4/5 ★ – FoofDeckman's review of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.

Tears of the Kingdom is the most innovative and refined open-world sandbox game I've ever played. This will be the game that'll set the expectations of all open-world games for the next decade or more. Between it's incredibly sophisticated building mechanics and emphasis on creativity, the way this game was built is a technical marvel. Not only that but somehow a game this giant is running on a portable handheld system with specs worse than my phone, I don't believe in witchcraft, but that seems like the only explanation I can think of. Tears of the Kingdom is an incredibly impressive title for a multitude of reasons, but in all honestly, I'm still left somewhat underwhelmed. Breath of the Wild is a masterpiece in my eyes, sure it's not actually perfect and nothing ever is, but it's everything I wanted from a game. Before Breath of the Wild every open-world game had that same exact surface level formula while hand holding you from point A to point B. Breath of the Wild unlinked those restrictive chains and gave you a completely open sandbox to explore at your own leisure. You had a main quest you could approach at any time, but it rewards you with power by exploring and venturing out. This was incredibly innovative for the time and as a result became the template for most open world games after its release. Tears of the Kingdom follows suit in it's footsteps while kind of treading over similar water a little too closely. Throughout the first 70% of the game, It felt like a huge "been there done that" kind of scenario, not that it was a bad scenario, but one that doesn't hold the same weight the second time around. Like Breath of the Wild, you have the option of finishing the game right away, or to be rewarded by venturing out into the world. Not only that but, you travel to the same towns, same regions, with the same types of NPCS in the overworld, albeit with a few caveats. This game's overworld feels almost like a remixed and expanded version of Breath of the Wild's map, and as a result the urge to explore is somewhat lessened. I emphasize Overworld, as the minimized sense of exploration doesn't apply to the Sky and Depths region of the world as those are exclusive to Tears of the Kingdom, both areas being my favorite sections in the game. As much as I love Breath of the Wild, I've never had the urge to replay it as I had my fun and simply moved on, and much like that game's Divine Beasts, Tears of the Kingdom introduces a nearly identical structure with it's Sages. Go to four distinct regions (Mountains, Desert, Volcano, Water), talk to NPCs for some quests and eventually reach a giant puzzle area before fighting a boss. And while that might be oversimplifying it, In retrospect it's still bizarre how similar the events in Tears play out compared to Breath of the Wild. Not that it's a bad thing since Breath of the Wild is great, and if it ain't broke don't fix it, but it still doesn't hold the same punch as it did experiencing it in the previous game. The newly introduced temples of Tears feel like a worse version of the Divine Beasts. The Divine Beasts always felt fairly straight forward and never really overstayed their welcome, which really kept the pacing going. On the contrary the Temples feel incredibly drawn out, and while they can be more a visual spectacle than the Divine Beasts ever were, I found the design of them to be very dull in comparison. The biggest complaint of Breath of the Wild I've seen from it's critics is the ever looming threat of weapon durability. I never really understood this complaint, for me the weapons of Breath of the Wild never really had all to much distinction from each other anyway, so losing one and grabbing a completely new weapon that acts almost the same never really bothered me. Outside of maybe the Master Sword's power meter, the complaints about weapon durability never made sense in my eyes. Tears of the Kingdom made me understand those people a little bit more. This game introduces a mechanic called Fuse, which conceptually is really cool, but I feel in execution kind of missed the mark for me. Instead of just finding a powerful weapon on the ground like in Breath of the Wild, you can combine your already existing weapon with a material to make it stronger or give it a certain effect. This mechanic is very extensive and the amount of things you're able to accomplish with just this one mechanic is really impressive, but when it comes to the combat itself, using It almost feels a little counterintuitive to a degree. As a result of the bonus damage Fuse can add to weapons, to balance this out all of the weapons do a lot less base damage. Most of the time I'll be swinging at an enemy and feel like I'm doing almost nothing, but as soon as I fuse it with my stockpile of items I'll never use, It becomes one of the best weapons in the game. Instead of feeling like a bonus, it feels more like a crutch thing you need to do and adds an extra step that didn't help the game in any degree. The Legend of Zelda series isn't particularly known for it's plot, hell most people think the main character of this series is Zelda, so that goes to show how unimportant it is. But for some reason, Tears of the Kingdom really lingers on the story when I feel like it would have been significantly better without it. Sure you're able to skip most cutscenes, but the amount of times these character's dump exposition that's delivered in a completely uninteresting way really just brings down the experience. I love all of the stuff directly involving Ganondorf, so the fact that so many of these cutscenes don't impact that main plotline and only really play into the backstories of the sages is wild to me. I mentioned earlier how 70% of this game felt like I had already played it before. The other 30% really bumped this game up for me, I was ready to give Tears of the Kingdom a lower score until suddenly the game decides to throw the most unique set pieces I've ever seen from this series. I won't get into spoilers because It's best to just experience these parts for yourself, but the journey to the 5th sage till the end of the game is the most fun I've had out of either of these Zelda games, or even the series in general. While I was hoping that Tears of the Kingdom would somehow outshine it's predecessor overall, it's clear now that I was already setting myself up for disappointment, even if it still manages to do it in spurts. Not that Tears of the Kingdom is a bad game, because it's far from it. I could spend all day praising its unique mechanics, score, art direction, but honestly I feel like I've said enough. If you're someone that loved Breath of the Wild, you most likely will also love this game, but to the people who already didn't like the first game, Tears will not win you over. If you somehow haven't played Breath of the Wild, I highly recommend playing this game instead as experiencing that open world through the lens of Tears of the Kingdom, opens a way better experience. I highly recommend dusting off the Switch to play this game, as it's one of those games you don't see all to often.