So I’ve Finished: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

Just recently I got to the end credits of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom after spending several dozen hours in it. I found it a worthy continuation from Breath of the Wild, but in both bad and good ways.

This review contains spoilers both mechanical and narrative.

By being set in the same world in the same chronology of the smash-hit Breath of the Wild, TOTK would have to work very hard to not just feel like BOTW v2. And it doesn’t.

I don’t intend to belittle the achievements of the developers, designers, and creators. I mean, goodness, would you look at what they were able to have run on the Switch? Did you feel how quick those loading screens were? Can you feel the love put into the animations and outfits? Gosh, it’s a lot of work in this cartridge. Go watch Jacob Geller’s reflection on the sun in art using Tears of the Kingdom as its touchstone work:

But it’s the same game as Breath of the Wild. Bigger. Broader. Sure. But you wouldn’t call FIFA2023 a sequel to FIFA2022 just because it had more stadiums (stadia? No, that’s done) and players and recent rules updates.

It is still show-don’t-tell mechanically (which I like), but tell-don’t-show narratively (which I don’t). Figuring out I could rewind the pieces of fallen debris to ascend to sky islands (or just to glide to the next shrine) felt great because I felt like I figured it out myself. Every second person telling me the same thing in the same words (gosh, designers worked so much expressiveness into the things that Link could do or touch or own or craft. Why do all the NPCs sound the same except for their (annoying) barks?) over and over again… good feeling gone.

You see this tonally, too. As I mentioned on Mastodon (come follow me on Mastodon), there’s some whiplash between any/every stable’s predictable form and repetitive “clues” and blah blah blah… and the nightmare-fuel gloom monster or demon king’s glowing-veined eyes.

But overall, it’s a lovely playground. I hesitate to call it an Open World. There’s precious little about Hyrule (over, on, or under) that feels like a world that exists when you aren’t looking at it (or even when you are). But all of it feels custom-built to be enjoyed with childlike playfulness. And there’s more of that then before, not because of the multiple levels of the world (because the sky and underdark are both very formulaic where they aren’t empty) but because of the higher density of stuff to do in Hyrule. More people on the roads, more signs of life… (though not enough for a kingdom on the rebound. Where are the people who are supposed to use those supply caches to rebuild homes? Where are the rebuilt homes themselves?)… but quantity isn’t necessarily quality:

• Koroks: euf, I was done yeeting campers to their camps within the first dozen hours. It feels like that’s literally half of all the koroks, though. (I liked the ‘the floor is lava’ one where you needed to land on a bull’s eye, though).
• Weapons: making them break even more frequently just made me want to engage in combat even less. Fuse-ing things to weapons never felt fun.
• Vehicles: maybe I’ve lost the sense of childish wonder, but I didn’t care about crafting vehicles unless it was the thing I needed to do to solve the puzzle in front of me. For traversal, I’d much rather grab one of my horses (named Horace, Hoarse, Horus, Epona, Bill, or Ted).
• The underdark: more isn’t more if it’s empty and you have to walk the whole length. And having to open it up piecemeal by lightroot? Pretty nifty if all you’re doing is lighting lamps in the dark from time to time… but there’s a reason the overworld has only 15 towers. It’s thankless work lighting the underdark.
• Outfits: Did upgrades get more expensive? It was hard to find enough rupees to upgrade my armour (which was the hint screen’s only advice when I biffed it in front of a monster). And that was just the core sets: all the nostalgia sets I found pieces of? I just left them in the bottom of the bag. Too much clothing, too little to make me want to wear any of it.

I did rather enjoy the ending, mechanically. Decent dungeon crawl (I finally remembered to use my travel medallions), some clever damage manipulation to make the final boss feel desperate without actually killing me.

Actually, let’s talk about that a little more. I went in with a full line plus about five hearts. Scads of them. Good defence, lots of shields. But my Master Sword ran out of energy before I faced the Demon King. No worries, the Master Sword is back and unbreakable for the DK fight (nicely done, devs, though a little game-y). So we’re fighting in the depths, and DK’s the master of Gloom, so I keep losing max hearts to gloom and, crap, I’ve eaten the last of my sundelion meals that’ll get me those hearts back, and I’m down to a total of five red hearts. Don’t worry, this next attack won’t kill you outright because you can’t heal beyond those five hearts: instead it’ll take one of your gloom-eaten max hearts! This is clever. Not only is it a credible threat (taking my heart containers? That requires four shrines or a temple to get!), not only does it extend the fight (my “working hearts” are untouched, so I still have five of those), it _also_ keeps the amount of my available hearts at a low enough level that I feel unsettled. Wonderful. And _then_ we take to the skies where the sun and my girlfriend the dragon can heal all my gloom and I can eat my fill and get my working hearts back up into the twenties.

System overlapping system coalescing in the final battle in such a way to make you feel desperate, powerful, and righteous. A+ mechanical work, Nintendo. Other devs: take note.

Narratively, TOTK kinda… sucks? I mean, thematically it’s a bunch of rehashed old status quo garbage that Polygon does an excellent job going into. Sure, this time they avoid the direct problematic elements of treating the Gerudo’s opinions about gender as a funny obstacle to rout around. So, kudos, I guess? But it’s still… not great to maintain the racist overtones of the brown desert people and the inexplicable, malevolent, and irredeemable evil of their dark-skinned king. It’s not great to suggest that what makes Zelda special is an unbroken _bloodline_ of all things. It’s weak to not even try to cover what Hyrule in general or Link in particular is doing to the environment by stripping it of resources.

And freaking Zelda has nothing to do but have things done to her. The series is named after her and it is Year of our Glorbo 2023 and we still cannot find anything for her to do after she fails to read the room at the beginning and kicks the plot off by walking downstairs. They animated five whole companions with… acceptable AI. They could’ve found something for Zelda to do besides cry her memories and then sit the throne.

Alas.

At any rate, if you enjoyed BOTW and want more of it, then TOTK is what you’re after. If you haven’t played BOTW, TOTK is an improved version that you can choose to skip right to if you’d like to save a step.