THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: TEARS OF THE KINGDOM REVIEW

Written by James Jensen

19 June 2023

I first played Breath of the Wild on release in 2017, put about 50 hours into it, and subsequently never touched it again. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy it: I still consider it one of the best games ever made, however, the time I had spent in its tranquill rendition of Hyrule was enough to leave me satisfied. There have been times in the past 6 years where I have looked back fondly on its serenity, its use of negative space and the quiet melancholy of a Hyrule in decline. As games like Horizon Zero Dawn and Ghost Recon: Wildlands were products of their time: sprawling, map-marker driven open-world games with what seemed like an endless amount of enemy encampments to clear, Breath of the Wild was more focused on player discovery, and felt like a meditation on open-world games as a whole. 

While Breath of the Wild was obsessed with using its space as a tool for player contemplation, Tears of the Kingdom fills that space with a plethora of surprises, taking the same Hyrule we know and meaningfully building upon it. While many were expecting a fundamental shake up from Nintendo’s open world Zelda formula, this game is definitively and fundamentally “Breath of the Wild 2,” with many of its mechanics lifted directly from it, love it or hate it. Comparisons between the two games can easily be made, however Tears of the Kingdom distinguishes itself again and again with unrelenting freedom, a genuinely thrilling story and the single most flexible and immersive sandbox experience I have seen in a game to date. 

Tears of the Kingdom begins on the Great Sky Island, a group of land masses floating above Hyrule, that acts as the Great Plateau did in Breath of the WIld. It is here that you are introduced to the game’s core mechanics: climbing, cooking, managing temperature and resource gathering, as well as its new mechanics such as the Ultrahand building system and the ability to fuse random junk together to make weapons. Just like the Great Plateau, this area acts as the game’s tutorial and is a microcosm for the systems you will interact with in the rest of the game. 

Eventually you are pushed from this area into the open world, and while some things are familiar from Breath of the Wild, pretty soon that sense of familiarity melts away into a sense of awe when you see just what has changed about this space, playing on what you remember from the original at almost every turn, and filling its world to the brim with activities and things to discover. As with Breath of the Wild, Hyrule Castle is in disarray, this time floating above the ground, and you quickly learn that the game’s four major settlements are all experiencing some kind of disaster, and thus your journey to figure out what has happened to Hyrule in your absence begins.

You may say this sounds somewhat similar structurally to Breath of the Wild, and you would be right. The main objective still is to save Princess Zelda and ultimately Hyrule, but the path in which you choose to do this (or not) is entirely up to you. Again, you are tasked with visiting the four main regions of the map to tend to the needs of the inhabitants of that area, each facing some catastrophe linked to the same events threatening Hyrule Castle. The order in which you can face these challenges however is entirely freeform, leaving your exploration of the game’s world and its pacing up to you. 

It is this freedom that is paramount to the success of Tears of the Kingdom. You can choose to venture west to help the feathered Rito, or you could do literally anything else in the meantime and the game will never make you feel like you have made the wrong decision for doing so, and with such a plethora of activities to partake in, it makes perfect sense for the game to be designed like this. That is not to say that the main questline is contrived or uninteresting, it’s just that you will not feel punished for straying off the beaten path. This feeling often lead me down multiple-hour long detours, as everything this world has to offer is equally as interesting as the main quest, and equally worth your time. 

When you actually get to exploring this rendition of Hyrule, you will start to find differences in how it was portrayed in Breath of the Wild. That game was just as much about its empty spaces and moving through them, as it was its story or side activities. Many of the areas you would come across in that game looked quite interesting, but a lot of them were simply set dressing to set the melancholic vibe that the game nailed so expertly. That is not the case here, and you can walk in just about any direction and find something interesting. Whether it is spelunking in one of Hyrule’s many newfound caves or stumbling upon an allied faction taking on a monster outpost, there is almost no meaningful length of time you can go or distance you can travel without finding *something* that will grab your attention.

In terms of narrative, the story  is delivered in a largely similar way to its predecessor, which is to say you will be watching a variety of cutscenes describing events passed, and it is your responsibility to piece these together yourself and figure out what has transpired. The quality of writing however is a significant step up from that of Breath of the Wild, and while the narrative can follow a lot of the series’ regular “save the princess” tropes, there are some genuine surprises and twists here that kept me more than engaged throughout my whopping 115 hour playthrough. 

This story will lead you all over Hyrule, from its highest peaks to its deepest depths. You will meet characters with compelling stories to tell, though none will be as compelling as the stories you make for yourself whilst travelling these lands. It has the capacity to move you, and has an absolutely thrilling conclusion that is worth experiencing on its own. 

“It is a testament to its design that by the end of my playthrough I was completely comfortable with these mechanics being in a Zelda game.”

I think the most important aspect to discuss in what makes this game so phenomenal is its commitment to its sandbox. No game before has delivered a sandbox this flexible whilst still being an actual video game. An insane level of building complexity is dropped into a Zelda game of all things, and it is all the better for it. This completely revolutionises exploration, and is a stunning step up from its predecessor. In Breath of the Wild, traversal was a central mechanic, but you were mostly traipsing around on foot, or on horseback. This gave a sense of importance to how the world was designed, as the space was made to be navigated in that manner. In Tears of the Kingdom, if you want to build a raft and sail to your destination, you can. If you want to build a plane and fly to your destination, you absolutely can. It is a testament to its design that by the end of my playthrough I was completely comfortable with these mechanics being in a Zelda game, and still finding unique ways that the sandbox could be used in combat or for traversal. 

None of this would be possible without the introduction of some new mechanics, the first being Rewind. This is quite smart actually, and allows you to reverse an object's trajectory and have it travel to where it originated from. If a group of enemies pushes a rock towards you down a cliff, you can send it back up to catch them off guard as they make chase. 

Secondly, Fuse allows you to dynamically fuse weapons and materials you find on the ground together, both increasing the weapon’s attack power and durability in the process. Let's say you have a tree branch as your main weapon, and you happen across a boulder. You can stick said boulder to said branch, and now you have a mace. This also includes things like attaching certain elemental fruits to arrows, or a sail to your sword to create a gust of wind to send enemies flying. 

The third ability is Ascend, which allows you to travel upwards through almost any ceiling as long as it isn’t too far away from you. When it comes to traversal, as long as you can get underneath something, you can quickly transport yourself up to the level above you, leaving you with an easy exit out of a cave, and some interesting traversal challenges, trying to find a way into certain areas by navigating underneath them. 

All of this pales in comparison to the Ultra Hand building system. This allows you to “glue” almost anything in the world together, be it logs, rocks, wooden planks, anything really. Where this gets really interesting is with the introduction of Zonai devices, controllable machine parts that run on electricity such as fans, wheels and flamethrowers. This opens up the possibility for almost anything you can think of being built, from cars to planes to literal tanks. 

The way you can solve problems organically and in your own way is unmatched here. If you can think of it, chances are it will work and the world is designed in such a way to bring out this creativity in you. Often problems can be solved through conventional means, but if you wanted to build an elaborate hovercraft to lay siege to an enemy base, dropping bombs on them from above you certainly can. A fun moment in my playthrough was attempting to build a carriage to take some logs to a nearby settlement, and having my horse pull said carriage to its destination. These logs ended up being considerably too heavy for my horse, leading me to construct a literal monster truck out of the logs I was trying to deliver and driving them there myself. This is a good example of the emergent fun that this system allows for. 

That is not to say everything here is an improvement though. Combat, a sticking point for many from the original, remains largely unchanged. Weapon durability, different weapon types and charge attacks are lifted almost directly from its predecessor, and while these mechanics have always been serviceable, I wouldn’t necessarily describe them as particularly enjoyable or groundbreaking. Some things have been changed, in that you can attach aforementioned Zonai devices to your weapon or shield, making something akin to a flamethrower sword or shield entirely possible, but these differences don’t radically transform combat into something it wasn’t in Breath of the Wild, they just add a touch more intricacy to a relatively basic system. 

Another problem I found was the finickiness of some mechanics, especially related to cooking and weapon fusing. You will rarely find extremely strong weapons out in the overworld, and thus your combat capabilities are largely relegated to your ability to fuse monster parts onto comparatively weaker swords or spears. Doing this involves navigation through multiple menus, selecting the items you want, placing them on the ground in a pile and then trying very carefully not to fuse the wrong item to the weapon you were trying to upgrade. This seems unnecessarily complex, but I also can’t imagine this mechanic functioning in the way that it does if it were done differently. 

The other problem is the cooking system, which, like in Breath of the Wild, was designed more in a way to deplete your stockpile of resources rather than being an interesting mechanic. While there are some fun new recipes that can be made with some experimentation, the mechanic largely falls into tedium, involving standing in front of a pot for large lengths of time, again navigating through menus to find specific ingredients you wish to use. There are obvious ways this could have been improved from its predecessor, like a cookbook for example, however Nintendo opted to not touch up this system this time around. 

Final Thoughts

It is worth saying that I have avoided discussion of some very large sections and mechanics  of the game, specifically to avoid spoilers. These sections are so inspired and surprising that it is far better that you discover these for yourself than read about them here.

Despite some very minor shortcomings, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is an almost objectively remarkable experience. So many times I was positively awestruck by what I was seeing, and completely floored by the number of sheer surprises that Nintendo have managed to pack into this game; it is almost unfathomable that this was created by human beings, and experiencing this world and this story is so essential to anyone that is interested in video games as a medium that I could not recommend it more strongly. 

The sandbox that Nintendo has created here seems impossible. It is so flexible and unique that it is easy to say that no company will be able to replicate anything nearly this complex for the better part of a decade. Ultra Hand is such a genius mechanic that will give this game longevity far beyond what its predecessor could offer, as people find new and interesting ways to break and bypass challenges set within the game world, and I am absolutely here for it. 

The narrative is genuinely exciting, and while told in a very freeform manner will play with your expectations, leave you with some absolutely unforgettable moments, and deliver on the fantasy epic that we have waited so long for. I can’t stress enough just how thrilling this story was to experience; a huge step up from its predecessor.