Breath of the Wild was a special game to me upon release. It was the first console launch I ever participated in (and will ever participate in cause that shit was not worth it!!!). I took time off work just to fully immerse myself in it and it was probably the last time a video game hit me with a specific feeling. The feeling to go outside and touch grass after spending a whole week cooped up at home away from work just traveling through Hyrule doing whatever thing caught my attention and getting distracted from any of the main quests. Sadly not all good things last and eventually I had to finish the game, but to this day it’s probably alongside Xenoblade 2 the most a video game has had a real world impact on me.

To a degree I can probably thank BOTW for partly being the reason I even began to even further appreciate just what we have on this planet we call home. It’s also a big factor as to why I went back and gave James Cameron’s Avatar another shot. Two pieces of media that put their full focus on how alive and real the world is. Both eventually falling victim to the “It’s overrated” or “It was never that good” take. Now what the fuck does this have to do with Tears of the Kingdom? Well for the impatient the analogy is that just like Avatar: The Way of Water which was a fantastic and better sequel to an already fantastic film. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom comes and blows the absolute lid off of BOTW to the point it may as well have been a beta test for this.

It’s no secret there’s a very loud minority out there of people that don’t like the new direction these games are taking and that’s perfectly fine. I didn’t like the direction RE took when it switched to first person initially, but lucky for me RE7 ended up being one of my favorites in the series and saved a franchise that was slowly and surely sinking further and further into just being nonsense and now we have fantastic remakes of RE2 and 4 and a stellar follow up to RE7 in the form of RE8.

Every factor that made BOTW great has been turned up to 11 and this includes adding in fixes to some of the more annoying aspects of the game. Didn’t like the combat shrines? There’s less of them this time with most of them being big puzzles that get really tricky dicky I’m not even kidding some of these are real brain stumpers and I kind of really love finding the most stupid dumbass galaxy brain way to solve them that works anyways instead of what the devs intended. Exploration leading to Zonai items and weapons besides shrines or Koroks now also helps to make the experience less tiring as you’re constantly discovering new shit that’s been added to this revamp of the original map. Weapon degradation, one of the most controversial aspects of the first game (skill issue btw) becomes genuinely fun with the fuse mechanic. Sure while my gamer brain went straight to just eventually always having a Lynel ready to go to get top tier drops for fusion those few times where my weapon got even stronger close to the end from fusing shit was such an elating feeling that the first game never had. TOTK is to BOTW what Doom Eternal is to Doom 2016. A game that takes all of what worked in the previous and shoots it to the next level. I genuinely don’t think as much as I love that game I can ever go back to BOTW or perhaps I am just being a hyperbolic moron and can easily pick it up once I get used to losing some good shit. Yeah sure the combat is still kinda braindead if you aren’t some crazy motherfucker who somehow turns it into DMC, but I also don’t really mind it cause if that’s how versatile the engine and mechanics can be then that’s just another skill issue on our part.

Also while the repeating Sage cutscenes are annoying this probably has the actual best narrative set-pieces in one of these since Wind Waker. The fact it reaches a level of spectacle I wasn’t expecting after how much more restrained BOTW was comparatively has left me completely awestruck. Some of the story beats that happen in this and the last hour or so of the game are going to be not just all timers for the franchise, but all timers for games I’ve played across my time on this Earth.

Game’s been out for a month now so I’m sure everyone ever has said what they want to say about it, but to me personally that much time spent on it? Well that’s just special. An open world game I was able to play for almost a month straight without getting bored? All that time spent on it not because I’d have to put it down from fatigue or getting angry at some bullshit boss, but because I genuinely enjoyed exploring the world and finding new things to do and quests to complete. Oh, and I haven’t even talked about The Depths. Fuck me, I love The Depths.

TOTK is not going to change your mind if you didn’t like BOTW or grew to dislike it over the years of its release, but if you did like it you will love Tears of the Kingdom. Period. That being said I do think BOTW has one advantage against tears. That is that it came first. As good as Tears is, it has in fact fallen into the "it's the sequel" trap to a degree. While there's plenty of new it's also familiar, not as fresh, and while the map has had plenty of changes made to it it's still the Hyrule from 2017 just a bit more alive. For that, no matter how much Tears of the Kingdom improved I don't think it'll ever really surpass Breath of the Wild for me as one of my favorite games of all time and that's perfectly fine. I’m sure sooner or later, just like when Breath of the Wild released and now that I’ve completed Tears of the Kingdom I’ll be finding places to just go out and walk for the day and appreciate life and the world we inhabit and the people I have in my life that can be lost at any moment.

Very clearly a game made with years of hard work and guts. The time spent on the original plus this one equating to basically 10 years of dev time and it shows. It may not have the best story in the world. It can even be called bad or uninspired, but what this is as a video game is probably going to go down in the annals of history. As will many other games released this year. Nintendo may be some real nasty scumfuck motherfuckers, but man when they deliver, they fucking deliver. Now if I can just find a bad bitch like Purah...