4.5/5 ★ – kinchia's review of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.

If you don’t like lots of text or spoilers you should probably stop reading this :) So, firstly I just wanna say that this is an incredible game. This and BotW are the only two singleplayer games I’ve played for over 100 hours, and I was completely invested in it nearly the entire time. There is so much I love about this game, from the art to the music to some great story moments and fantastically inventive combat situations. But you’ve already heard all that. Tears of the Kingdom is an incredible game which doesn’t even crack my top ten Zeldas. It is a fantastically messy smorgasbord of ideas which ultimately lacks the focus and purity of its predecessor. It stretches up and down into empty space, diluting the fabulous world between. It provides enhancements to areas of BotW which already had reached virtual perfection yet neglects the few parts which clearly needed restructuring. And it’s probably the least unique Zelda game ever made. Buckle in, I guess? Or stop reading, I don’t really blame you. *clears throat* Imma start with the most obvious point of criticism: the dungeons still suck. They suck slightly less than BotW but they still suck by Zelda standards. Come on. They’re like under 30 minutes long, can be cheesed easier than a hateno pizza, and they have the same goddamn terminal thing. The terminal thing would work great for one dungeon. One! Not all of them! At the beginning of the lightning temple there’s a linear Indiana jones sorta section, and it was SO SO NICE AND REFRESHING, but it’s seemingly the only tiny point of linearity in the entire game. Linearity. At some point in the past decade developers realized games were too linear and decided that the answer was to make everything nonlinear. Nonlinearity is not inherently better than linearity, they are just different, and you gotta use them both! So imagine my disappointment when I walk into the wind temple for the first time and instead of a perfectly paced, tight, brilliantly designed puzzle box I’m hit with five little shrines-in-disguise and one big shrug from the developers. To the dungeons’ credit, the differing environments go a LONG way and are way better than the divine beasts. Plus, I thoroughly enjoyed the fire temple and I think the lightning temple is the only one that actually honestly holds up as a Zelda dungeon. Lightning and Fire both actually center around a main theme mechanic, making them much more fully realized. All this only applies if you make the CHOICE not to cheese the dungeons. More on this later. Why am I hung up on dungeons? Because that is literally the essence of the legend of Zelda. Yes, including the first game. Remember that Zelda was born when miyamoto, exploring the Japanese countryside, stumbled upon a cave and wondered what was inside. The spirit of this series is that right there: exploration through level dungeon design. So yeah, the dungeons were a pretty big bummer, I’d say. Next up, the world. When I heard they were reusing the same world, I wasn’t angry. I was excited, because no game has ever repurposed a world this expansive and I wanted to see what they’d do to subvert their previous creation. That subversion does exist in pockets. Hateno was a great opportunity to play with NPC’s social views and witness a really fun and goofy quest repurpose a previously boring village. The hype of seeing an old friend in the depths is really fun. That’s, like, all the major examples I can think of. There are some delights here and there, I guess. But if you’re gonna make a sequel to a game completely utterly built around exploration and not knowing what’s around the corner, you GOTTA do more than some fun remixing. This ties right into the topic of progression. I consider BotW to be the best truly expansive open world I’ve played because of its CONTROL. It subtly guides players towards landmarks, slowly builds progression, keeps you wondering what you’ll stumble upon next. That is, like, 95% of the strength in BotW’s design, and it’s what makes you feel like you’re on a sweeping adventure. In TotK, you can basically fly from tower to tower and you’re initially dropped straight in the middle of the map. The world seems so so so tiny and insignificant, and it’s kinda cool but mostly it’s pace-ruining. It’s overwhelming at first and unsatisfying by the end, because those towers were trivial and that exploration is not really exploration. I feel like we all played BotW years ago and we can’t completely remember how absolutely fucking monumental it felt. That world felt absolutely massive, like you were trotting the globe. The distance between death mountain and the plateau felt impossibly huge. It wasn’t, of course, but BotW expertly made you FEEL like it was, and TotK throws that away. Now, granted, I did have some great traversal experiences, but I had to actively create them myself. When I went to Gerudo I flew a wing plane up the river canyon, skidding across the water and dodging the walls of the canyon, one of the absolute highlights of the game for me. Similarly, I took a boat upriver to get to Zora’s Domain, dodging octorocks and frantically pushing upwards. If the entire game was built around these moments, fantastic! But these are suboptimal anomalies I had to literally do myself in order to give myself a good time - in both cases, it was much more optimal to just take the sky route. This cheesability is another issue in the dungeons. After my first temple I realized the best way to approach the temples was to turn off the minimap and the HUD (using pro mode) and to ignore those stupid map markers telling you where to go. As soon as I did that, I found myself actually plotting ahead, figuring out where to send the mine carts, where to shine the mirrors, etc. The fire temple specifically is designed around slowly making your way up until you get the last terminal by diving all the way down to the bottom floor. Very cool design but it can, again, be cheesed easier than a hateno pizza. Don’t even get me started on the Water (anti-)Temple, cheese levels critical. So yeah, you’re left with a game where the most optimal solution is also the least fun. Gone are the days of BotW where you had to either climb over the mountain or around it. Now you teleport to that tower over there and fly a kilometer above it without even registering it exists. So clearly, exploration was not meant to be the main focus of this game, instead shifting it to the four new mechanics and experimentation in battles. They did a pretty damn good job there too, but again, lotsa problems. The four new abilities are all outta whack. Fuse is straight up not a puzzle mechanic at all, and ascend is really just a traversal mechanic. That leaves rewind and ultra hand as the only two real puzzle abilities for shrines. Now, these guys coulda gone absolutely batshit insane with rewind, and I know that because Braid is an insane game based solely around rewind and it’s only in two dimensions! What a missed opportunity that was. Almost none of the shrines really capitalize on the potential mind-boggling stuff you could do with rewind. And then there’s ultrahand. I love ultrahand, but it’s pretty damn janky to build stuff. It takes so much struggling and so much time to build something that, let’s be real, probably won’t work and/or will disappear next time you die or teleport or walk ten steps away. Again, I love ultrahand, but in the spirit of complaining, that’s what I got. A crap ton of the shrines are blessings, usually because of the sky crystals, which are again ultrahand puzzles. Some are the naked eventide-style combat, again not a puzzle. And then there’s the giant ultrahand courses in the shrines, which also amount to building the obvious vehicle that’s already half-built for you and driving through the track. The dungeons and shrines in this game are so ridiculously trivially easy and my brain is desperately looking for a workout. Wind Waker was twice as complex as this. Wind Waker. :( Weapons. Fuse basically reduces almost every weapon in TotK to spear, one handed, and two handed. That’s basically it, because you just fuse your materials anyways so different damages basically don’t matter at all. Gone are the joys of the great flame blades, the savage lynel crushers, etc. Imma be real here, this isn’t really a complaint, because I do think weapons were improved, but it’s a bit sad that there are only functionally three weapons when it comes to finding loot. Fuse is great though. Except for the quality of life of getting stuff out of your inventory and scrolling through your arrow fusing materials. Again, this is more of a note, not a complaint. Okay, so that was most of the game stuff. Here comes the big one. Story. Okay, where do we begin. First of all, this plot is way stronger than BotW. Because BotW didn’t have a plot. High bar, here, real high. Ok but really, the time travel mechanic is neat albeit a bit gimmicky, but it’s cool. I guess. Story problem 1: the execution is so, so bad. Like, they took the one thing everyone hated about BotW’s storytelling and made it worse. This time, ya get a memory out of order, ya fucked. Now, personally I used the forgor temple to get the memories in order, but hilariously, almost everyone I’ve talked to got the SONIA DEAD MEMORY as one of the first ones. Like, lmaooo???!?! Great idea to tell players to go to rito and then put the biggest story moment in a giant conspicuous geoglyph right on the way. If you asked me about this whole open world story situation a year ago I wouldn’t have any better ideas. But after playing Outer Wilds, it’s clear that the best open world stories are stories that themselves are made to be open, ones that are actually linked to spatial design and are made to be revealed in a nonlinear fashion. BotW could at least kinda tell the story out of order, but for this game it just doesn’t work. But oh, it gets so much worse. I got the geoglyphs pretty early (uh, how could you not, they’re practically begging to be found) and got the master sword even earlier. It’s so stupid knowing exactly where Zelda is and then going around with Mr Soar Long investigating her whereabouts and, even worse, having the regional phenomena be all about the Zelda mystery. Like, buddies, it’s not a mystery anymore. Get with the program. Story problem 2: that absolutely metal ending was wasted on a game with almost no stakes leading up to it. My god, I wanted to care so badly about what was going on by the end, but I just didn’t! Ganondorf has ZERO compelling factors as a villain. I won’t say this problem is unique to TotK, as Twilight Princess definitely had the same thing going on. OKAY THEN. So that was fun! I love these Zelda and Metroid games because I feel like I almost get even more out of the game after I’ve played it and I get to analyze it and talk about it. I absolutely loved this game. The only game I’ve played for more hours than this one is… BotW. Games don’t usually hold my attention like this, but this reinvigorated my eagerness to play games. I had an absolute blast, and I know that I just spent an entire goddamn essay complaining, but I do it out of love for this series. So yeah. So many great things, so many problems that I’m optimistic they can improve on. Time for the good stuff (speedrun mode): - I fucking loved that Hateno quest. Gimme all that progressive conservative political turmoil, mwah! - Cooking recipes is so much fun, even more so that BotW. Also, love those songs Link sings while cooking, especially because I literally do the same thing. Like. The same songs. Literally. - One of my original complaints was that this game has no thematic resonance compared to BotW’s themes on nature vs technology, legacy, memory, etc. The ending, however, makes me take that back. This is an answer to the loneliness of BotW with a resounding “you are not alone.” It’s actually… pretty good! Nice job. - Ascending up to the stormwind ark was incredible - The Gerudo quest felt just like one of those ATLA season finales where you’re prepping for battle and shit. I specifically remember wishing after BotW that they’d have epic battles to match the epic scale of the game, mad lads actually did it. So so so much fun. Also Riju is badass and the only one in the entire game with any style, get with the program peeps. - Had a lot of fun getting all the past armor in the depths (but how can you put Majora’s Mask in there like it’s nothing? It’s like the ring of power but Zelda version. Anyways) - For all that it fails in its focus and purity, the transition from the open skies through the bustling world into the claustrophobic depths when diving through a chasm absolutely rules. Also those horns BWAHHHHHHHHH - The music is so damn good. The way they use instruments for each section of the game… sax for sky, erhu for main theme, accordion for rito, trombone for Goron, etc. The fire temple theme absolutely slapped me into outer space, I could barely focus on the dungeon I was jammin so hard to that jazz flute, yeah baby. - The main bosses are fantastic, every single one. Colgera reaches new heights, Ghoma rocks, Muktorock plays dirty, and Queen Gibdo will let you eat cake. Sakurai please feel free to use these descriptions for your next smash reveals, you’re welcome. - Gleeoks are kinda unbalanced but god is that final phase cool or what - I hate Yunobo with all my guts and these mfs did the greatest thing they could possible do with him, turned him into a capitalist pig drug lord luchador. Dude shoulda stayed evil, was his only good look. - I was describing the Lurelin quest to my brother and said “yeah you fight all the pirates and then you get to Bolson” and he went “NOOOO WAY” because he thought I was saying Bolson was the pirate leader, um Nintendo why tf is Bolson not the pirate leader? Plz tell me? Also missed opportunity to make the Gerudo pirates again??? Ok bye Not gonna lie, I’m sad they’re seemingly abandoning the tightly-paced OoT-form Zeldas, but as long as they can pack their worlds full of interesting stuff I’m down. At the end of the day, the thing I’m most concerned with this game is, above all else, identity. Like when everyone hated Wind Waker but then realized it was super unique and special and now we all love it. Or like how everyone was all super into Twilight Princess but now it’s kinda faded a bit and pales in comparison to Ocarina because it really wasn’t that unique. Feel like we’re all having a great time but, in the long run, I will not be surprised if this goes the Twilight Princess route. So, Zelda team… What’s next? ;)