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This review contains spoilers
You actually do play as Metroid in this one
When I was a kid, the only games I had were licensed ones. These were the only games featuring characters that I recognised, and back then that was all that mattered to me. Most of these games weren’t very good, but the media that you’re exposed to as a kid leaves a different kind of impression on you than media you encounter as an adult. For this reason, some of the licensed games I had as a kid retain an important place in my personal history with the medium. One such game was the Wii adaptation of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel are two of my favourite books ever written, combining nonsense literature with fantastical characters and settings. Tim Burton’s 2010 movie saps the imagination out of Carroll’s work by shoehorning its iconic characters into a generic “chosen one” narrative where Alice has to lead a rebel force against a tyrannical ruler in a post-apocalyptic setting. The video game adaptation tells an abridged version of the movie’s story, so if it’s a strong narrative you’re looking for, then I’d say that American McGee’s duology probably offer a more compelling reinterpretation of Carroll’s original books. The one saving grace of Tim Burton’s movie is its art direction, which straddles the line between gothic and whimsical in a way that feels both true to the source material while also staying consistent to the idiosyncrasies of Burton’s style. This carries over to the Wii game, where the art style makes up for the low graphical fidelity.
Despite being a licensed game, there are some neat ideas here. You control one of five characters: the White Rabbit, the Dormouse, the March Hare, the Mad Hatter, and the Cheshire Cat. Notably, Alice is absent from this line-up, and that’s because this entire game is like a full-length escort mission where you act as Alice’s steward and bodyguard, guiding her through levels and defending her from the Red Queen’s henchmen. Each character has a unique ability that allows them to engage with the world in different ways, and the game’s puzzles are all based around using these abilities in tandem. The White Rabbit can freeze and rewind time, the March Hare has telekinesis for god-knows-what reason, the Mad Hatter can reshape the environment by looking at it from different perspectives, and the Cheshire Cat can turn himself and certain objects invisible. The Dormouse is the only character without a special ability, but she is the most efficient combatant of the bunch. You can switch between characters on the fly, and a second player can join in at any time in classic Wii-fashion. While all of this might sound cool, the game’s puzzles are unfortunately very simple, and the combat isn’t much better. You can unlock the option to use a character’s special ability on enemies, but it’s always more efficient to just mash the attack button. There is a specific kind of enemy that requires you to use the March Hare’s telekinesis to remove its shield, and I would have liked to see more enemies like this that you could only attack after using certain abilities on them. Of course, as a kid, none of these things really bothered me. In fact, as a kid, I actually struggled with the game a great deal more than perhaps I should admit - you can’t technically even die in the game, as when you run out of health you are instantly revived with the only penalty being a loss of XP. If you are careless, however, it is possible for Alice to be taken away by the Red Queen’s servants, which results in a game over screen. This was a screen that I became all-too-familiar with during the boss battle with the Bandersnatch.
My struggles with the Bandersnatch were so arduous and prolonged that they have since become canonised in my family lore. To this day, whenever I find myself stuck on a particularly difficult boss fight it becomes referred to as “The Bandersnatch” until such time that it is vanquished. I think the reason it took me so long to get past this part was because it requires you to use multiple character abilities in a specific sequence in order to deal damage to the boss. The way you use your abilities in this game is by highlighting objects with the Wii Remote pointer and then shaking or spinning the remote depending on what action you’re trying to perform. This adds an almost point-and-click puzzle element to the game’s boss battles on top of the basic combat, which is a cool idea but as a kid who was just getting into video games, it was a lot for me to wrap my head around. However, after weeks of attempts, of furious tantrums and being sternly told “that’s enough Wii for today”, I finally triumphed over the foul beast, solidifying Alice in Wonderland as one of the most pivotal video game experiences I had as a child.
On my most recent playthrough of Alice in Wonderland, I lamented how it squandered its best ideas on simplistic puzzles and mindless combat. This is not a particularly worthwhile game to play for anyone who doesn’t have a personal connection to it, as my friend who I forced to go through it with me will probably tell you. However, this is a game that I feel was worth revisiting, if only to show that Bandersnatch what thirteen years of resentment and beating all the Dark Souls games does to a motherfucker.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel are two of my favourite books ever written, combining nonsense literature with fantastical characters and settings. Tim Burton’s 2010 movie saps the imagination out of Carroll’s work by shoehorning its iconic characters into a generic “chosen one” narrative where Alice has to lead a rebel force against a tyrannical ruler in a post-apocalyptic setting. The video game adaptation tells an abridged version of the movie’s story, so if it’s a strong narrative you’re looking for, then I’d say that American McGee’s duology probably offer a more compelling reinterpretation of Carroll’s original books. The one saving grace of Tim Burton’s movie is its art direction, which straddles the line between gothic and whimsical in a way that feels both true to the source material while also staying consistent to the idiosyncrasies of Burton’s style. This carries over to the Wii game, where the art style makes up for the low graphical fidelity.
Despite being a licensed game, there are some neat ideas here. You control one of five characters: the White Rabbit, the Dormouse, the March Hare, the Mad Hatter, and the Cheshire Cat. Notably, Alice is absent from this line-up, and that’s because this entire game is like a full-length escort mission where you act as Alice’s steward and bodyguard, guiding her through levels and defending her from the Red Queen’s henchmen. Each character has a unique ability that allows them to engage with the world in different ways, and the game’s puzzles are all based around using these abilities in tandem. The White Rabbit can freeze and rewind time, the March Hare has telekinesis for god-knows-what reason, the Mad Hatter can reshape the environment by looking at it from different perspectives, and the Cheshire Cat can turn himself and certain objects invisible. The Dormouse is the only character without a special ability, but she is the most efficient combatant of the bunch. You can switch between characters on the fly, and a second player can join in at any time in classic Wii-fashion. While all of this might sound cool, the game’s puzzles are unfortunately very simple, and the combat isn’t much better. You can unlock the option to use a character’s special ability on enemies, but it’s always more efficient to just mash the attack button. There is a specific kind of enemy that requires you to use the March Hare’s telekinesis to remove its shield, and I would have liked to see more enemies like this that you could only attack after using certain abilities on them. Of course, as a kid, none of these things really bothered me. In fact, as a kid, I actually struggled with the game a great deal more than perhaps I should admit - you can’t technically even die in the game, as when you run out of health you are instantly revived with the only penalty being a loss of XP. If you are careless, however, it is possible for Alice to be taken away by the Red Queen’s servants, which results in a game over screen. This was a screen that I became all-too-familiar with during the boss battle with the Bandersnatch.
My struggles with the Bandersnatch were so arduous and prolonged that they have since become canonised in my family lore. To this day, whenever I find myself stuck on a particularly difficult boss fight it becomes referred to as “The Bandersnatch” until such time that it is vanquished. I think the reason it took me so long to get past this part was because it requires you to use multiple character abilities in a specific sequence in order to deal damage to the boss. The way you use your abilities in this game is by highlighting objects with the Wii Remote pointer and then shaking or spinning the remote depending on what action you’re trying to perform. This adds an almost point-and-click puzzle element to the game’s boss battles on top of the basic combat, which is a cool idea but as a kid who was just getting into video games, it was a lot for me to wrap my head around. However, after weeks of attempts, of furious tantrums and being sternly told “that’s enough Wii for today”, I finally triumphed over the foul beast, solidifying Alice in Wonderland as one of the most pivotal video game experiences I had as a child.
On my most recent playthrough of Alice in Wonderland, I lamented how it squandered its best ideas on simplistic puzzles and mindless combat. This is not a particularly worthwhile game to play for anyone who doesn’t have a personal connection to it, as my friend who I forced to go through it with me will probably tell you. However, this is a game that I feel was worth revisiting, if only to show that Bandersnatch what thirteen years of resentment and beating all the Dark Souls games does to a motherfucker.
This review contains spoilers
Breath of the Wild had, in my opinion, the best gameplay foundation of any Zelda game, with its complex web of interlocking physics systems. The ways in which Tears of the Kingdom builds on this already impressive foundation are wildly imaginative and completely unexpected as only a Nintendo game can be. That being said, Tears of the Kingdom doesn’t do much in the way of improving those elements of Breath of the Wild which many felt were lacking, such as the weak narrative and the underwhelming dungeons. It’s fun to mess around in the world of Tears of the Kingdom’s, but the actual predetermined objectives are some of the least compelling in the series.
Functionally, Tears of the Kingdom is like a really cool toy from the future. Breath of the Wild already had a lot of fun systems to experiment with, but Tears of the Kingdom raises the creativity ceiling to the moon with the addition of the ultra-hand mechanic. The open-ended nature of ultra-hand basically means that there’s no limit on what crazy contraptions you can cook up as long as you have the parts and the creative bandwidth, which is probably why this game is excellent for generating viral clips. Your mileage on ultra-hand will vary depending on how much you personally feel motivated to exercise your imagination using the systems provided, and the game rarely requires you to build anything more complex than a simple car or aircraft. However, that doesn’t make it any less funny to build a giant electric cage for committing Bokoblin genocide, or any less satisfying when you finally get your drop ship drone to work. This is definitely a mechanic I’d love to see return in the future, possibly even in a game using The Wind Waker’s art style to really lean into the Looney Tunes-style scenarios.
The world of Tears of the Kingdom is pretty much the same as Breath of the Wild, which has lead some to dismiss the game as “€70 DLC”. However, the game adds more than enough content to justify itself as a new release - the familiar land of Hyrule has been repopulated with new shrines, more NPCs, a greater variety of monsters, and new recurring gameplay scenarios, such as explorable caves and larger enemy camps that you can raid with NPCs. Old points of interest are also repurposed and towns are reinvigorated with lengthier side quests. On top of all that (literally) are the sky islands, which hold their own secrets and challenges. The biggest addition, however, is the Depths - an entire new map beneath Hyrule that is shrouded in darkness and filled with the game’s most dangerous enemies. Clearly, quantity isn’t an issue with this game - however, it’s the uneven quality of this new content that can be disappointing.
Surprisingly, the recycled map from the previous game wasn’t as big of a problem for me as I had thought it would be, and on the whole I found the new side quests to be more engaging than those in Breath of the Wild. I also enjoyed how some Koroks now have to be transported across sections of the map to collect their seed, because it forced me to come up with contraptions designed for cargo transportation rather than just efficient traversal. I also enjoyed the Depths, and the unique challenge of exploring in pitch black darkness and lighting the environment up as I went along made up for how ineffectively a lot of the space is used. Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for the sky islands. Despite how heavily they featured in the game’s marketing, they are probably the least fleshed out addition to the game world. Aesthetically there is little-to-no variation between regions, and nearly all of the archipelagos consist of the same island templates with the same challenges, just rearranged slightly. The only sky island that features environmental variation - forests, snowy mountains, its own cave system - is the Great Sky Island that you start the game on, but from then on out they’re all just clusters of floating rubble. Two of the game’s temples also require you to ascend a unique layout of sky islands to reach, and although these are fun sequences, it’s disappointing that they are the exception and not the rule. Speaking of temples, the ones in this game are a mixed bag. They’re more thematically varied than Breath of the Wild’s divine beasts, but structurally they are the same - you scour them for five switches, which you can activate in any order, and then fight the boss. The game even marks the locations of the switches on your map so you don’t have to find them yourself, which takes away half the fun of dungeons for me. Thankfully, the bosses in this game are a huge step up from Breath of the Wild - instead of fighting four offshoots of Ganon, each temple now has a unique boss encounter that makes use of the new ability you unlock before each temple. These battles were definitely highlights of the experience for me, and the improved quality of boss fights extends to mini-bosses and secret bosses that you fight outside of the main quest as well.
All of this leaves one major aspect of the game for me to talk about - the story. And unfortunately this is the part of the game that I take the most issue with. Previous Zelda games’ plots are all structurally similar, usually revolving around gathering a set of MacGuffins or assembling a motley crew of sages to seal away some great evil. What makes their stories memorable, though, as well as distinguishable from one another, are their themes. Ocarina of Time is essentially a coming-of-age story. Majora’s Mask follows on from this, contrasting two characters who respond to the loss of a dear friend in starkly different ways - Link maturely reaches out and helps to strengthen the relationships of others, while the Skull Kid immaturely lashes out and tries to destroy everyone else’s happiness. The Wind Waker criticises past generations who leave their problems for their children to deal with, and at the same time is hopeful that the future generations will be able to learn from the mistakes of their ancestors while leaving behind their baggage. Even Breath of the Wild, which many considered to have a disappointing narrative, has a central theme of perseverance in the wake of failure, which is depicted through Zelda’s struggle to get in touch with her powers in flashbacks and through Link’s quest to defeat Ganon 100 years after he failed to do so. Tears of the Kingdom doesn’t have any strong anchoring theme, at least not that I can tell. And for a game with so little of substance to say, its characters spend a disproportionate amount of time talking in cutscenes - cutscenes that mostly serve as exposition dumps. The game also squanders the relationship between Link and Zelda, which is probably the most interesting characterisation in this duology, by having them separated for the entire game. Zelda’s presence in the story is once again relegated to being the subject of flashback cutscenes that the player can unlock by exploring the map, only this time she doesn’t have an arc. In Breath of the Wild, the memories served to flesh out Link’s relationship with Zelda and the Champions who perished in the battle with Ganon 100 years earlier, strengthening the player’s attachment to the goal. In this game, that same formula is applied to a story that essentially boils down to an origin story for why Link can build cars with his mind now - except we never even see the Zonai make use of these abilities in the flashbacks. This could not only have been cool, but it would have set them apart from other races in the Zelda universe. As it stands, they’re just another slightly more technologically advanced race than the Hylians who died out hundreds of years ago. The flashbacks also serve to show us how threatening Ganondorf is, but that could have been inferred from the fact that his very presence creates endless hordes of monsters. The flashbacks would have been a good opportunity to do something interesting with Ganondorf’s character, but instead he’s just a generically evil dark lord - “this world should be shrouded in darkness, not bathed in insufferable light” is an actual line of his before the final boss. The portrayal of Ganondorf as the embodiment of evil and the antithesis of Link was fine in 1998, but it’s a played out dynamic now and Tears of the Kingdom has nothing new to add. I will say that the ending of the game, from the lead-up to the final boss to the final boss itself and the ensuing sequence, is extremely well done, but that’s mostly thanks to the gameplay and musical score rather than a result of masterful narrative build-up. All-in-all, this might be one of the weakest stories ever told in a Zelda title. I know that most people don’t play Zelda for the story, but I firmly believe that the resonant themes and narrative beats are a huge part of people’s fondness for this franchise over time. Nothing in this game’s story is on the level of Anju and Kafei’s wedding in Majora’s Mask or Link’s farewell to his grandma in The Wind Waker, and for me it is moments like those that contextualise the gameplay and make it all worth it.
Still, it’s impressive that a nearly forty-year-old franchise can reinvent itself so spectacularly and be just as important in 2023 as it was in 1998. Part of what made that reinvention so thrilling back in 2017 was Nintendo’s willingness to discard elements of the series that many would have considered to be tentpoles. For the next big Zelda game, I think Nintendo is going to have to take a similar look at the new formula they’ve developed and make similarly drastic changes. In some ways, I wish that aspects of this game were DLC for Breath of the Wild, and that the ultra-hand mechanic was used as the basis for an entirely new game without having to adhere strictly to the Breath of the Wild formula. Tears of the Kingdom has one of the most exciting foundations for any game I’ve played, but it needs a better game to be built on top of it to do it justice.
Functionally, Tears of the Kingdom is like a really cool toy from the future. Breath of the Wild already had a lot of fun systems to experiment with, but Tears of the Kingdom raises the creativity ceiling to the moon with the addition of the ultra-hand mechanic. The open-ended nature of ultra-hand basically means that there’s no limit on what crazy contraptions you can cook up as long as you have the parts and the creative bandwidth, which is probably why this game is excellent for generating viral clips. Your mileage on ultra-hand will vary depending on how much you personally feel motivated to exercise your imagination using the systems provided, and the game rarely requires you to build anything more complex than a simple car or aircraft. However, that doesn’t make it any less funny to build a giant electric cage for committing Bokoblin genocide, or any less satisfying when you finally get your drop ship drone to work. This is definitely a mechanic I’d love to see return in the future, possibly even in a game using The Wind Waker’s art style to really lean into the Looney Tunes-style scenarios.
The world of Tears of the Kingdom is pretty much the same as Breath of the Wild, which has lead some to dismiss the game as “€70 DLC”. However, the game adds more than enough content to justify itself as a new release - the familiar land of Hyrule has been repopulated with new shrines, more NPCs, a greater variety of monsters, and new recurring gameplay scenarios, such as explorable caves and larger enemy camps that you can raid with NPCs. Old points of interest are also repurposed and towns are reinvigorated with lengthier side quests. On top of all that (literally) are the sky islands, which hold their own secrets and challenges. The biggest addition, however, is the Depths - an entire new map beneath Hyrule that is shrouded in darkness and filled with the game’s most dangerous enemies. Clearly, quantity isn’t an issue with this game - however, it’s the uneven quality of this new content that can be disappointing.
Surprisingly, the recycled map from the previous game wasn’t as big of a problem for me as I had thought it would be, and on the whole I found the new side quests to be more engaging than those in Breath of the Wild. I also enjoyed how some Koroks now have to be transported across sections of the map to collect their seed, because it forced me to come up with contraptions designed for cargo transportation rather than just efficient traversal. I also enjoyed the Depths, and the unique challenge of exploring in pitch black darkness and lighting the environment up as I went along made up for how ineffectively a lot of the space is used. Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for the sky islands. Despite how heavily they featured in the game’s marketing, they are probably the least fleshed out addition to the game world. Aesthetically there is little-to-no variation between regions, and nearly all of the archipelagos consist of the same island templates with the same challenges, just rearranged slightly. The only sky island that features environmental variation - forests, snowy mountains, its own cave system - is the Great Sky Island that you start the game on, but from then on out they’re all just clusters of floating rubble. Two of the game’s temples also require you to ascend a unique layout of sky islands to reach, and although these are fun sequences, it’s disappointing that they are the exception and not the rule. Speaking of temples, the ones in this game are a mixed bag. They’re more thematically varied than Breath of the Wild’s divine beasts, but structurally they are the same - you scour them for five switches, which you can activate in any order, and then fight the boss. The game even marks the locations of the switches on your map so you don’t have to find them yourself, which takes away half the fun of dungeons for me. Thankfully, the bosses in this game are a huge step up from Breath of the Wild - instead of fighting four offshoots of Ganon, each temple now has a unique boss encounter that makes use of the new ability you unlock before each temple. These battles were definitely highlights of the experience for me, and the improved quality of boss fights extends to mini-bosses and secret bosses that you fight outside of the main quest as well.
All of this leaves one major aspect of the game for me to talk about - the story. And unfortunately this is the part of the game that I take the most issue with. Previous Zelda games’ plots are all structurally similar, usually revolving around gathering a set of MacGuffins or assembling a motley crew of sages to seal away some great evil. What makes their stories memorable, though, as well as distinguishable from one another, are their themes. Ocarina of Time is essentially a coming-of-age story. Majora’s Mask follows on from this, contrasting two characters who respond to the loss of a dear friend in starkly different ways - Link maturely reaches out and helps to strengthen the relationships of others, while the Skull Kid immaturely lashes out and tries to destroy everyone else’s happiness. The Wind Waker criticises past generations who leave their problems for their children to deal with, and at the same time is hopeful that the future generations will be able to learn from the mistakes of their ancestors while leaving behind their baggage. Even Breath of the Wild, which many considered to have a disappointing narrative, has a central theme of perseverance in the wake of failure, which is depicted through Zelda’s struggle to get in touch with her powers in flashbacks and through Link’s quest to defeat Ganon 100 years after he failed to do so. Tears of the Kingdom doesn’t have any strong anchoring theme, at least not that I can tell. And for a game with so little of substance to say, its characters spend a disproportionate amount of time talking in cutscenes - cutscenes that mostly serve as exposition dumps. The game also squanders the relationship between Link and Zelda, which is probably the most interesting characterisation in this duology, by having them separated for the entire game. Zelda’s presence in the story is once again relegated to being the subject of flashback cutscenes that the player can unlock by exploring the map, only this time she doesn’t have an arc. In Breath of the Wild, the memories served to flesh out Link’s relationship with Zelda and the Champions who perished in the battle with Ganon 100 years earlier, strengthening the player’s attachment to the goal. In this game, that same formula is applied to a story that essentially boils down to an origin story for why Link can build cars with his mind now - except we never even see the Zonai make use of these abilities in the flashbacks. This could not only have been cool, but it would have set them apart from other races in the Zelda universe. As it stands, they’re just another slightly more technologically advanced race than the Hylians who died out hundreds of years ago. The flashbacks also serve to show us how threatening Ganondorf is, but that could have been inferred from the fact that his very presence creates endless hordes of monsters. The flashbacks would have been a good opportunity to do something interesting with Ganondorf’s character, but instead he’s just a generically evil dark lord - “this world should be shrouded in darkness, not bathed in insufferable light” is an actual line of his before the final boss. The portrayal of Ganondorf as the embodiment of evil and the antithesis of Link was fine in 1998, but it’s a played out dynamic now and Tears of the Kingdom has nothing new to add. I will say that the ending of the game, from the lead-up to the final boss to the final boss itself and the ensuing sequence, is extremely well done, but that’s mostly thanks to the gameplay and musical score rather than a result of masterful narrative build-up. All-in-all, this might be one of the weakest stories ever told in a Zelda title. I know that most people don’t play Zelda for the story, but I firmly believe that the resonant themes and narrative beats are a huge part of people’s fondness for this franchise over time. Nothing in this game’s story is on the level of Anju and Kafei’s wedding in Majora’s Mask or Link’s farewell to his grandma in The Wind Waker, and for me it is moments like those that contextualise the gameplay and make it all worth it.
Still, it’s impressive that a nearly forty-year-old franchise can reinvent itself so spectacularly and be just as important in 2023 as it was in 1998. Part of what made that reinvention so thrilling back in 2017 was Nintendo’s willingness to discard elements of the series that many would have considered to be tentpoles. For the next big Zelda game, I think Nintendo is going to have to take a similar look at the new formula they’ve developed and make similarly drastic changes. In some ways, I wish that aspects of this game were DLC for Breath of the Wild, and that the ultra-hand mechanic was used as the basis for an entirely new game without having to adhere strictly to the Breath of the Wild formula. Tears of the Kingdom has one of the most exciting foundations for any game I’ve played, but it needs a better game to be built on top of it to do it justice.