Breath of the Wild is my favorite game of all time. So it’s crazy to think that Nintendo could make a new Zelda game that somehow makes BOTW look like a rough draft for a bigger and crazier game, yet that’s exactly what Tears of the Kingdom sets out to do. The question is - does it do it successfully?
(Skip to the end of if you just want my summary without the rambling. Note: this review has a lot of complaints but I love the game. I just think it could've been so much more)

Against all odds, one thing that Tears of the Kingdom did that no other Zelda has really done before (except maybe Skyward Sword) is it made me care about the story. And not just care with a passing interest, I mean really truly care about the story, the world, and the characters living in it. I wanted to seek out every memory and push the story forward because I was excited to see what happened next. Breath of the Wild mainly felt like a big sandbox that had some light storytelling to get you just interested enough in the world you were exploring. Tears of the Kingdom takes that sandbox, and really digs into it adding more story, structure, and substance that Breath of the Wild was lacking.

While Breath of the Wild encouraged you to rethink how you explore; Tears of the Kingdom encourages you to let your creativity run buck-wild and let that bleed into every single thing you do in the game. The new powers, gadgets, and physics introduced in TOTK make the systems in BOTW feel elementary by comparison. BOTW had cool abilities in their own right but they were limited and created a pretty solid ceiling for what you can or can’t do in that world. A ceiling we didn’t realize existed at the time, but a ceiling nonetheless. Tears of the Kingdom gives you the toolset to smash through that ceiling in a dozen different ways. You are constantly given opportunities to do things that make you feel like the smartest person alive until you go on the internet and see people making literal Gundams, Batmobiles, death machines, and Korok torture devices.

The abilities themselves are cool and all but what’s really impressive is how well the whole game is crafted around your powers in such a remarkable way that capitalizes on the new systems introduced without being overwhelming. Watching the trailer for the game, I remember I sort of had this worry that it would be hard to build cool stuff, but the game eases you into the mechanics and gently guides you to making nifty contraptions in a way that empowers you to then break the mold and try new things using what you’ve learned.

Just as Link gets new abilities in this game, the new champion stand-ins come with new powers to utilize in combat and while exploring the world. The characters are rad and the integration of the sages into the gameplay is a really cool concept, but actually using these new powers is an enormous pain in the ass. Instead of utilizing a skill wheel like you do for Link’s abilities, you have to manually interact with your companions with A to activate their powers. Which means either one of two things: 1. You are chasing your companions around the battlefield to use their powers or 2. You will accidentally spam a power you don’t want to use while trying to pick up an item with the same button. It’s legitimately bad game design and I’m shocked Nintendo actually shipped the game with this.

Beyond new systems and mechanics, Tears of the Kingdom almost doubles the amount of content over Breath of the Wild. Way more side quests, more substantial main story, and more than double the amount of map to explore. But just because the map is more than twice the size of the previous game’s map doesn’t mean that it’s twice as interesting.

Breath of the Wild’s map size was pretty perfect. Not too big, not too small, and every inch of it was worth exploring. Tears of the Kingdom’s land map offers much of the same quality and explorability, but it adds the incredibly cool sky and the underwhelming depths on top of that. The sky is rad and, while sparse, it’s designed in such a way that every skysland you could go to had something to do. I never launched into the sky and felt like my time up there was wasted. In contrast, a majority of my time in the depths was pretty boring after the initial wow-factor wore off.

The depths are 1:1 the exact same size as the surface, but with only a fraction of the activities to do. By their very nature, the depths can’t have towns, NPCs, quests, Koroks, or puzzles to solve, so instead they filled the massive, barren landscape with cookie-cutter enemy camps and minibosses that are no different from what exist on the land above. The only unique activities the depths have to offer are the Yiga Camps which, while neat, can be beaten pretty quickly. Activating all the lightroots to light up the depths, should be a satisfying endeavor, instead it offers little pay-off. When you activate a lightroot, a handful of greenery sprouts around it and the immediate vicinity gets a bit lighter. Beyond that, the depths remain unchanged - it’s still dark, barren, and riddled with gloom. Why not take the idea of the green plants that sprout and take that a step-further? Make it so that activating a lightroot really banishes the darkness, gloom, and bleakness from the depths. Make it so that the ceiling of the depths turns into a cool illuminated underground sky. Something. Anything! Maybe the depths would be more impressive if Elden Ring hadn’t done a way cooler “whoa there’s a whole land underground” thing just last year, but as it stands, The Depths in TOTK feel like one giant missed opportunity for something genuinely cool.

The new side quests TOTK offers are great. They were easy to stumble on due to how many there are, and I enjoyed doing all of them. That said, at a certain point I had to come to terms with the fact that the journey very much is the reward, because the actual rewards it gives you for doing anything are laughable. Whether it’s finding all the wells and caves, repairing signs, or just helping someone find their friends, it’s clear Nintendo doesn’t really think much of your accomplishments judgings by the rewards you’re given. I lost track of how many times I would put in the work and time to help someone solve one of their problems, only for them to give me 50 rupees and some soup. You get more money from killing a single moose and selling its meat than you do from doing 95% of the side quests in the game. To be fair, I did enjoy every minute I spent doing every side quest or discovering every cave in Hyrule, but that deoesn’t change the fact that the economy in this game is absolutely fucked.

I was shocked by just how much money was required to do things in Tears of the Kingdom. You need 80,000 rupees total if you want to upgrade every piece of armor in the game. And that doesn’t take into account any other spending you’d do to buy armor, arrows, materials, or the ludicrously-priced custom house parts. You could do every single side activity in this game and still not have enough money to upgrade your armor without farming for materials or meat to sell. Using an exploit that Nintendo quickly patched out, I was able to cheese my way into 120k rupees, and I somehow went through all of it before finishing the game. And don’t even get me started on the actual upgrade materials themselves. Between the insane rupee cost and absurd amount of materials required, a duplication bug was the only way I was able to even stand a chance of upgrading all my armor. Yeah I did some dragon part farming in BOTW but nothing even close to what TOTK requires.

It feels weird to criticize a game this good for missed opportunities when there are so many things it gets right, but it’s hard not to dream of what could have been. TOTK adds several new armor sets, but disappointingly keeps every armor from BOTW with no changes. I was excited to get a snow outfit, but disappointed that it was identical to the last game. I was excited that Link has a cool new hairstyle, but then realized that every piece of headwear just puts his hair up into the same styling it had in the first game. Several new armor sets give you bonus attack damage in cold, hot, or stormy areas, but they’re not all that practical. If I’m in freezing temperatures, why would I wear my cold-damage armor instead of my outfit that protects me from the cold? An easy solution to this would be to let you extract abilities from armor or to fuse armors in some way. The game even lets you buy duplicates of most armor pieces available. Let me take my cold-resistant Snowquill set and fuse it with the cold damage Frostbite set to create Frostquill armor. If you’re going to recycle 75% of the armor from the last game, at least let me do something new with it in a game where you literally introduced fusing objects together.

The new house system in the game is another thing that is such a rad concept, but is so poorly executed I almost would have rather they left it out entirely. You can buy a wide variety of rooms to build your dream house, provided you don’t want windows, don’t want any color, don’t want any decorations around your property, and can do it all with 15 max building pieces, all while your construction assistant constantly gets in the way of anything you want to do. And, once again, be prepared to save up another 10k-20k rupees if you want to build a cool house, because it ain’t cheap.


While most of the game feels like a clear evolution of BOTW, other parts of the game feel like Nintendo fell into the same “more = better” trap that so many other AAA game studios fall into. More quests, more map, more armor, but what’s the value added? Time? My total playtime in Tears of the Kingdom was 220 hours, compared to 155 hours on the BOTW base game. 65 hours more on TOTK than BOTW, but those 65 hours does not mean TOTK was a better experience for it. More time is not equivalent to a better time. Ubisoft games have struggled with that for years, but it’s a bummer to see Nintendo doing the same to Zelda.

In many ways, Tears of the Kingdom is better than Breath of the Wild. But for every new and exciting thing TOTK does over its predecessor, it introduces a new problem or missed opportunity that makes me dream of what Tears of the Kingdom could have been. While BOTW was a game where I encouraged people to try to see everything, I'd almost argue that TOTK is best experienced by not doing everything. I don't regret 100%ing it, but it feels like Nintendo put so much in the game so you could do what you want, not so you would do everything. Yeah Tears of the Kingdom is a brilliant game, but it’s not the same level of revolutionary that Breath of the Wild was.

+ Best story of any Zelda game hands-down
+ Builds on BOTW in meaningful ways
+ Empowers you to solve puzzles in your own ways
+ Rad boss fights
+ Shrine puzzles continue to be excellent and utilize new powers well
+ Fuse opens up mind-blowing possibilities
+ New powers make open-world exploration better than ever
+ Weapon fusing adds more variability to combat

- Major economy issues
- Story dungeons are still the weakest part of the game
- Sage ability activation sucks
- House building is poorly executed
- New collectibles with no good way of tracking any of them
- 75% of the armor and weapons are reused from BOTW
- Arguably too large of a game
- The Depths are a huge missed opportunity
- Hand-waving some of the events of BOTW away