at the end of his tutorial level practically screamed to me, “Hey, remember when you felt something at the end of your time with the Old Man in Breath of the Wild? We’re doing the same thing here! Don’t you feel something? Don’t you remember loving that?” And like yeah, I do remember that. And now I’m mad you’re trying to copy your own damn homework without understanding why it worked the first time. I have not built up a relationship with great-great-grand-furry goat dragon. I do not know why he is chill with Zelda. Honestly, all the statues with him and Zelda holding hands at the end of every shrine is weirding me out! Is Link a cuck now?

I want to say this is all superficial, but it’s really not, because everything about my time with Tears of the Kingdom so far felt like it was being led around by the tail. This is a re-skin of Breath of the Wild, but it doesn’t even have the decency to be honest with me. If we’re gonna have shrines, and they’re gonna function exactly the same way, why did you go through the bother of giving them new, thematically incoherent designs. Why do the upgrade orbs need new names, new lore. Changing the shrines’ glowy color from blue/orange to green is a downgrade, actually! Those other colors were a lot easier to see at a distance in a game world that has lots of green!

Jumping ahead of myself for a moment, I knew I was done when I unlocked the first new Shiekah Tower. (You can’t even call them Sheikah Towers anymore, these days!) The emergence of the Sheikah Towers in Breath of the Wild was iconic, cinematic, promising adventure in a changing world. The equivalent cutscene in Tears of the Kingdom felt like getting a homework assignment. Hey, someone you know has already explored the world, had time to build fantastic structures in every corner, and just needs a cable guy to come by and make sure the wiring is up to code! You know, that person who was a 100-year old loli in the last game! Well, now she’s been aged up to guilt-free fuckable waifu status! And she’s super plot relevant! You’ll get to talk to her more than Zelda over the course of the game, probably!

Seriously, that loli was my least favorite part of Breath of the Wild, and Tears of the Kingdom felt it important to put her loli portrait on her encyclopedia page?? When she will never look like that in this game??? She has the gall to rename Zelda’s magic iPad after herself! I was thinking about her (and taking internal bets as to whether she’d be a waifu or had somehow de-aged even more) hours before I saw her.

ANYWAY. None of what I said so far really matters more than the gameplay. And a Great Plateau 2 this was not.

I was so disappointed with how linear this was. In theory, I understand the concept that led to it existing the way it does. Tears of the Kingdom is a Lego game. It purposefully had sections of little Lego kits structured in a way where pieces from one would not mix with pieces of another and confuse people who have never touched Legos before. But giving kids Lego kits can change the way they interact with Legos. Hell, I remember I thought it was sacrilege when my sisters disassembled my Bionicle to make their own Voltron-esque monstrosities. But to them, who had not, could not, would not read the instructions, their style of play was more intuitive, more pure than mine.

Fundamentally, Tears of the Kingdom was not encouraging me to think for myself, to become resourceful, to seek my own path through things. It was priming me to expect that for any task that needed to be accomplished, the tools and materials would be provided for me. And without the spark of original creativity, putting the Lego pieces together was the dull monotony of fulfilling someone else’s factory work blueprint.

When I saw the jumble of lumber next to a korok in an adorable backpack, I immediately mentally put together what needed to be done, and thought, “What kind of Nintendo Labo bullshit is this?” The tediousness of rotating wood, sticking it to a hook, waiting for the korok to go down the slide - this was minutes of gameplay execution from the seconds of intuition I had of what the game wanted from me. And the reward was a measly two gold turds. I felt like I deserved five.

I feel like Aonuma has gone off the deep end. He’s spent so long in this game engine that he’s forgotten what made the original Breath of the Wild experience so special. He’s made a game for speedrunners without designing a game for the common folk first. In Breath of the Wild, the myriad systems, the freedom of choice, the hidden depth of the game’s chemistry and physics mechanics - all of those were introduced slowly in juxtaposition to a Link who had nothing but a shirt and a stick to his name. Everything felt special because the game beat you down and dead early on to make you appreciate and critically examine anything that could provide the slightest advantage to survival.

In Tears of the Kingdom, you gain the ability to Ascend through ceilings, (without stamina cost!!!), before you get the option to increase your stamina. Before you have even found anywhere worth climbing, any heights out of reach. There is nothing to instill that feeling of “I can’t climb there now, but some day, I will!” This is so wild to me. That emotion will never blossom when you’re given a cheat code at Level 1. It will cause people to look for places they can exploit their cheat code instead of… engaging with what was the entire foundation of the freedom of exploration in the first game!

Cannot overstate how much I felt something thematically crack inside of me when Tears of the Kingdom did not even suggest the possibility that I could upgrade my stamina wheel with my first blessing, locking me into more health. For a cutscene.

For a god-awful cutscene where Zelda fucks off before we chase down some NPCs to chase down some other NPCs to watch her fuck off again.

Does this all sound nit-picky? Do I sound insane? I sound petty to myself! But I have to be honest, this game failed to ignite my curiosity! And I gave Breath of the Wild 5 stars! It really does make me wonder how much of a game experience is built on the expectations built by its opening hours. In a way, if the only difference between Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom is the introduction and framing, that would be a valuable lesson on how important those beginning elements are.

I know that’s not the only difference. Tears of the Kingdom is anime as fuck. It’s tacky as hell. I lost it when Zelda’s magic iPad made the real-world iPad camera shutter sound.

Tears of the Kingdom is not a new game. It’s a jerry-rigged retrofitting of an existing game by an old man who saw Fortnite once since 2017, approved by a company who has no idea what he’s doing or why the old game sold so many millions of copies. Of course they’d be up for a direct sequel asset reuse that sounded vaguely like Minecraft! I’m just disappointed that the same team who showed they were capable of creating such a fully realized thematic throughline of a game were content to corrupt something beautiful just for the sake of convenience.

Maybe Link’s awful haircut and corrupted hand are a perfect visual metaphor for this game’s soul. A bunch of concepts grafted onto something great with no regard for how inelegantly they clash, while also showing a lack of maintenance to keep what came before presentable.

I’m so glad I didn’t pay $70 ($70!) for this game, or else I would have felt obligated to stick around long enough to understand the gacha mechanics enough to get mad at them.

——

June 28th 2023 Edit: wish different reviews could have different play statuses. Oh well. “Completed” the game with more words,, but in my heart this review should stay Abandoned.

Reviewed on May 13, 2023


31 Comments


10 months ago

Though I personally disagree. I can completely see where you are coming from. The great Sky Island was a slog compared to the Great Plateau. But I still love the experimentation in this game. For example, you can fuse a mine cart or bomb flower to your shield. Which allows you to ride on rails, and get launched upwards like that one scene from the Zelda cartoon. There are almost always multiple ways to clear a puzzle, for example. In the Ultrahand shrine, you were supposed to build a cable car, but you could also just use the plank as a ramp to get to the track. And shield surf down the track instead.
The enemy variety is also drastically improved, fixing one of the biggest complaints of BotW. And the regions are also very different from how they were in BotW. They are filled much better, with tons of caves and new area's to explore. It really takes off once you get the paraglider (which you are not far from now).

I agree that the tutorial took far too long, and was not even close to being as engaging as the one from BotW, but trust me. When you are let loose in the world. It will feel less handholdy and more like Breath of the Wild. If you have the time, maybe try it out for one more hour. And see if it finally clicks.

10 months ago

arbitrary contrarian review

10 months ago

Removed by a moderator

10 months ago

No idea why people are getting mad over this review. Seems like you didnt like it which is understandable

10 months ago

Incredibly good review, thanks for writing it. Fun fact! Did you know that the Towers in this game will stop you from activating them if you dare to explore the game yourself at all before meeting up with Purah? That's right! The game forcibly locks you into progressing the main story quest before you're allowed to actually engage with some of the most important parts of the open world, despite the freeform engagement with the open world being one of the core things that made BotW addictively fun. And don't worry, it doesn't stop here! You are almost guaranteed to stumble upon other things, go "woah that looks awesome!" and then run into invisible walls that will all but shout at you that you're not supposed to be here until later in the story. It's fucking lame. They spent all of BotW crafting an absolutely precise formula to keep you sucked into the game, and then promptly hit their heads on a particularly hard rock and forgot everything about it before making this one. I cannot for the life of me understand it.

10 months ago

Well said. I was floored by how unbelievably closely and hollowly this game structured itself off Breath of the Wild just adding more fiddly mechanics, which isn't an uncommon observation, but I haven't seen many others point out how much cornier it all feels than that game either. I've played a good deal further along and some of the cutscenes found through the reused 'Memories' mechanic feel like the OoT plot put through a shonen anime filter.

10 months ago

@Wboy2006 I think why the customizable approach didn't grab me in this game was because the Ultrahand and Fuse systems felt like several abstractions too far. Breath of the Wild felt like a fantasy RPG with an aggressive campaign against functional fixedness. Tears of the Kingdom's brutal utilitarianism of every object and enemy stripped away the set dressing too much for the customization to still feel fun. Killing a bokoblin in BotW by dropping a crate on their head still felt like fun because I still perceived the scenario as a slapstick way to kill a goblin. Doing the same in TotK did not have the same effect, because crates had already been recontextualized as building blocks first, fantasy crates second. Even the bokoblin design felt like it had stripped away the soul of the goblin essence to make sure I could see the crafting utility of new giant spikey horn on his head, and a bunch of stuff was tacked-on to his back so he could hold crafting materials for fire arrows. The game mechanics were laid too bare for me to feel clever for any solution I came up with.

I appreciate the context that the beginning of the game did not present itself strongly. Perhaps I'll borrow it from the friend I played it with last night after he's gotten however many thousand korok seeds this game has.

@9arc I assure you, I wish I could be flippant or arbitrary! I would have to pay attention to games media way more than I do to know what consensus is enough to be an intentional contrarian!

@Livingstone I had to look up whatever zillenial term "cope" was, and that seems like what I'm doing? Writing about my feelings and disengaging from an experience that wasn't sparking enough joy? Who are you talking to by leaving that comment, besides me? For who's benefit are you claiming my insanity, while degrading a website on an account on which you have written 2.7x times as many reviews as I have? I do not know what you want from me.

@NOWITSREYNTIME17 2 stars in my rating system means that it's fine, it's C rank, it's middle of the pack. I didn't actively dislike it, but after playing enough of BotW, TotK was not showing me enough that was new and interesting to motivate going through another 100 hours of what was being promised. Maybe if it was my first, I'd have enough curiosity to keep at it, but I don't think the looming cloud of the first game could ever clear enough for me to feel that same level of engagement.

@Shymain Thank you, I just needed to get my thoughts out while they still felt fresh~
Oh wow that's terrible! That's a fundamental misunderstanding of BotW's appeal! I recall BotW only having one invisible wall in the the snowy mountainous region! The underlying context that you could be fighting Ganon right now was what made everything else in BotW so damn funny! I'm cooking frogs and and dyeing clothes while Zelda is soloing the world over there - hilarious! I sincerely wonder if this is what Aonuma and his team came up with if they were trying to make another game more like older Zelda games. They make so few games so far apart that I could understand returning to the well dredging up some antiquated design philosophies for everything they actively didn't think about in the last game, namely cutscenes and story.

@NoArrows They seriously re-used the mechanic of using Zelda's magic iPad to try to recreate her Instagram feed?? I think the anime-ness of BotW was overlooked and potentially lost because of how good the character designs and art direction were, but that doesn't apply in the sequel. The art of Tears of the Kingdom was not built-up whole-cloth from the ground up to serve the kind of experience they wanted to make. Trying to tap into BotW's aesthetic for what a very different gameplay experience showed more behind the curtain than I think was intended. BotW was so beautifully centered around such a blue palette that the harsh pivot to yellow and green no longer plays to the style's strengths, and what was cool and mysterious now feels weird and tacky, especially when characters are moving and talking like anime characters. Ocarina of Time did not have a good story, it had ground breaking gameplay! People remember the story only because that was the more tangible and familiar element people could latch onto for talking about their experiences! Frustrating!

10 months ago

This is honestly one of the best reviews I've ever read, no joke.

You encapsulate all the feelings I have for the game perfectly.... I cannot believe Nintendo is charging 70$ for what basically amounts to an asset flip.

10 months ago

Dont know if it's a good thing alcorion is agreeing with you :hedgewtf:

10 months ago

Have you even read my reviews bro? Most of them are like a single sentence long. You write ENTIRE ESSAYS. Also "cope" has been a part of the English vernacular for awhile now. What I want from you? WHAT I WANT FROM YOU? Idk

10 months ago

Bro spent more time writing the review than playing the game

10 months ago

This review took longer than 5 hours to write 🤯

10 months ago

Finally, a review that isn't simply dicksucking the game.

10 months ago

I'm in huge agreement with your assessment about the trailers leading up to the release of the actual game, and "Tears of the Kingdom is a Lego game." is a strong sentence. Based on your overall assessment of it, it sounds to me like they're going back down the path of Ocarina, Wind Waker, and Twilight Princess in terms of linearity. Which is a bummer, because they always sell.

Do you think you think it would've been better if they just called it Breath of the Wild 2?

Also, unrelated, Pikmin 2 in your top 5 is incredibly based. 😎

10 months ago

Gonna agree with steven, pikmin 2 is kino

10 months ago

relax, it's just a game

10 months ago

good bit

10 months ago

Five hours to get the paraglider? What the heck were you doing? Even with some excess exploring and going after landmarks I had it in around two and a half. I literally cannot comprehend what you could do to not get it

10 months ago

im probably not playing this game for a really long time bc it seems really whatever to me based on the reviews on this site for it, or what i can glean from them at least, but i will not stand you besmirching link's new design. it's such an improvement over botw's design imo. and from what i understand it might be the only positive change from botw in the whole game lul

10 months ago

This is really not a well written review, sometimes less is more.

Anyway, what bothered me was the comment at the top. I roll my eyes anytime I see the old Aonuma boogeyman drawn out once more. Aonuma made the dungeons in Ocarina of Time, co-directed Majora's Mask, and directed Wind Waker and Twilight Princess. He hasn't been directly involved in the creative aspects of Zelda in over a decade. All of your problems with Zelda don't stem from Aonuma, but the actual director, Fujibayashi. Though I see I'm talking to someone who bizarrely gave Breath of the Wild a 10/10 while hating Tears of the Kingdom, gave Ocarina a 4, and Majora's Mask a 5. Perhaps there is no reasoning with you!

10 months ago

@Alcorion Of all the games for Nintendo to start charging $70, this was both the only one and the worst one to start with! The fact that they brought back the voucher system to the US just in time for this game to advertise them on it's eShop pre-order page kinda tells you everything you need to know!

@soraflorida I am still working on the review for which that is 500% true.

@roboSteven Tears of the Kingdom is a god-awful title for anything. The fact that Nintendo had to clarify what the title even meant should have been the marketing department's first clue they done goof'd!

@NOWITSREYNTIME17 Pikmin 2 is not one of the best games ever made, but it is one of my favorites.

@Livingstone looks like a previous comment of yours got removed, wish I could request to have it back :/

@brockreiher [https://www.tumblr.com/ommanyte/181137865935/how-dull-for-you-to-live-your-life-without-any](no), writing this was just as fun as the game itself

@AllstarBrose I was playing in a group that was passing the controller around, so there was a fair bit of faffing about as people got used to the wacky new controls and argued over the most efficient way to fail to glue logs together. But perhaps our experience wasn't super isolated!

@Snigglegros if this is a bit my life is a joke and I'm waiting for the punchline

@Ninjabunny I will say that on his design's initial reveal, I was all over it. Very strong Princess Mononoke influence that made me hopeful the rest of the game would be able to keep up that level of energy. In game, however, it was not a corruption, but a grafted arm, and I very much did not like the close ups of his dragon furry fingernails. It pulled me out of the game world a lot because it made him feel like a level editing cursor rather than an action RPG adventure character.

@chill99 I agree! I put very little effort into this, I just got my thoughts out after my friends left and posted at like 3:00am! I was expecting to be buried in all the newer reviews from people who might know what they were talking about, but here we are!
Also very fair that Aonuma is probably not the one who directly made every choice that I didn't like, but he is the face the company is using to sell their creative vision for the final product, so I feel fair in using him as a stand-in for taking shots at the team's collective decisions. He is, in some ways, still responsible, even if it was not to be smarter than to allow what came to pass to come to pass.
And a correction about my rating system - I find it interesting you sought out what scores I gave other Zelda games but did not read my profile to understand how I use stars on this site! I rank games F, D, C, B, A, S, and use the stars to approximate them the best I can. F is .5 stars, D is 1, C is 2, B is 3, A is 4, S is 5, with half-stars between meaning B+/A- type of thing. I imagine a C would be a 6/7 out of ten at a typical game rating place? I have no idea how their rating distributions work these days, I haven't read anything that contributes to a MetaCritic score in like a decade.

So! The Zelda games, (of the ones I've played enough to have an opinion on), based on my current scores are:
S-tier: Breath of the Wild
A-Tier: Skyward Sword, Minish Cap, Tri-Force Heroes, Wind Waker
B-Tier: Majora's Mask, A Link Between Worlds, Twilight Princess
C-Tier: Ocarina of Time, Link's Awakening Remake, Spirit Tracks, and now Tears of the Kingdom.

I'm not saying Tears of the Kingdom is a bad game, just one that feels uninspired. Or more accurately, it failed to inspire me to desire more of it. Majora's Mask proved that reusing assets is not the same as an asset flip, and I would not say that Tears of the Kingdom is that, either - but I did not detect an identity that felt distinct more than expecting me to love a mod-pack for a game I loved half a decade ago. As @Wboy2006 said, perhaps I ran into the part of the game I would have liked least, first! But if on the other side of that hurdle is Breath of the Wild, but more, I'm not sure I'm that interested.

10 months ago

yeah pikmin 2 is kino, very interesting zelda ranking. I'd put majoras mask In S, botw in C, OOT and albw in A. Very different lists we have

10 months ago

please unsubscribe me from this chain, thank you

10 months ago

how the hell did you take 5 hours to get the paraglider? it's like 1h30 or 2h maximum

10 months ago

It's interesting reading this as someone who's not nearly as passionate about BotW. The only particular note I have is that the ascend ability isn't really that busted since plenty of natural structures can't be climbed with them.

How do you feel about the fuse ability? It's probably my favorite part so far, giving many items extra utility and enhancing the more improvisational feeling of combat I think the BotW was going for.

10 months ago

do you think it would diminish Link's standing as a man if Zelda were to become romantically involved with someone else? did this perceived diminution of manhood, as noted in your wondering if Link is a "cuck" affect your reading on the game at all? (or I guess I should say the game's tutorial, which it apparently took you quite a long time to compete. no shade meant, I think games should accommodate players of all skill, even those who lack it)

10 months ago

@DeltaWDunn I understand that Ascend is easily rendered unusable from a level design perspective, but I dislike that one of the core mechanics of Link's transversal discounts his stamina wheel. It's a step further into a Creative Mode type of experience that's unappealing to me when I thought climbing was so interestingly balanced already.
Fusing leans in a direction of crafting and collecting that isn't appealing to how I typically play games. Part of what I liked about the first game was how little time was spent in menus. In that regard, fusing arrows is a fantastic way to further harmonize the experience of having variety in combat with minimal thought and subtly increasing the number of interesting decisions that are made for resource management. But for everything else, it feels like it only chops up the same behaviors the underlying combat system encourages, with hoarding and withholding of choice weaponry now seeping into a couple more decisions of menu management. I understand that for some people that is the appeal of this type of game, but I prefer my spreadsheet games and my action games to be more distinct.

@PierreMenard Link does not deserve Zelda, she deserves someone at least as cool as Urbosa. This Link is also developmentally under the age of 20, so he is a literal child and too young to be corrupted by concepts of manhood.
And if you did not find things to distract you from the main path in a game (now game series) meant to distract you with your own curiosity every few steps, maybe I engaged with this game more honestly than most people did? I was exceedingly thorough in looking for fun in every square meter of tutorial sky world. Why would I try to speedrun my first time with a game the likes of which we won't get a sniff at for another half a decade? How is lack of speedrunning a new game an indication of skill at all? (Also I mentioned in another comment that I played this with a group, so play time was inflated by multiple people failing to rotate logs correctly.)

Loved your parenthetical word-play, would heart your comment if I could. I'm too honest to serve up burns that cold XD

10 months ago

Did yall really let someone who played the game for 5 hours live in your heads rent free like this, the amount of shit that's just wrong in the first couple paragraphs alone lol

9 months ago

How are you dissappointed that a sequel to a game about freedom gives you more freedom? Why were you under the impression that the Ascend ability is some sort of cheat code? You cant climb an entire mountain with ascend unless you are under it. Oh no, the game tricked you into exploring in order to find a cave! It's almost like the devs want you to explore, boy, I wonder if that's intentional. Jesus christ what a bad review.

9 months ago

zelda series makes people turn goofy as hell