More than a masterpiece.
I was surprised at the long six-year development period leading up to the production of The Legend of Zelda: Kingdom of Tears. Given that, like Majora’s Mask and the Oracle dulogy, it clearly reuses many assets from its predecessor, many expected a quick response. But after playing Tears of the Kingdom for about 80 hours, I noticed something as the credits rolled. Six years was a very conservative estimate. Tears of the Kingdom is the direct result of 12 years of continuous development. More than any other Zelda game or any other sequel, Tears of the Kingdom picks up the torches left behind by Breath of the Wild and just keeps running. The result is a sequel to his one of the most famous games of all time, making its critically acclaimed predecessor look like an early beta.
Tears of the Kingdom begins years after the end of Breath of the Wild. Back in 2017, I found Breath of the Wild’s ending to be very abrupt, even with an unlockable post-credits scene. Rejoining Link and Zelda as Hyrule’s rebuilding begins not only serves as an excellent cold opening for Tears of the Kingdom, it’s been long overdue for what Link did in Breath of the Wild. It gave me satisfaction. It turns out that the people of Hyrule are starting to get sick because of a strange darkness rising from deep beneath the castle. When Link and Zelda go to investigate, they discover ruins in the basement of the castle that reveal traces of the Zonai, a long-dead race. Zonai itself was set in Breath of the Wild as a powerful ancient civilization from Hyrule’s distant past. Moving on, Link and Zelda eventually encounter the tomb containing the remains of Ganondorf, one of the most iconic villains of The Legend of Zelda. However, it may not be as good as you’ve seen it before. All of this happens within the first ten minutes of Tears of the Kingdom. I’ll leave the details of the story here to avoid any real spoilers.
The most obvious gameplay change in Tears of the Kingdom related to Breath of the Wild is Link’s new abilities. Gone are the Seeker Slates, instead his four new skills provided by new arms transplanted into Link. Some of these are inspired by abilities from Breath of the Wild, while others are completely new. Ultrahand and Recall are reminiscent of Magnesis and Stasis respectively, but their uses are very different. Ultrahand can pick up any inanimate, dynamic object in the environment and manipulate it freely in 3D space. Objects can be rotated in 45 degree increments along static X and Y axes. You can connect these to other dynamic objects to create anything from bridges to vehicles. Add in powered Zonai objects like wheels, fans, and rockets, and the vast array of options that Tears of the Kingdom has to offer, and it feels like you’re about to break through the game. In fact, it seems as if that’s the belief behind all these abilities. Recal lets you rewind the motion of non-living dynamic objects such as falling rocks or logs going down a river. Fuse allows you to combine weapons and shields in your inventory with, you guessed it, non-living dynamic objects. If you want to put a spear on a spear and make a ridiculously long spear, go for it! Why not attach bomb flowers to your shield? It seems like a bad idea, but no one can stop you. Finally using Ascend allows Link to shoot straight up at objects that provide a flat surface. Can you use this to break the dungeon rules and get to the boss room faster? Of course you can, and so did I!
It offered a massive sandbox, but unlike Breath of the Wild, which limited the game’s unique mechanics when engaging divine beasts, Tears of the Kingdom never says, “You can’t do that here.” . There are places in some dungeons that I’m still not quite sure how to get to, but it wasn’t by climbing a wall to a small ledge, climbing through another small ledge, and then sneaking around. think. We proceeded along the wall until we found an opening to the room. Did the game care that I did that? Not even a little. Tears of the Kingdom is a game that always offers the ‘right’ solution, but it’s a lot of fun to watch them come up with new ideas. The amazing thing is that nothing I’ve done so far has caught the game off guard. There was never a moment when I realized, “Oh, the game didn’t want me here,” nor was there an event that didn’t activate because I skipped a trigger. I strongly believe this is only possible in a game where the world and mechanics have matured over his 12 years. Breath of the Wild was his six-year-old Tears of the Kingdom, and Tears of the Kingdom wouldn’t exist without Breath of the Wild. It feels silly to explain what seems like nothing more than the definition of a sequel, but this is a sequel designed in a way I’ve never seen before. It may sound utterly silly until you’ve played both Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, but once you do, you’ll know exactly what I mean.
But beyond these core mechanics, Tears of the Kingdom improves on virtually every other aspect as well. As already hinted at, the dungeons aren’t by any means the strongest in the series, but they feel closer to what you’d expect from a Zelda dungeon. Regionally themed, unique hooks, and boss battles full of fun spectacle. Most importantly, do not limit climbing or ability use. This had the side effect of the dungeons being non-linear in nature and I felt like they didn’t let the dungeons have arches of any kind. Some of the best dungeons in the series, like The Ancient Reservoir in The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, tell a story as you progress through them. The dungeons in Tears of the Kingdom are like a series of several challenges that can be approached in any order, inevitably unlocking large doors and fighting bosses behind them.
But perhaps the most unique element of these dungeons is that Link doesn’t take on them alone. Team up with a different character on each link. Each of these characters has their own unique abilities, which are used extensively in the dungeon. After completing the dungeon, these characters can join Link and continue their adventure. As you progress through the story, you’ll quickly find what’s basically the equivalent of a full party of characters, lending out their unique abilities and taking part in battles. It helps control crowds and can even divert the attention of big boss characters away from you as you move to more advantageous positions, thus significantly changing the feel of the battle. My his one problem with most of the dungeons and major story beats is that they closely mirror what existed in Breath of the Wild. When you pick up his first four objective markers at the start of the game, you’ll quickly realize they’re the same as Breath of the Wild. This is somewhat mitigated later in the game, but I couldn’t help but feel that Tears of the Kingdom’s story was very amenable to what had happened before. Like last time, Link will revisit Rito, Gerudo, Zora, and Goron, rather than taking advantage of unique, underutilized locations like Fort Akkara and the Colosseum.
The world itself is much more expanding than pre-launch marketing would make you believe. Hyrule’s bones are reused from Breath of the Wild, but the landscape is vastly different thanks to events that occur early in the story. But beyond that, Hyrule’s explorable area is more than double the size of his. Sky Islands make up a small part of it and offer a few smaller puzzles and challenges, but the real piece of new content lies deep beneath Hyrule in a new area called The Depths. This is a pitch-black area that spans the entire Overworld map. Depths is endlessly fun to explore, but often very unnerving. Here we look for fast travel points and light routes that act as light sources. As you explore, you’ll discover the ancient and haunting Zonai ruins lurking in the dark, as well as several other surprises. Unique monsters and the aforementioned darkness are everywhere, and if damaged by any of them, Link will not only lose a heart’s worth of health, but will also lose health until Link returns to sunlight or consumes a specific food item. Hearts cannot be replenished.
One of my few complaints about Breath of the Wild was its music. It certainly had its glorious moments, but it was mostly relegated to the city. I know some people enjoyed it a lot, including Neil Ronahan, who reviewed Breath of the Wild, but I found it underwhelming, full of cacophony and short musical loops. , I felt that the repetition would increase without the beloved hook. Tears of the Kingdom is a noticeable improvement in this regard, but it’s not a complete success. Overworld still mostly uses the exact same music as Breath of the Wild, but new locations such as dungeons are excellent. They employ the same strategy as Hyrule Castle in Breath of the Wild, with configurations naturally evolving as you progress to build epic showdowns. Some of the resurrection songs have also been nicely re-arranged, including basic field combat music.
Although far from perfect, the technical performance is impressive. It’s a massive, open-world, physics-driven, immersive sim that runs on a 2017 handheld gaming system built on a 2014 chipset. Tears of the Kingdom is an absolute feat of engineering that delivers solid image quality and overall solid performance. Performance of about 90%. As we discussed in our pre-launch tech analysis, docking mode targets his 900p and nearly he stays at 900p with moderate upsampling to 1080p. Handheld, on the other hand, is aiming for his 720p and can keep that up most of the time as well. This is his target of 30 frames per second, and will stay at this value during general exploration without any real issues. Naturally, however, Tears of the Kingdom’s gameplay is so fluid that there are dips as things get more complicated. Having a lot of enemies and physics on screen slows down his frame rate to 20 frames per second. This is a very noticeable problem, not very common, but very obvious when it happens. That being said, you can’t pretend that such a drop doesn’t affect you, but you have to keep in mind exactly what Tears of the Kingdom is doing. It’s not ideal, but it’s also very understandable.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is, in most respects, a pure improvement on Breath of the Wild. Beyond what I’ve mentioned here, there are countless small quality-of-life improvements and features that could easily turn this review into hours of analysis. That said, while it succeeds on nearly every level, there are some areas in Tears of the Kingdom that I fear straying too far from the success of Breath of the Wild. . The story is mostly predictable. Sure, there are some interesting twists and turns, but it never quite hits the high points of Skyward Sword or Majora’s Mask stories. The dungeon itself is a huge improvement over its predecessor, but still ranks poorly compared to the rest of the series. But here’s the problem, and that’s okay. Despite its minor flaws, Tears of the Kingdom still manages to dwarf what many consider to be one of the best games he’s ever made. In that sense, the only criticism I can really make of Tears of the Kingdom is that it’s only as good as one of history’s most famous games in some of the minutiae. And beyond those few things, there are games that engage players to a degree we’ve never seen before. This is a game where you outsmart it and enjoy it. This is a game that showcases the value of taking your time cooking a game and of a studio that has supported a consistent group of developers working on the same series over the decades. The Legend of Zelda: Kingdom of Tears is not a game that other people can make. This is why I bought the Switch, even if I didn’t know it at the time.
