Honestly, it’s hard to know where to begin with this one. Breath of the Wild was already such a massive and innovative new chapter for not just the Legend of Zelda franchise, but for gaming as a whole; setting the standard for open world games going forward through an eminently engaging set of systems that allowed for a nearly endless loop of creative approaches to gameplay and overworld exploration. It was going to be a lot to live up to, and it would have been understandable had the sequel simply ended up as Breath of the Wild 2 and little more. The familiar setting and assets built upon from Breath of the Wild initially create a sense of familiarity that, at first blush, belies that idea of a sequel that iterates without further innovating itself. The game begins with a strong, alluring atmospheric hook, alluding to a darker, more unnerving game to come. The tutorial section greatly mirrors that of Breath of the Wild, but feels more restrictive in spite of the seemingly limitless capacity your newly bestowed powers offer. Ultrahand, Fuse, Ascend, and Rewind fundamentally change the way in which you interact with the world, offering a host of new and varied systems to engage with that remains always accessible while offering an incredible creative ceiling for committed players to test the sandbox limits of. Personally, I’m not the type to design, test, and build such complex creations, but I’m very happy that these systems exist in the game for players who get a lot out of such creative freedom, and that I am not necessarily forced to utilize them beyond a basic level, and do not feel like I’m missing out by not engaging with it more. That freedom of choice, a philosophy of complete non-restraint for each player to approach the problems and puzzles of the game as they see best, is the inspired tenet which compels these games to truly embody the “open” nature of the open world game.

Where Breath of the Wild excelled in giving you the space and tools to learn how to interact with its world before shoving you off with complete freedom to go and do whatever you felt like first, including the endgame, Tears of the Kingdom stumbles slightly, but it surpasses Breath of the Wild in just about every other category as compensation. To prevent this from becoming strictly a comparison piece, inevitable as that may be considering how much dna these two games share, I’m hoping to get most of the juxtaposition out of the way here so I can expound more upon the game as its own entity thereafter. The similarities feel greatest early on, with the tutorial space of the Great Sky Islands mirroring that of Breath of the Wild’s Great Plateau, to an almost imitative degree. The new power set allows for a more customized journey to each required shrine you need to progress, but they still manage to create large enough roadblocks to force you into a largely linear pathway until you complete the tasks on the island and skydive onto the main world of Hyrule. In Breath of the Wild, once you finished the Great Plateau, it was off to the races. There was nothing important left to do other than check out the main quests, or not, and dive into the expansive world that lay before you. Tears of the Kingdom presents ostensibly the same practice here, but in reality, you don’t have near your complete toolkit yet, and when presented with your main missions they are suggested with a touch more emphasis of order. If there weren’t a point of comparison to contrast Tears of the Kingdom’s opening with, then there wouldn’t be such a complaint here, as ultimately, it’s still a fine presentation that offers you freedom of approach after you leave the tutorial area. It’s just that Breath of the Wild presented its opening act with such elegance, and at the end you felt truly unbeholden and ready to explore in any direction you could imagine. For how much more there is to Tears of the Kingdom, the beginning felt like one step forwards, two steps back. But that so much more truly starts to show itself after the slightly rocky introduction.

Playing on launch, one of the biggest gifts the developers gave us was the tight-lipped secrecy of the games sheer size and depth. For those who paid attention to all the promotional trailers and gameplay demonstrations, it had already seemed like Tears of the Kingdom was going to be a gargantuan game with its expanded map in the sky and the limitless potential of weapon fusion and building mechanics. And those things certainly do add to the inconceivable mass of this game, but as we were speculating, we had no idea just how massive this new world was going to be. Utilizing the same base map and known locations for Breath of the Wild could have been a risk for returning players, as that familiarity could fail to offer a feeling of freshness if not properly recontextualized. I don’t know why we’d ever doubt the Zelda team to follow through on making sure the Hyrule we know so well from Breath would feel both recognizable and completely new to us upon our return, because of course they delivered on that. The world of Hyrule is probably my favorite part of Tears of the Kingdom, because it is absolutely stuffed with environmental storytelling that builds upon the disastrous impact of the previous game’s events while speaking thematically to the struggles of a populace to put the pieces of their community back together after such devastations bring ruin to their worlds. The characters and sidequests intermingle to tell a larger story of humanity, of collective survival and rebuilding. The story of Tears of the Kingdom is not simply of Zelda and Link, but of the many disparate peoples of their kingdom, coming together to rebuild their society in the wake of multiple worldwide disasters. Every time I saw Addison, the meekly assistant of the Hudson Construction Company, holding up his sign in the middle of a field, or on a frozen road high up in the mountains, I would drop everything to assist him. This frequent puzzle distraction you’ll come across in your journey is a great example of how the game marries its new systems with the story it wants to tell. You’re meant to use building materials that the Hudson Construction Company has been placing throughout Hyrule to help with the rebuilding of the world to prop up these signs with your Ultrahand power. You’re rewarded every time you do, but frankly the actual materials you receive are practically insignificant. The real reward is the immersion and satisfaction you feel in contributing to the restoration of this community, one road sign at a time.

There are some more significant sidequests sprinkled throughout the world that take this communal engagement to the next level. The defeat of the pirates terrorizing Lurelin Village, and its subsequent restoration, is a big one in terms of giving the player a feeling of accomplishment, especially as the events affect characters spread throughout the world, as they hear about your efforts in restoring their homes and come back to them to continue living as before. There’s a mayoral election sidequest in Hateno Village you can partake in which sees you secretly learning about the two candidates and how their visions of the village’s future are rooted in unique but equally defining characteristics for the community there, and how they might be an influence on one another for the shaping of the community as it continues to grow. The stable quests send you around the entirety of the map, learning about different struggles people from every area of the world are plagued with, which are then solved and recorded in a circulating newspaper you’re helping to bolster along the way. All of that is just side content, totally superfluous to the main story and not at all necessary to beat the game in any way, shape, or form. And yet, I was actively avoiding the main quests to do many of these activities throughout my playthrough, because I was so invigorated by these characters in their world that I was more compelled to engage in their relatively small scale conflicts than the big blinking indicator on my map that said I need to clean up the sludge in the Zora Domain. Now, that’s not to say the main quests are lacking in compelling narrative immersion—they are engaging and narratively compelling in their own right—but whereas in Breath of the Wild I would get distracted by enemy camps and overworld puzzles while on the way to those main objectives, here it’s the side quests and ancillary characters who sent me on detours and lengthy excursions.

One of the main complaints lodged with Breath of the Wild was its lack of traditional Zelda dungeons. The Divine Beasts were a fine substitute, and fitting considering how much of a departure the game as a whole was, but Tears of the Kingdom manages to reintegrate many of the important facets of more traditional dungeon designs while still retaining the unique, open-ended designs of the boss areas in Breath. It’s important to consider the challenges leading up to the dungeons here as part of the dungeons themselves, as they often incorporate divergent gameplay that adds to the experience of the trek leading to the completion of that particular chapter. The Lightning Temple is undoubtedly the best example of this, channeling the game’s more sinister tone with the invasion of seemingly invincible creatures in Gerudo Town that quite intentionally recall the nightmare-inducing impression of Redeads in Ocarina of Time and Wind Waker. One beat has you enact out a tower defense scenario, in which you assign certain units of Gerudo warriors to entry points into the town, fighting off waves of the invading Gibdos while eliminating their spawning hives. This leads to the temple itself, in which you are immediately faced with the boss in an unexpected deviation from the typical dungeon formula, chasing it into the temple itself after discovering its weakness in the initial encounter. The bosses as a whole recall some of the best in the series, a couple being direct callbacks in and of themselves. Second to the Lightning Temple was the Wind Temple, the first the game points you towards, and an excellent introduction of the spectacle and scale you will come to expect from the game from then on.

After completing all the dungeons and returning to your home base of Lookout Landing, you’re tasked with investigating the castle which has risen into the sky, and then afterwards told to seek out the heretofore unknown Fifth Sage and their temple somewhere in the depths. This was not my experience playing the game, for I had the privilege of stumbling upon this temple much earlier than intended, and thus sequence breaking the progress that, while not intended perhaps, was clearly allowed by the developers with their philosophy of freedom of approach. There was difficulty in finding my way there, navigating blindly through a storm-ridden island in the sky, before happening upon the events needed to trigger this late-game quest, but the reward of discovery and early access was so fulfilling, and felt even more so thanks to the engagement with the wider community playing the game simultaneously, and communicating about all its secrets in tandem. That’s actually how I learned about this secret dungeon, from someone who was farther ahead and gobsmacked about its discovery so late into the game. That small hint of something special hidden away made me eager to seek it out, and utilizing the logical patterns the game had thus far demonstrated between its overworld and mirrored counterpart of the Depths made the discovery and investigation so satisfying and natural to accomplish on my own. That’s the other big gift Tears of the Kingdom has given us: the feeling of communal interaction in a single-player game. The plethora of secret rewards and personalized solutions to the multitudinous puzzles of the game means that no one approach is the correct one, and every player’s experience with the game will be vastly different. Different enough, at least, to engender discussion and comparison to how you can overcome any given obstacle. The boss of the Wind Temple has three weak points on its body which can be shot out with arrows, as I did. Alternatively, you can skydive through them without taking damage, which I learned from friends who approached the boss with the mechanics learned on the trek up to the temple in preparation for the boss to come therafter.

Bosses in general have become more plentiful and engaging with this new game, retaining many of the overworld bosses from Breath of the Wild while adding a host of new creative encounters to, at first, ignore for fear of your life, only to later challenge with newly forged confidence, and overcome after a tumultuous bout. Gleeoks and Flux Constructs in particular offer the player exciting fights that call upon their complete toolkit to defeat. They’re designed in such a way that, even after you’ve learned their routines and weaknesses, they’re still fun to engage with late into the game, and rewarding, too, as the items they drop are worth going out of your way to farm them for. The Fuse mechanic makes seeking out these high-powered enemies incentivizing, as their drops are the primary way in which you’ll be getting sufficiently powerful materials to attach to your weapons as the difficulty of the game increases. Standard enemies will slowly level in difficulty as they did in Breath of the Wild, noticeably distinguished by their colored variations and more powerful item drops. The game in general has a very well-orchestrated resource loop, in which you’re constantly gathering supplies to venture into more difficult areas, where you will then get more powerful rewards to use in the overworld quests, which lead to more resource gathering to venture back into the supply-draining reward-giving areas. This is mostly a cycle of venturing into the Depths, where non-degraded weapons and Zonaite mines exist, which you need to power your various build devices, most of which are found in the sky. The sky in turn has resources that can heal you from the heart-stealing gloom of the Depths, as well as treasure maps that lead to powerful and referential items also hidden within the Depths. Overall, it’s just a really well-incorporated series of systems that encourages you to cycle through its multiple levels of exploration to satisfactorily adventure throughout your journey.

Perhaps of least significant from a design standpoint, but a crucial point of growth and immersion still, is the strides in narrative importance placed here. The Legend of Zelda games are not especially known for their stories. They’re typically rudimentary, oft-repeated stories of good and evil archetypes once again matching up against one another for the fate of the world. It’s always been very typical fantasy storytelling far more concerned with the legacy of its telling (or perhaps, legend, one could say), than substantial characters or plot developments. Tears of the Kingdom retains this tradition of iterative narrative storytelling, but does so with a far more compelling pace and reveal of information. In Breath of the Wild, much of the game’s story was communicated through flashback scenes which were unlocked via specific map locations you had to discover from contextual pictures called Memories. Tears of the Kingdom keeps the backstory formula of storytelling but shifts their discovery from a picture matching system to a more environmentally entwined system. Geoglyphs, as they’re called, are large portraits hidden across the landscape of the map, which can be easily seen from far away, or high up in the sky. They’re exciting to hunt down not only because they’re more visually engaging and identifiable, but because the snippets of story they reveal are more exciting and dramatic than we’re typically used to from a Zelda title. Again, referring back to the philosophy of freedom of player approach, although there is a specific, chronological order intended to see all these chapters in, I found it more satisfying to receive some of them early, learning some devastating plot twist, which then excited me to learn how we got to that major development. The story has some pretty significant dramatic turns, and some very slight developer touches really add the icing to the cake in their emotional impact, in ways only a video game can truly achieve. The last Memory in particular carries with it a gut punch revelation, compounded by the appearance of a certain item at your feet to really underline the moment as well.

After 120 hours, and many, many distractions and excursions, I felt ready to bring everything to its conclusion. I’d finally reached the point where time spent not playing wasn’t filled with dreaming of playing the game more, but rather what I want to do next. Still, every time I picked the game up again, intent on heading towards the end, I’d inevitably get sidetracked and spend several hours doing another side quest or five, or just exploring some more caves I hadn’t gone through yet, or gathering more resources to upgrade the armor I was using and to get the best weapon loadout I could before the end. Eventually, I did in fact make my way there, hoping it could deliver on a finale that felt truly climactic. I think it’s safe to say few games have felt as truly climactic as Tears of the Kingdom. Starting from the fight with the Demon King’s Army, with all your Sage companions assisting you in the brawl, it was truly a spectacle from start to finish. The fight with Ganondorf felt instantly iconic, with a number of surprises that both excited and terrified me. And then of course, there was the denoumount, which was so glorious, so satisfying, so epic in its conclusion, that I could not, in good conscience, divulge it here. I was so elated throughout the climax knowing there was so much there that had not been spoiled for me, in spite of how long the game had been out by now. The doubts I had going in, that this was going to retread Breath of the Wild’s innovations to a derivative degree, were long, long assuaged before the end, and by that point it was clear that Tears of the Kingdom had not only surpassed its predecessor, but had become a definitive monolith of gaming in its own right. Such plaudits should typically be reserved for a more protracted analysis to employ, but it’s extremely evident from just this initial experience that, without any exaggeration, Tears of the Kingdom is one of the greatest games ever made.