Raw thoughts as the credits are rolling in front of me: Breath of the Wild was one of the best games ever made, a perfect modernisation of the tone and core elements of a classic series that's known for reinventing itself almost every iteration. It kept everything that makes the franchise feel cohesive and added to it with new abilities, capabilities and carrying forward a lot of the best elements of previous games as well as new ones that make you have to really think about every move you make in a massive open world that simultaneously feels vast and isolated whilst still feeling like there's something new around every corner. It was as good as everyone said it was at the time.
Tears of the Kingdom surpasses it in almost every way.
Don't misunderstand me, it's both largely a similar experience and a very different experience, but I cannot see myself going back to breath of the wild. New abilities grant you near-unlimited powers of creation, shrines shift from mere puzzle solving to puzzles that teach you new creative ways to use these abilities. The map feels fittingly more full and lively, with the world coming back to life, it feels like time truly has passed. Dungeons don't just act like tradition Zelda dungeons in the gameplay, they also look the part; whilst I think the 'all the dungeons look the same ergo there are no dungeons' mentality a lot of BOTW critics tout is extremely poorly thought-through, the aesthetic differences between dungeons here is a step-up.
Even the final boss here feels like an improvement, in the previous game it was far too easy if you have done all the game asks you to, but here it's a real and genuine challenge, asking you to push the raw combat to it's mechanical limits, in fact it might be one of the best final bosses in series history. That goes for the combat in general, this is a much tougher game to survive and you really have to think through everything you do. Even the story feels more interesting as it's split evenly between the flashbacks that the previous game held its story in and current happenings right now.
It's insane that you can take a game that was such a moment for the industry as breath of the wild and just make it better on perhaps every level, but if any series can do it, it's Zelda.
Tears of the Kingdom surpasses it in almost every way.
Don't misunderstand me, it's both largely a similar experience and a very different experience, but I cannot see myself going back to breath of the wild. New abilities grant you near-unlimited powers of creation, shrines shift from mere puzzle solving to puzzles that teach you new creative ways to use these abilities. The map feels fittingly more full and lively, with the world coming back to life, it feels like time truly has passed. Dungeons don't just act like tradition Zelda dungeons in the gameplay, they also look the part; whilst I think the 'all the dungeons look the same ergo there are no dungeons' mentality a lot of BOTW critics tout is extremely poorly thought-through, the aesthetic differences between dungeons here is a step-up.
Even the final boss here feels like an improvement, in the previous game it was far too easy if you have done all the game asks you to, but here it's a real and genuine challenge, asking you to push the raw combat to it's mechanical limits, in fact it might be one of the best final bosses in series history. That goes for the combat in general, this is a much tougher game to survive and you really have to think through everything you do. Even the story feels more interesting as it's split evenly between the flashbacks that the previous game held its story in and current happenings right now.
It's insane that you can take a game that was such a moment for the industry as breath of the wild and just make it better on perhaps every level, but if any series can do it, it's Zelda.