Breath of the Wild? You’ve sure grown a lot since I last seen you.
After two weeks of grinding through this game, I’ve officially beat Tears of the Kingdom, the main story. There’s still a shit ton of quests and other exploration to do in the game that I will tackle over the summer but the main game to the sequel of one of my favorite Zelda games is complete. And honestly, it was pretty good and a fundamental improvement over Breath of the Wild, though still carrying on many of its contributions. I greatly enjoyed being back in Hyrule again, sometimes above and rarely below it, and it was a strong sequel that definitely felt like it was over six years in the making. Another Nintendo banger, though I have some gripes with.
The new abilities of this game are decently good though also a little weird in their own right. Ascend and recall are intriguing additions that shake up some of the gameplay, ascend to an even bigger degree in making traversal slightly less tedious where before you had to climb everything with limited stamina and without the full climbing set until later in the game. Recall ends up being a little too situational and underutilized with some puzzles taking advantage of it and sometimes I used it in combat to throw objects and weapons back to enemies, though this was few and far between. Fuse feels a little too on the nose of a response to weapon durability criticism and it feels...fine. Fusing weapons together looks ultra goofy and most times isn’t super effective with the terrible durability that feels even weaker here than in BOTW. Fusing materials with weapons is way more effective but the whole process of fusion is so unnecessarily clunky and awkward with having to select a material, drop it, select fusion, and then select your weapon or shield (unless it is not out which adds even more steps to this process). It’s fine for fusing materials with arrows, but weapons is just awful. Why couldn’t the devs have just utilized an extra menu to cut down on all of these processes? We already are doing a ton of menuing anyways. Also why couldn’t bows be fused with other bows or weapons to slightly offset their durability and experiment with them?
Ultrahand itself feels like a very obvious selling point for this game and I am pretty mixed on it. The almost limitless possibilities and executions this ability can do are downright demonic. I’m not much of a guy that enjoys this aspect of this game and the last, but I do want to acknowledge the ingenuity at play here from seeing so much creativity people have made on the internet so far. Pure kino shit. That said, the controls feel very clunky in rotating and placing objects, and the entire process of putting together a bizarre contraption grows very old very fast. Autobuild, the one ability that is confusingly placed in a series of lesser main missions for some reason, alleviates this a bit but even that is limited with the amount of designs you can save and it is run on resources if the items you need to make your invention are not around. I get that some boundaries needed to be placed on this, but the game is already so vulnerability to being cheesed, that they should have just went all the way with full god mode with these abilities. This game’s heavy emphasis on being open-ended does feel that it is close to reaching some breaking point, but the devs manage to keep things from going completely out of control, for now.
Tears reuses the same map from the last game, but many valuable additions have been made such as the caverns, depths, sky islands, and other changes to the landscapes and sceneries with even more enemies to boast compared to botw’s quickly apparent issue of lack of enemy variety. The caverns were so fun to encounter and added a lot to Hyrule feeling fresh again, along with the more interesting side adventures in the game. While I did not feel much interest in really traversing everywhere this time, Hyrule was still a blast to return to and see some changes and some of the things that didn’t change.
The sky islands at first were very intriguing and honestly hit their peak with the tutorial section of the great sky island because every other island except for a very small few felt very sparse and small in scale with very repetitive challenges of bring the green gem to activate a shrine or sky dive through rings to unlock another shrine . The islands are amazing at a presentation level and the fact that the switch runs this game so well outside of using ultrahand is nuts. Looking down at Hyrule while on the islands and getting to see some of the going-ons like dragons flying in the area felt very serene. Hate that there wasn’t a ton more to these islands. The depths were dead on arrival for me and honestly that was for the best. I don’t care for them much, even if they have some good items hidden within them. The advanced darkness trick to push exploration and present challenge is tired. I prefer Elden Ring’s approach with this with the sprawling and ever unique caverns and undergrounds that weren’t pitch black and had way better enemy variety and overall intrigue in the levels. I feel like less depths and even more caverns in Hyrule would have been a better solution to making the map feel new again. Even thinking of these two sections of the islands and depths as compliments to the overworld helps a little better instead of seeing them as independent aspects that could but mostly could not stand on their own.
Another thing that bothered me about the exploration is how the memories of this game are handled similarly to last game’s. I did not mind the nonlinear discovery of the memories in Breath of the wild since they are Link’s memories and acted as more abstract entries that could be put together in a certain linear organization but watching them out of order was never a huge issue. Here in Tears, the tears fit in more of an actual timeline of events and going out of order has the potential of spoiling certain things and making other parts very awkward to watch afterwards. The devs obviously knew about this since Impa always mentions to Link if he visited a certain spot after completing a region, but like you could still end up finding these memories out of order anyways if you are focused on exploring rather than brute forcing the main story, which I feel like most people are doing the former rather than the latter. When I noticed this with the first memory, I just pulled up a guide so this didn't happen and the entire memories together were all great and even surprising in a good way with the last one, if only they weren’t forced into this open-ended structure of discovering them and instead limiting them based on progression in the game. This also fed into another issue I had with this game, its narrative and its structure.
Tears’ story is better, I think, than botw. Ganondorf feels like a real menacing threat with actual screentime versus his calamity shenanigans last game, not to mention he’s pretty hot when not in need of moisturizer. The final battle against him in Hyrule castle and his final transformation and the battle there is all exceptional and stomps all over Breath of the wild. I legitimately loved this last part of the game and story and some of the beginning too, up till we reach the ground and… do the same structure from the last game. Every region is in peril from the upheaval and all of the leaders need Link’s help to solve it as they work together to scale “dungeons” and defeat the regional bosses for the reward of a heart container, story sequence, and the power related to your partner of that region. I got no problem with the structure, but the open-ended approach makes each of them feel very samey, even more so than breath of the wild with the same story exposition sequence with sages happening every single visit with little to no difference. Not much time is really spent at each region either. It was all pretty disappointing coming from botw that had similar issues but somehow was slightly better given Link’s lost memories and getting to know those spaces more for the first time. Speaking of, let me spend a minute on the “dungeons”. (And a slight nitpick since I couldn’t find elsewhere to put this, how come Teba was not the sage for the Rito? Tulin was fine, but annoying and he felt somewhat undeserved to be the sage for them. Weird since everyone else that becomes the sage was the same person we helped in the last game, giving a cool little reunion vibe, except for Tulin since he’s new here.)
The alleged “dungeons” in this game, I will say they are better than the divine beasts, at least two or three of them are. Overall though, these are still far from the dungeon name that is associated with this series except for Lightning temple in the Gerudo region which was great all things considered with pretty good puzzles involving light and introducing unique enemies to the region that made it a very memorable visit. . The wind temple had a decent set up with the trek up to it, but the actual dungeon itself once inside is still very simplistic and not very interconnected with each of the puzzles in meaningful ways. The water temple feels like a very on brand joke given this series’ complicated relationship with this kind of dungeon and is pathetically simplistic and short with a boss battle that feels oddly like a Super Mario Sunshine homage, the entire Zora region in general this game. The death mountain section at first was intriguing with the pothead goron thing, but the dungeon itself still felt only alright despite really liking the mine cart gimmick this time as a way to travel and activate the locks, if only they turned off climbing in this section. The less I talk about the spirit temple, the better because this was far and away one of the low points of the game for me because of the tedious trek to retrieve construct parts and then becoming a very slow and insufferable mech section. Easily one of the worst “dungeons” I’ve played in a Zelda game and made me even miss the divine beasts. I feel like strong dungeons are very capable with this formula of Zelda, but like it hasn’t happened yet. Maybe next time or the time after that.
On the plus side, I feel like the presentation in this game got a big upgrade. Not to say botw didn’t have strong presentation at points, but this game feels like it flexes more often than before. Key instances were the ascent up to the wind temple and the boss battle, the trek up the water temple with the waterfalls and Sidon summoning a fucking whirlpool, summoning the lightning temple, the fight at the top of Death Mountain, pretty much all of the final battle against Ganondorf, getting the master sword, and the sage cutscenes and some of the memories. The switch is still a toaster oven and has its moments of performance and visual drag, but this game looked so beautiful frequently, even more than many other AAA releases this year and upcoming. Hyrule is still beautiful as ever six years later and this game definitely feels like it has been six years in the making with a ton of polish put in it besides some aspects. The Zelda team are some wizards.
What else did I not cover? Well, shrines are back with a better outside aesthetic, but the inside feels a little generic. The puzzles in them feel way better than the constant battle challenges, unwieldy motion-controlled puzzles and other tedious repeats in botw. They still are immensely simplistic in quite a chunk of them, and they are all pretty vulnerable to being cheesed by the new abilities, which isn’t the worst thing but feels a little too criminal at times. Apparently there are even more of them this time, which is a choice that is very baffling coming off the issues with them last game.
The koroks are still here and they do try to make them a little less annoying, but I ended up ignoring most of them anyways. The sign holding instances were fun at first but got tired too quickly. The music here feels better but still is a little too ambient at times, not to say there aren’t any favorites like Last Catch, Dragon Head Island, the Ganondorf Castle theme. I’m glad the champion tunic is back as armor, though the way you get it is kinda lame compared to botw. Getting the master sword though is a little more impactful, though it was resonant in botw too. The monster hunts in the side adventures were surprisingly so much fun and whenever I came across it randomly while exploring, I lit up with a lot of joy. The voice acting is still… the voice acting; I really couldn’t stand Tulin, and Zelda and Yunobo were weird sometimes to me.
I think that’s it though in terms of everything else I could add. I’ve done some side adventures and side quests and they were cool, a little better than last time but there are still some stinkers in the mix. Oh also, everything is so expensive now in the game and getting a lot of rupees and upgrades are harder. Also fuck enemies one shotting, that’s stupid as fuck.
Anyways, yeah that was Tears of the Kingdom. A great sequel to Breath of the Wild and improves quite a lot on it. That said, I wasn’t fully impressed with it in some parts and the direction they decided to take with the game overall as a sequel. Still, it is worth a buy, definitely not a $70 buy just like every other game that is charging this ridiculous price. I’m hoping the next Zelda game scales back on the open-endedness of these past two games unless the third one ends up being a follow-up to this game. The openness is still good and shouldn’t be thrown out but rein it in a bit and work out aspects like dungeons and weapons and the story. Hell, I’ll even take a 2D game that doesn’t retread or follow from A Link to the Past as the next Zelda game. I have fun with this style but, like the older style by the time of Skyward Sword, it is starting to show its diminishing returns unless some more revamps are taken. Still at the end of the day, Tears of the Kingdom is pretty good. Not my favorite game of the year though, but definitely top 5 or 10 of the year if I wanna be nitpicky.
Also holy shit I did not expect to write a whole essay on this game but I suppose it left some impact on me despite the gripes. If you made it this far, thanks for reading!
After two weeks of grinding through this game, I’ve officially beat Tears of the Kingdom, the main story. There’s still a shit ton of quests and other exploration to do in the game that I will tackle over the summer but the main game to the sequel of one of my favorite Zelda games is complete. And honestly, it was pretty good and a fundamental improvement over Breath of the Wild, though still carrying on many of its contributions. I greatly enjoyed being back in Hyrule again, sometimes above and rarely below it, and it was a strong sequel that definitely felt like it was over six years in the making. Another Nintendo banger, though I have some gripes with.
The new abilities of this game are decently good though also a little weird in their own right. Ascend and recall are intriguing additions that shake up some of the gameplay, ascend to an even bigger degree in making traversal slightly less tedious where before you had to climb everything with limited stamina and without the full climbing set until later in the game. Recall ends up being a little too situational and underutilized with some puzzles taking advantage of it and sometimes I used it in combat to throw objects and weapons back to enemies, though this was few and far between. Fuse feels a little too on the nose of a response to weapon durability criticism and it feels...fine. Fusing weapons together looks ultra goofy and most times isn’t super effective with the terrible durability that feels even weaker here than in BOTW. Fusing materials with weapons is way more effective but the whole process of fusion is so unnecessarily clunky and awkward with having to select a material, drop it, select fusion, and then select your weapon or shield (unless it is not out which adds even more steps to this process). It’s fine for fusing materials with arrows, but weapons is just awful. Why couldn’t the devs have just utilized an extra menu to cut down on all of these processes? We already are doing a ton of menuing anyways. Also why couldn’t bows be fused with other bows or weapons to slightly offset their durability and experiment with them?
Ultrahand itself feels like a very obvious selling point for this game and I am pretty mixed on it. The almost limitless possibilities and executions this ability can do are downright demonic. I’m not much of a guy that enjoys this aspect of this game and the last, but I do want to acknowledge the ingenuity at play here from seeing so much creativity people have made on the internet so far. Pure kino shit. That said, the controls feel very clunky in rotating and placing objects, and the entire process of putting together a bizarre contraption grows very old very fast. Autobuild, the one ability that is confusingly placed in a series of lesser main missions for some reason, alleviates this a bit but even that is limited with the amount of designs you can save and it is run on resources if the items you need to make your invention are not around. I get that some boundaries needed to be placed on this, but the game is already so vulnerability to being cheesed, that they should have just went all the way with full god mode with these abilities. This game’s heavy emphasis on being open-ended does feel that it is close to reaching some breaking point, but the devs manage to keep things from going completely out of control, for now.
Tears reuses the same map from the last game, but many valuable additions have been made such as the caverns, depths, sky islands, and other changes to the landscapes and sceneries with even more enemies to boast compared to botw’s quickly apparent issue of lack of enemy variety. The caverns were so fun to encounter and added a lot to Hyrule feeling fresh again, along with the more interesting side adventures in the game. While I did not feel much interest in really traversing everywhere this time, Hyrule was still a blast to return to and see some changes and some of the things that didn’t change.
The sky islands at first were very intriguing and honestly hit their peak with the tutorial section of the great sky island because every other island except for a very small few felt very sparse and small in scale with very repetitive challenges of bring the green gem to activate a shrine or sky dive through rings to unlock another shrine . The islands are amazing at a presentation level and the fact that the switch runs this game so well outside of using ultrahand is nuts. Looking down at Hyrule while on the islands and getting to see some of the going-ons like dragons flying in the area felt very serene. Hate that there wasn’t a ton more to these islands. The depths were dead on arrival for me and honestly that was for the best. I don’t care for them much, even if they have some good items hidden within them. The advanced darkness trick to push exploration and present challenge is tired. I prefer Elden Ring’s approach with this with the sprawling and ever unique caverns and undergrounds that weren’t pitch black and had way better enemy variety and overall intrigue in the levels. I feel like less depths and even more caverns in Hyrule would have been a better solution to making the map feel new again. Even thinking of these two sections of the islands and depths as compliments to the overworld helps a little better instead of seeing them as independent aspects that could but mostly could not stand on their own.
Another thing that bothered me about the exploration is how the memories of this game are handled similarly to last game’s. I did not mind the nonlinear discovery of the memories in Breath of the wild since they are Link’s memories and acted as more abstract entries that could be put together in a certain linear organization but watching them out of order was never a huge issue. Here in Tears, the tears fit in more of an actual timeline of events and going out of order has the potential of spoiling certain things and making other parts very awkward to watch afterwards. The devs obviously knew about this since Impa always mentions to Link if he visited a certain spot after completing a region, but like you could still end up finding these memories out of order anyways if you are focused on exploring rather than brute forcing the main story, which I feel like most people are doing the former rather than the latter. When I noticed this with the first memory, I just pulled up a guide so this didn't happen and the entire memories together were all great and even surprising in a good way with the last one, if only they weren’t forced into this open-ended structure of discovering them and instead limiting them based on progression in the game. This also fed into another issue I had with this game, its narrative and its structure.
Tears’ story is better, I think, than botw. Ganondorf feels like a real menacing threat with actual screentime versus his calamity shenanigans last game, not to mention he’s pretty hot when not in need of moisturizer. The final battle against him in Hyrule castle and his final transformation and the battle there is all exceptional and stomps all over Breath of the wild. I legitimately loved this last part of the game and story and some of the beginning too, up till we reach the ground and… do the same structure from the last game. Every region is in peril from the upheaval and all of the leaders need Link’s help to solve it as they work together to scale “dungeons” and defeat the regional bosses for the reward of a heart container, story sequence, and the power related to your partner of that region. I got no problem with the structure, but the open-ended approach makes each of them feel very samey, even more so than breath of the wild with the same story exposition sequence with sages happening every single visit with little to no difference. Not much time is really spent at each region either. It was all pretty disappointing coming from botw that had similar issues but somehow was slightly better given Link’s lost memories and getting to know those spaces more for the first time. Speaking of, let me spend a minute on the “dungeons”. (And a slight nitpick since I couldn’t find elsewhere to put this, how come Teba was not the sage for the Rito? Tulin was fine, but annoying and he felt somewhat undeserved to be the sage for them. Weird since everyone else that becomes the sage was the same person we helped in the last game, giving a cool little reunion vibe, except for Tulin since he’s new here.)
The alleged “dungeons” in this game, I will say they are better than the divine beasts, at least two or three of them are. Overall though, these are still far from the dungeon name that is associated with this series except for Lightning temple in the Gerudo region which was great all things considered with pretty good puzzles involving light and introducing unique enemies to the region that made it a very memorable visit. . The wind temple had a decent set up with the trek up to it, but the actual dungeon itself once inside is still very simplistic and not very interconnected with each of the puzzles in meaningful ways. The water temple feels like a very on brand joke given this series’ complicated relationship with this kind of dungeon and is pathetically simplistic and short with a boss battle that feels oddly like a Super Mario Sunshine homage, the entire Zora region in general this game. The death mountain section at first was intriguing with the pothead goron thing, but the dungeon itself still felt only alright despite really liking the mine cart gimmick this time as a way to travel and activate the locks, if only they turned off climbing in this section. The less I talk about the spirit temple, the better because this was far and away one of the low points of the game for me because of the tedious trek to retrieve construct parts and then becoming a very slow and insufferable mech section. Easily one of the worst “dungeons” I’ve played in a Zelda game and made me even miss the divine beasts. I feel like strong dungeons are very capable with this formula of Zelda, but like it hasn’t happened yet. Maybe next time or the time after that.
On the plus side, I feel like the presentation in this game got a big upgrade. Not to say botw didn’t have strong presentation at points, but this game feels like it flexes more often than before. Key instances were the ascent up to the wind temple and the boss battle, the trek up the water temple with the waterfalls and Sidon summoning a fucking whirlpool, summoning the lightning temple, the fight at the top of Death Mountain, pretty much all of the final battle against Ganondorf, getting the master sword, and the sage cutscenes and some of the memories. The switch is still a toaster oven and has its moments of performance and visual drag, but this game looked so beautiful frequently, even more than many other AAA releases this year and upcoming. Hyrule is still beautiful as ever six years later and this game definitely feels like it has been six years in the making with a ton of polish put in it besides some aspects. The Zelda team are some wizards.
What else did I not cover? Well, shrines are back with a better outside aesthetic, but the inside feels a little generic. The puzzles in them feel way better than the constant battle challenges, unwieldy motion-controlled puzzles and other tedious repeats in botw. They still are immensely simplistic in quite a chunk of them, and they are all pretty vulnerable to being cheesed by the new abilities, which isn’t the worst thing but feels a little too criminal at times. Apparently there are even more of them this time, which is a choice that is very baffling coming off the issues with them last game.
The koroks are still here and they do try to make them a little less annoying, but I ended up ignoring most of them anyways. The sign holding instances were fun at first but got tired too quickly. The music here feels better but still is a little too ambient at times, not to say there aren’t any favorites like Last Catch, Dragon Head Island, the Ganondorf Castle theme. I’m glad the champion tunic is back as armor, though the way you get it is kinda lame compared to botw. Getting the master sword though is a little more impactful, though it was resonant in botw too. The monster hunts in the side adventures were surprisingly so much fun and whenever I came across it randomly while exploring, I lit up with a lot of joy. The voice acting is still… the voice acting; I really couldn’t stand Tulin, and Zelda and Yunobo were weird sometimes to me.
I think that’s it though in terms of everything else I could add. I’ve done some side adventures and side quests and they were cool, a little better than last time but there are still some stinkers in the mix. Oh also, everything is so expensive now in the game and getting a lot of rupees and upgrades are harder. Also fuck enemies one shotting, that’s stupid as fuck.
Anyways, yeah that was Tears of the Kingdom. A great sequel to Breath of the Wild and improves quite a lot on it. That said, I wasn’t fully impressed with it in some parts and the direction they decided to take with the game overall as a sequel. Still, it is worth a buy, definitely not a $70 buy just like every other game that is charging this ridiculous price. I’m hoping the next Zelda game scales back on the open-endedness of these past two games unless the third one ends up being a follow-up to this game. The openness is still good and shouldn’t be thrown out but rein it in a bit and work out aspects like dungeons and weapons and the story. Hell, I’ll even take a 2D game that doesn’t retread or follow from A Link to the Past as the next Zelda game. I have fun with this style but, like the older style by the time of Skyward Sword, it is starting to show its diminishing returns unless some more revamps are taken. Still at the end of the day, Tears of the Kingdom is pretty good. Not my favorite game of the year though, but definitely top 5 or 10 of the year if I wanna be nitpicky.
Also holy shit I did not expect to write a whole essay on this game but I suppose it left some impact on me despite the gripes. If you made it this far, thanks for reading!