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

It’s hard for me to consider a game disappointing when it’s so great. There was a period of one week where this game was all I wanted to do. The gameplay is still incredibly fun and addicting. The sense of exploration is still vast and detailed all at the same time. The weapon degradation system is still frustrating for some, but a great idea if you ask me. That’s the magic word: Still. This game is way too similar to Breath of the Wild. Despite their attempts to alter the world, adding sky islands, even adding an entire underground world, the game still feels like BotW plus. It’s so frustrating that everything is so polished, but I have to give a good chunk of that credit to the game it was based on. Other sequels in the Zelda series did a much better job separating themselves from the the one before. The original top-down Zelda NES gave way to the side-scrolling RPG, Zelda II. Majora’s Mask is the definitive sequel to Ocarina of Time, but despite keeping the same gameplay style, the mood and story are entirely original while still reusing assets from Ocarina. My point is that Tears of the Kingdom barely feels more like it’s own game and more like a big DLC expansion for the first game. With all that said, I enjoy the new runes you get in this game as well as the Sage powers. They help a lot, but it still isn’t enough for me to consider it the games whole identity. Besides the similar gameplay, the other disappointment is the incredibly underwhelming story. The tears you find are the most interesting, but only a few of them really gave me pause. Even then, if a certain twist ended how it was, I was just gonna be pissed off after everything that happened in BotW. I won’t say either way for your sake, I think you should still play this game yourself. One last thing, *SPOILER HERE* *HEY ITS MINOR BUT STILL A SPOILER* When you save each of the 4 sages, you get the same cutscene with the same information every time and it made me hate the sages for wasting my time since I sat through all of them in case they said something new, but they never did. This was the laziest part of the entire plot. Also, fuck whoever decided to replace Teba. Stupid.