This review contains spoilers
The experience I have with Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom is most similar to what people tell me they experience playing games like Skyrim; there's a big world, and I get to walk around it wherever I want and see stuff. Really, the entirety of what appeals to me about this new form of Zelda games can be cut down to that (and that Link is cute). I walk somewhere, I encounter a brief, simple challenge, I overcome it, I move on.
Tears of the KIngdom immediately has a problem, in that the world is largely the same. In the last game, it was entertaining to discover mountains, valleys, towering fields of mushrooms, to finally reach a thing you'd seen in the distance hours ago, etc. This time around, the novelty of the terrain is gone. For a moment, it seems like the Depths and Sky Islands will provide something new and interesting. They do not.
There's little hope in the combat either, which remains an exercise in avoidance and resource management. Being able to use monster parts to create more capable weaponry is an improvement, but the unpleasantness of Breath of the Wild's weapon durability is still, at its core, a very questionable decision.
What the developers manage to do instead is add a wider variety of challenges to encounter. A sensible refinement of the abilities from the previous game (removing the bombs, moving anything movable instead of just metal objects) mean that the wide world of video game physics puzzles is now at their disposal. They don't tread new ground on this front, in any particular sense, and much of the time the solution to these puzzles is more or less put in front of the player, but every once in a while, I was able to use the tools the game had given me to trivialise a boss fight, or complete story missions way out of sequence. In moments like those, Tears of the Kingdom manages to rise from 'enjoyable enough' to 'actually fun'.
Where it does not rise in the slightest is in the rest of the experience. There's a cloying, stagnant air to the game whenever you approach its story, where indistinguishable characters and long cutscenes about things happening to other people drown out whatever sense of fun and adventure had managed to coalesce. The haughty self-importance with which the narrative continuity of the series is treated continues to aggravate; Zelda continues to lack agency and needs rescuing, Ganondorf continues to be a vaguely racist caricature. These qualities constitute something sacred and immutable to the devs, apparently, so don't expect anything remotely interesting on that front. As a matter of fact, the tools and allies they give you are actively taken away from you for the final confrontation. Almost none of what you learn and obtain is ultimately relevant. It all comes down to slapping Ganondorf with the Master Sword, then slapping him with it again when he turns into a giant monster. A few presentational flourishes here and there do nothing to disguise it.
Fortunately, there's enough to do that most time spent with the game will have nothing to do with that. There's enough context-light adventuring in a beautifully rendered world to satisfy a good amount of playtime, and nothing to guilt you into letting it outstay its welcome. Like Breath of the Wild before it, it's perfectly adequate.
Tears of the KIngdom immediately has a problem, in that the world is largely the same. In the last game, it was entertaining to discover mountains, valleys, towering fields of mushrooms, to finally reach a thing you'd seen in the distance hours ago, etc. This time around, the novelty of the terrain is gone. For a moment, it seems like the Depths and Sky Islands will provide something new and interesting. They do not.
There's little hope in the combat either, which remains an exercise in avoidance and resource management. Being able to use monster parts to create more capable weaponry is an improvement, but the unpleasantness of Breath of the Wild's weapon durability is still, at its core, a very questionable decision.
What the developers manage to do instead is add a wider variety of challenges to encounter. A sensible refinement of the abilities from the previous game (removing the bombs, moving anything movable instead of just metal objects) mean that the wide world of video game physics puzzles is now at their disposal. They don't tread new ground on this front, in any particular sense, and much of the time the solution to these puzzles is more or less put in front of the player, but every once in a while, I was able to use the tools the game had given me to trivialise a boss fight, or complete story missions way out of sequence. In moments like those, Tears of the Kingdom manages to rise from 'enjoyable enough' to 'actually fun'.
Where it does not rise in the slightest is in the rest of the experience. There's a cloying, stagnant air to the game whenever you approach its story, where indistinguishable characters and long cutscenes about things happening to other people drown out whatever sense of fun and adventure had managed to coalesce. The haughty self-importance with which the narrative continuity of the series is treated continues to aggravate; Zelda continues to lack agency and needs rescuing, Ganondorf continues to be a vaguely racist caricature. These qualities constitute something sacred and immutable to the devs, apparently, so don't expect anything remotely interesting on that front. As a matter of fact, the tools and allies they give you are actively taken away from you for the final confrontation. Almost none of what you learn and obtain is ultimately relevant. It all comes down to slapping Ganondorf with the Master Sword, then slapping him with it again when he turns into a giant monster. A few presentational flourishes here and there do nothing to disguise it.
Fortunately, there's enough to do that most time spent with the game will have nothing to do with that. There's enough context-light adventuring in a beautifully rendered world to satisfy a good amount of playtime, and nothing to guilt you into letting it outstay its welcome. Like Breath of the Wild before it, it's perfectly adequate.