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

(PRE-RELEASE: SPOILER-FREE) Before I begin, I want to specify that this will be the first of two reviews. My second review will come after the game releases and potentially gets patches or any other such things. Also, obviously, after I put plenty of more time into the game. Consider this review to be first thoughts. Thus, it will be a shorter review. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom picks up brilliantly where Breath of the Wild leaves off, throwing you immediately into the story as the game begins. I will not mention any spoilers in this review, as it wouldn’t be really fair. All I will say is that we continue the story of Breath of the Wild in a way that really feels like it makes sense. The most notable change in Tears of the Kingdom is the new focus on verticality in the map. There are underground cave systems and floating archipelagos that populate the map, giving it a thorough sense of depth and layers to the potential exploration. This is genuinely brilliant and I find myself looking up to the sky to see if anything is hiding above me quite often. None of the special abilities from Breath of the Wild return. No more Magnesis, Cryonis, Stasis, or even bombs. Also gone are the abilities obtained after defeating the Divine Beasts. This isn’t surprising, but I expected to severely miss these things. However, the abilities that replace them in this game are in some cases even better. The most useful of the abilities is definitely Ultrahand, which is the spiritual successor to Magnesis. It allows you to grab any item and fuse it in to however many items you would like. This lets you create any items you want, even further expanding the sandbox. Fuse lets you, well, fuse items into your weapons. For example: you can fuse a boulder to your equipped club and make a hammer. You can use the hammer to destroy cracked rocks or simply do more damage to enemies. This somewhat replaces the bombs, along with the fact there are countless different plants and fruits around the world that serve as the way to make special arrows/items including bombs whenever you want. Ascend allows users to float upward and effectively swim through solid matter to appear on top of the surface above them. It is very situational, but still nice. I suppose this traversal focus means this succeeds Cryonis. Finally, what seems to be the the successor to Stasis: Recall. Instead of freezing an item in time, which it still does for just a moment, Recall instead has the primary purpose of moving an object backwards through time until it returns to its starting point. This has been very very hard to find uses for so far, but it is still incredibly satisfying to use when you have any creative epiphanies. In terms of items, as I mentioned earlier, there are a ton of different kinds of fruit or plants that allow you to attach them to arrows or just throw them to replace things like bombs, explosive arrows, flame arrows, etc. Of course, these also add to the familiar cooking system. One major change are the inclusion of new tools called Zonai Devices. These devices are, if you really stretch the definition, the successor to the Divine Beast abilities. They are gadgets that require a charge and can do things such as shoot flames, blow air like a fan, or even be a portable cooking pot. I think, in general, these are a welcome change and provide even more freedom into the game. All in all, from the ten to twelve or so hours that I have spent playing Tears of the Kingdom thus far, I can report that while this definitely has a ton of DNA in it from Breath of the Wild… it is far from a bad thing. The changes seem only to improve the open-ended game philosophy by giving the player even more tools to forge their own path. If you enjoyed Breath of the Wild as much as I did, then I think it is safe to say you’ll enjoy Tears of the Kingdom just the same. Due to the expanded game mechanics, map, increased density of points of interest, and general quality of life upgrades, Tears of the Kingdom seems to just be Breath of the Wild but even a bit better. Get hyped for the public release next week, I know I’ll be playing the game every minute until then. This really might end up being my favorite game ever made. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Initial Score: 10/10