Breath of the Wild Too.
Years ago I purchased a Nintendo Switch at Best Buy along with one game: Breath of the Wild. The game had been out for maybe a year, if even, but I'd heard from numerous friends and publications that it was one of, if not the greatest games of all time. I played it, enjoyed my first solo playthrough of a Zelda game, but largely dissented from enjoyment as a result of the game's lack of narrative focus, recycled dungeons/bosses, and weapon durability. I like to think of myself as malleable and approachable to change, so when Tears of the Kingdom was announced many moons ago, I got excited for a change to re-try the BotW formula. What I got in this go around was... an experience all too familiar.
Tears of the Kingdom begins on a high note... literally. You effectively start high above the fields of Hyrule in the sky aisles that had appeared after the events of the prequel title. This was a major focus of media marketing for the game and subject to a majority of promotional material, adding a whole new vertical element to an already expansive game. Here you go through a sort of proving grounds and tutorialization of Link's new "powers" which are completely different from BotW. No longer do you have the ability to magnet and slingshot items across the map as it is replaced with spells that let you freely attach materials together, fuse items to your weapons, and ascend through almost any vertical challenge. While these were really neat from a physics standpoint and added an invaluable amount to the already peak sandbox that was BotW, it removes a sense of integrity from the way the game is "meant" to be played, but more on that later. You have a few hours of messing around up here before you're thrown into the familiar world of Hyrule and tasked to track down the Princess of the land herself, Zelda. Stop me if you've heard that one before.
From here your gameplay loop remains largely the same, not only from the way you experience the sandbox itself, but who you interact with on your mission to stop the Upheavel and defeat the series' longstanding antagonist. I won't touch on story spoilers but I think most players of BotW have a sense of where this game is heading. Traversal across Hyrule is a bit of a hodgepodge of utilizing the shrine network, towers, Zonai contraptions, and new powers gifted to you by one of the four civilizations you visit. Horses as a method of movement are pretty much completely outclassed by the above. Shrines give you a place to fast travel to and for the love of all that is good in this world, are much more entertaining and enticing to complete in TotK than in BotW. Where the shrine monotony comes into play for me in the previous title was that a lot of the solutions relied upon combat endeavours against Guardians or pinball-esque flip games that relied on the Switch's faulty Gyro to complete. In Tears of the Kingdom, there was a great deal of thought put into making these unique from one another, relying heavily on the new powers link is given to complete. The unfortunate byproduct of this is that you can absolutely cheese and bypass the intended way of completion for these shrines with your fuse/ultrahand powers. I'm a strong proponent of cheesing certain mechanics in games to get solutions, but with the amount of it you can do in Tears to completely move aside from the way the game wants the player to solve puzzles... it just feels kinda dirty. I mean if you can do something faster, then for efficiency's sake, why wouldn't you? So the shrines are more innovative, but easier to break. Towers are a great way to move across the vast world, and give you a tremendous insight into what to attack next. You can see almost the whole world, and with the right amount of stamina it practically is all reachable. I thoroughly loved going into the sky in each region's tower, which also fills in the area on your map, and identifying all the shrines, villages, and general points of interest on my map that I could so that I could eventually tackle them. It was the first few days in TotK of playing that I felt my greatest joy, because the world felt so tangible and achievable, I could see it all and do it all.
I've played a lot of open world games at this point, most of us have, and it takes a great deal to set them apart and make them feel fun. In my opinion the games that never get me to stop and ask "why am I doing this?" are the good ones. One of my favorite games of all time came out last year, Elden Ring. I scoped what felt like the entire map from top to bottom, taking on each and every boss fight, sifting through each and every cave I could, just because it felt rewarding in and of itself. In the hallmark Bethesda titles I chased each guild/faction subquestline, did all the sidequests I could, just because it felt rewarding. I began to do that in Tears of the Kingdom, in fact I did it almost exclusively for the first few days of playing, but I hit a "why" and never really turned back. In my initial run of Tears of the Kingdom, I went shrine hunting, solved all of the glyphs, helped every villager I could in the game's major settlements. I had a great time personally with the silly little town of Hateno Village, with its exceptionally cozy soundtrack and perfect-for-Zelda quirky constituents as I tried to play mediator in a mayoral race between two polar opposites. It was here that I found I was at my greatest enjoyment of the world, I wasn't asking myself any questions, I was just basking in the game's moment to moment quirkyness and personality. After I unlocked more shrines and completed some more sidequests, I realized that I was at the same point I'd reached in Breath of the Wild. I had completed two of the four major questlines in the game, which utilized the same exact races from BotW, mostly including the same exact people. Despite having been across the entire map and decyphering the truth behind the numerous glyphs, I still had to help the same exact peoples I had done a few years ago. Stop me if you've heard this before: Link must approach the Rito, Gerudo, Goron, and Zora and obtain the help of their champion and embark on a short quest to bring you one step closer to defeating the great evil, which involves using their one gimmick power to complete a dungeon in which you must find four-five macguffins to reach a final boss, of which is a largely mechanically uninteresting fight. I was greatly let down, again with the way this game had approached dungeoneering, which was previously a staple of the franchise. I had my qualms with Skyward Sword being TOO much of a dungeon-dungeon-dungeon game, but at least they felt unique and different from another. In Tears, just as was the case in Breath of the Wild, they all kinda felt... the same. I had hoped Nintendo would put a greater focus into this after the first game, but I was gravely wrong. Doing these dungeons is almost completely futile too if you've already solved the mysteries behind the glyph's, it's completely pointless, but you still have to do it for the sake of the storry. I made the mistake of doing the Rito and Gerudo, doing all of the glyphs, and then doing the Zora and Goron, which helped me realize how futile this endeavour truly was. I said I wouldn't spoiler above, so I won't, but if you've beaten it, you'll know. To end the commentary on dungeons, the final two-three dungeons in this game are genuinely awful and as anticlimactic you can get for a game that was six years in the making and has as much lore implications as Tears of the Kingdom does. The game starts off with a bang in the sky, then gets you going into the four-race dungeons, and then ends on a few wet noodles... it was beyond disappointing.
Weapon durability was a bad idea in the first place, and it's one of the few points of contention that I will not back away from. In a game where exploration is as big of a focus as it is, why should the player be de-incentivized from engaging in combat if they know that their best weapons are going to be destroyed in just a few strikes, even with the assistance of the fuse power? Again to harken back to Elden Ring, other than wasting my time, there was no negative element to engaging in frivalous combat. If I saw something I wanted to kill, I could do it knowing that the worst that would happen would be a simple respawn. In Tears of the Kingdom, I still had to wager my the next major fight I was going to do against taking out a group of world enemies for a sidequest. It was here again where I'd ask myself the "why," of engaging in the open-world exploration of this game, why would I ruin my best gear if I don't know how beneficial the end result is going to be? Doing some of these sidequests reward you with powerful weapons too, but why would I even take or use those if I know a few hits against a moblin is going to tarnish them forever? I don't get it, I didn't get it beforehand either. The argument that it enforces the player to use their surroundings and take advantage of what the world offers is a weak one to me too, because this to me does the opposite of what a game like Zelda should do, it fights against the power fantasy. You play as the damn Hero of Hyrule, why shouldn't you be able to take on any group of bokoblins or moblins that you see without destroying your gear? I just genuinely don't understand the developer appreciation for this, nor why the "fuse" power was supposed to be the saving grace for this as a detriment, it just prolongs the inevitable. I don't mean to prop up Skyward Sword as the magnum opus of the series, as I still have yet to play a great deal (myself, not as a younger sibling watching,) but the combat was snappy, and I felt like I could and SHOULD engage with each of the enemies I came across.
Now I've spent a lot of time dunking on this game, and in my humble opinion (shocker,) it has been rightfully so, there is a lot of sauce in Tears of the Kingdom that made it a generally enjoyable experience. Despite what I would call a miserable way to end the game, Tears was full of that Zelda/Nintendo magic that's brought them to where they are now. Even if the game doesn't run very well and is bottlenecked by the Switch, the artstyle is beyond gorgeous. Hyrule in its moments of Link flying and running around holds a plethora of jaw dropping beauty within the unique biomes and meticulously crafted cities and environments. The characters are again intricately designed and filled with personality through their design. Link, Zelda, Purah, Riju, Impa, and everyone else have been brought to life in such an impressive way. This game is eye candy, and even if its not in a completely new engine, another great moment in Nintendo world/character design. Even if it soured on me eventually, my first few days of exploration were filled with memorable moments of interaction with the game's engine, as well as fun moments of discovery into the seemingly endless hidden nooks and cranny's that there is to offer. Zelda, much like Metroid to me, is an IP that has the advantage of having some really damn cool lore, and it's at great display in Tears of the Kingdom. One of the chief complaints I had with Breath of the Wild is that much of the story exposition, like almost all of it, was resigned to flashback cutscenes which is a pretty bad way to tell a story. Now, that's not entierly different with Tears of the Kingdom, but the amount of story they manage to tell through the glyphs and temples is far greater than it was in BotW. I found myself sitting up and revelling in the cutscenes that TotK had to offer, as there was so much to pack up and take away that I could use to solve the game's mystery. I enjoyed that, and it's almost exclusively because of that, that I rated this game higher than its predecessor. I felt like Nintendo and the Zelda team sucessfully navigated the complaints about narrative and made a rather positive change.
In all, most people that are reading this, if any have actually read this in its entirety, are probably already playing/played TotK or are going to. I had fun, but I highly doubt this will be my game of the year, and probably not a game I'll return to.
Years ago I purchased a Nintendo Switch at Best Buy along with one game: Breath of the Wild. The game had been out for maybe a year, if even, but I'd heard from numerous friends and publications that it was one of, if not the greatest games of all time. I played it, enjoyed my first solo playthrough of a Zelda game, but largely dissented from enjoyment as a result of the game's lack of narrative focus, recycled dungeons/bosses, and weapon durability. I like to think of myself as malleable and approachable to change, so when Tears of the Kingdom was announced many moons ago, I got excited for a change to re-try the BotW formula. What I got in this go around was... an experience all too familiar.
Tears of the Kingdom begins on a high note... literally. You effectively start high above the fields of Hyrule in the sky aisles that had appeared after the events of the prequel title. This was a major focus of media marketing for the game and subject to a majority of promotional material, adding a whole new vertical element to an already expansive game. Here you go through a sort of proving grounds and tutorialization of Link's new "powers" which are completely different from BotW. No longer do you have the ability to magnet and slingshot items across the map as it is replaced with spells that let you freely attach materials together, fuse items to your weapons, and ascend through almost any vertical challenge. While these were really neat from a physics standpoint and added an invaluable amount to the already peak sandbox that was BotW, it removes a sense of integrity from the way the game is "meant" to be played, but more on that later. You have a few hours of messing around up here before you're thrown into the familiar world of Hyrule and tasked to track down the Princess of the land herself, Zelda. Stop me if you've heard that one before.
From here your gameplay loop remains largely the same, not only from the way you experience the sandbox itself, but who you interact with on your mission to stop the Upheavel and defeat the series' longstanding antagonist. I won't touch on story spoilers but I think most players of BotW have a sense of where this game is heading. Traversal across Hyrule is a bit of a hodgepodge of utilizing the shrine network, towers, Zonai contraptions, and new powers gifted to you by one of the four civilizations you visit. Horses as a method of movement are pretty much completely outclassed by the above. Shrines give you a place to fast travel to and for the love of all that is good in this world, are much more entertaining and enticing to complete in TotK than in BotW. Where the shrine monotony comes into play for me in the previous title was that a lot of the solutions relied upon combat endeavours against Guardians or pinball-esque flip games that relied on the Switch's faulty Gyro to complete. In Tears of the Kingdom, there was a great deal of thought put into making these unique from one another, relying heavily on the new powers link is given to complete. The unfortunate byproduct of this is that you can absolutely cheese and bypass the intended way of completion for these shrines with your fuse/ultrahand powers. I'm a strong proponent of cheesing certain mechanics in games to get solutions, but with the amount of it you can do in Tears to completely move aside from the way the game wants the player to solve puzzles... it just feels kinda dirty. I mean if you can do something faster, then for efficiency's sake, why wouldn't you? So the shrines are more innovative, but easier to break. Towers are a great way to move across the vast world, and give you a tremendous insight into what to attack next. You can see almost the whole world, and with the right amount of stamina it practically is all reachable. I thoroughly loved going into the sky in each region's tower, which also fills in the area on your map, and identifying all the shrines, villages, and general points of interest on my map that I could so that I could eventually tackle them. It was the first few days in TotK of playing that I felt my greatest joy, because the world felt so tangible and achievable, I could see it all and do it all.
I've played a lot of open world games at this point, most of us have, and it takes a great deal to set them apart and make them feel fun. In my opinion the games that never get me to stop and ask "why am I doing this?" are the good ones. One of my favorite games of all time came out last year, Elden Ring. I scoped what felt like the entire map from top to bottom, taking on each and every boss fight, sifting through each and every cave I could, just because it felt rewarding in and of itself. In the hallmark Bethesda titles I chased each guild/faction subquestline, did all the sidequests I could, just because it felt rewarding. I began to do that in Tears of the Kingdom, in fact I did it almost exclusively for the first few days of playing, but I hit a "why" and never really turned back. In my initial run of Tears of the Kingdom, I went shrine hunting, solved all of the glyphs, helped every villager I could in the game's major settlements. I had a great time personally with the silly little town of Hateno Village, with its exceptionally cozy soundtrack and perfect-for-Zelda quirky constituents as I tried to play mediator in a mayoral race between two polar opposites. It was here that I found I was at my greatest enjoyment of the world, I wasn't asking myself any questions, I was just basking in the game's moment to moment quirkyness and personality. After I unlocked more shrines and completed some more sidequests, I realized that I was at the same point I'd reached in Breath of the Wild. I had completed two of the four major questlines in the game, which utilized the same exact races from BotW, mostly including the same exact people. Despite having been across the entire map and decyphering the truth behind the numerous glyphs, I still had to help the same exact peoples I had done a few years ago. Stop me if you've heard this before: Link must approach the Rito, Gerudo, Goron, and Zora and obtain the help of their champion and embark on a short quest to bring you one step closer to defeating the great evil, which involves using their one gimmick power to complete a dungeon in which you must find four-five macguffins to reach a final boss, of which is a largely mechanically uninteresting fight. I was greatly let down, again with the way this game had approached dungeoneering, which was previously a staple of the franchise. I had my qualms with Skyward Sword being TOO much of a dungeon-dungeon-dungeon game, but at least they felt unique and different from another. In Tears, just as was the case in Breath of the Wild, they all kinda felt... the same. I had hoped Nintendo would put a greater focus into this after the first game, but I was gravely wrong. Doing these dungeons is almost completely futile too if you've already solved the mysteries behind the glyph's, it's completely pointless, but you still have to do it for the sake of the storry. I made the mistake of doing the Rito and Gerudo, doing all of the glyphs, and then doing the Zora and Goron, which helped me realize how futile this endeavour truly was. I said I wouldn't spoiler above, so I won't, but if you've beaten it, you'll know. To end the commentary on dungeons, the final two-three dungeons in this game are genuinely awful and as anticlimactic you can get for a game that was six years in the making and has as much lore implications as Tears of the Kingdom does. The game starts off with a bang in the sky, then gets you going into the four-race dungeons, and then ends on a few wet noodles... it was beyond disappointing.
Weapon durability was a bad idea in the first place, and it's one of the few points of contention that I will not back away from. In a game where exploration is as big of a focus as it is, why should the player be de-incentivized from engaging in combat if they know that their best weapons are going to be destroyed in just a few strikes, even with the assistance of the fuse power? Again to harken back to Elden Ring, other than wasting my time, there was no negative element to engaging in frivalous combat. If I saw something I wanted to kill, I could do it knowing that the worst that would happen would be a simple respawn. In Tears of the Kingdom, I still had to wager my the next major fight I was going to do against taking out a group of world enemies for a sidequest. It was here again where I'd ask myself the "why," of engaging in the open-world exploration of this game, why would I ruin my best gear if I don't know how beneficial the end result is going to be? Doing some of these sidequests reward you with powerful weapons too, but why would I even take or use those if I know a few hits against a moblin is going to tarnish them forever? I don't get it, I didn't get it beforehand either. The argument that it enforces the player to use their surroundings and take advantage of what the world offers is a weak one to me too, because this to me does the opposite of what a game like Zelda should do, it fights against the power fantasy. You play as the damn Hero of Hyrule, why shouldn't you be able to take on any group of bokoblins or moblins that you see without destroying your gear? I just genuinely don't understand the developer appreciation for this, nor why the "fuse" power was supposed to be the saving grace for this as a detriment, it just prolongs the inevitable. I don't mean to prop up Skyward Sword as the magnum opus of the series, as I still have yet to play a great deal (myself, not as a younger sibling watching,) but the combat was snappy, and I felt like I could and SHOULD engage with each of the enemies I came across.
Now I've spent a lot of time dunking on this game, and in my humble opinion (shocker,) it has been rightfully so, there is a lot of sauce in Tears of the Kingdom that made it a generally enjoyable experience. Despite what I would call a miserable way to end the game, Tears was full of that Zelda/Nintendo magic that's brought them to where they are now. Even if the game doesn't run very well and is bottlenecked by the Switch, the artstyle is beyond gorgeous. Hyrule in its moments of Link flying and running around holds a plethora of jaw dropping beauty within the unique biomes and meticulously crafted cities and environments. The characters are again intricately designed and filled with personality through their design. Link, Zelda, Purah, Riju, Impa, and everyone else have been brought to life in such an impressive way. This game is eye candy, and even if its not in a completely new engine, another great moment in Nintendo world/character design. Even if it soured on me eventually, my first few days of exploration were filled with memorable moments of interaction with the game's engine, as well as fun moments of discovery into the seemingly endless hidden nooks and cranny's that there is to offer. Zelda, much like Metroid to me, is an IP that has the advantage of having some really damn cool lore, and it's at great display in Tears of the Kingdom. One of the chief complaints I had with Breath of the Wild is that much of the story exposition, like almost all of it, was resigned to flashback cutscenes which is a pretty bad way to tell a story. Now, that's not entierly different with Tears of the Kingdom, but the amount of story they manage to tell through the glyphs and temples is far greater than it was in BotW. I found myself sitting up and revelling in the cutscenes that TotK had to offer, as there was so much to pack up and take away that I could use to solve the game's mystery. I enjoyed that, and it's almost exclusively because of that, that I rated this game higher than its predecessor. I felt like Nintendo and the Zelda team sucessfully navigated the complaints about narrative and made a rather positive change.
In all, most people that are reading this, if any have actually read this in its entirety, are probably already playing/played TotK or are going to. I had fun, but I highly doubt this will be my game of the year, and probably not a game I'll return to.