Tears of the Kingdom feels like a magic trick: an open world game that reuses its predecessor’s setting and still manages to feel novel and exciting to explore. Going in, I was skeptical about how much they could possibly add when we’re just back in the same Hyrule again, but between the sky islands, the caves, and the Depths, there’s an incredible amount of new sights to see, not even counting the familiar locales that have undergone significant changes in the years since the events of Breath of the Wild.
The new abilities are fantastic as well; as much as I kinda missed abusing Remote Bombs, Ascend and Recall are incredibly useful, Fusion is a clever improvement on the weapon durability system, and Ultrahand basically completely transforms the way you play the game if you let it. Need to get to the top of a mountain? You could always climb it like BotW, slowly and painstakingly scaling a cliff face looking for shallow enough inclines to briefly stand on and recover stamina, or you could construct a flying machine with a couple fans, a hot air balloon, or a rocket and reach dizzying heights with ease. Plus, even when your contraptions fail to work as intended, the consequences are usually hilarious.
I do have a few minor quibbles with the game, but my biggest complaint is that the 4 main quests do basically nothing with their principal characters. I’m not asking for anything deep, just an arc of some kind or literally anything for them to do beyond follow you around. As is, they feel kinda disposable and interchangeable (doubly so for the faceless ancient sages), and hearing a bunch of the same exposition each time, sometimes word for word, gets old fast. (“The Demon King? Secret stones?”) At the end of the day, narrative and character just aren’t the game’s priorities, but I still feel like they should have done more just for the sake of making the main quests more distinctive and memorable. (Though that’s not to say they’re completely uninteresting; the ascent to the Sky Temple is incredibly cool, for instance, it’s just that Tulin might as well not even be there.)
The new abilities are fantastic as well; as much as I kinda missed abusing Remote Bombs, Ascend and Recall are incredibly useful, Fusion is a clever improvement on the weapon durability system, and Ultrahand basically completely transforms the way you play the game if you let it. Need to get to the top of a mountain? You could always climb it like BotW, slowly and painstakingly scaling a cliff face looking for shallow enough inclines to briefly stand on and recover stamina, or you could construct a flying machine with a couple fans, a hot air balloon, or a rocket and reach dizzying heights with ease. Plus, even when your contraptions fail to work as intended, the consequences are usually hilarious.
I do have a few minor quibbles with the game, but my biggest complaint is that the 4 main quests do basically nothing with their principal characters. I’m not asking for anything deep, just an arc of some kind or literally anything for them to do beyond follow you around. As is, they feel kinda disposable and interchangeable (doubly so for the faceless ancient sages), and hearing a bunch of the same exposition each time, sometimes word for word, gets old fast. (“The Demon King? Secret stones?”) At the end of the day, narrative and character just aren’t the game’s priorities, but I still feel like they should have done more just for the sake of making the main quests more distinctive and memorable. (Though that’s not to say they’re completely uninteresting; the ascent to the Sky Temple is incredibly cool, for instance, it’s just that Tulin might as well not even be there.)