Breath of the Wild is like ice cream, a sweet treat that a majority of people love, but loses its allure when consumed in excess. Tears of the Kingdom, on the other hand, is like one of those cookie ice cream sandwiches. Just like plain ice cream, they’re pretty damn good, but they’re easier to get tired of and are arguably more divisive.
Tears of the Kingdom takes Breath of the Wild, slams some layers on either side of it and throws in some new stuff and story changes in the middle. It's great but it can certainly be a bit much. For example, the new layers - the sky islands and the depths - are massive additions to the game, but fall a bit flat when fully scoured. There’s a lot of cool stuff in both spots, but when the player delves deeper, they realize that it's a lot of the same cool stuff, making the whole experience a little less magical. Finding an underground coliseum challenge is cool the first time, but the second time? The third time? It's just not the same, and the first time isn’t as powerful as a result.
There’s certainly an argument to be made that the sky islands and depths should have either been fleshed out or shrunk, but maybe the excess isn’t so bad. After all, a vast majority of players aren’t going to be in the game long enough to see this repetition in the first place. Of course, unique content is always better than repetitive material, but in a game like Tears where the player is constantly getting new materials and tools, each new instance of a previously encountered situation or problem is a chance to experiment with new solutions, something that can’t be said for other games with repetitive content. Ideally, the new areas would just have new, unique puzzles, but a game like Tears is a case where it works, or at least can work depending on how the player approaches it.
Speaking of the tools Tears provides, gone are the Sheikah tools from Breath of the Wild, in are the new Zonai tools Link gained from his cool new arm. Rewind allows Link to move an object back in time, primarily utilized to solve puzzles and to gain elevation using fallen rocks, but also has uses in combat. Ascend is pretty simple, it allows Link to swim up through ceilings and pop out on the other side, very useful when exiting the caves, another new addition to Tears. Fuse lets Link attach items to his weapons, shields, and arrows, a cool way to strengthen Link early on, but almost a necessity to ensure fights with stronger enemies don’t take forever. Ultrahand is the big one, it lets Link build machines using his new arm to move things like magnesis did to metal items in Botw. It also allows Link to glue items together. It's a little clunky and the creations push the switch to its limits, but it's the selling point to the game for a reason, and gives the player more options than anything in Breath of the wild. Autobuild is the last new tool, and allows for the recreation of previous machines even without all the materials (at the cost of other materials of course). The camera also makes a welcome return, and works just as it did in Botw. Tears also incorporates most of the Sheikah abilities from Botw in some way. Bomb flowers work kinda like the Sheikah bombs, ultrahand does everything magnesis does and then some, ice flowers and ice weapons can create ice slabs on water, and rewind can freeze items temporarily if turned on and off right away (that one is a bit of a stretch).
The story is in the same format as Breath of the Wild: Link needs to explore the world and collect some memories to put together the whole picture. Unfortunately it doesn’t work quite as well in TotK. Because of how the memories are structured, seeing them out of order doesn’t work nearly as well as it did for the more disconnected ones in Botw. A shame, because the method of collecting dragon tears is far more interesting than simply looking at pictures and locating where they were taken. The order in which things are collected is actually a problem in other aspects of the game; the paraglider is missable now, as it is given after an interaction in lookout landing rather than when leaving the initial area. It's a baffling decision considering how important the paraglider is to exploration. Autobuild is also tied to a completely missable sidequest in the depths, another odd decision when building things is such a huge part of the game.
Tears unfortunately doesn’t fix some of Breath’s biggest issues, such as menuing which is even worse (especially the arrow fusing menu) and weapon durability is even more divisive considering how having good fusible items is almost as important as having weapons to fuse with in the first place.
However, this ice cream sandwich tastes kinda good actually.
For all the issues this game has, actually playing it makes them melt away, especially early on. Tears is not a game meant to be 100%, it's meant to be played as long as the player finds themself engaged. The sheer inventiveness on display here is staggering, Tears allows the player to do and try things that no other games do, and that's an accomplishment. Problems be damned, there’s plenty of fun to be had and memories to be made in Tears, and it deserves the recognition its garnered.