I want to start off by saying because I gave the game a perfect score, does not mean the game is perfect. I think the stars and numbers of reviews more so signify a level of recommendation. A 5 star game or a 10/10 game to me means that’s a game someone would recommend to anyone because it’s that good. And I feel Tears of the Kingdom is one of those games. That’s not to say it doesn’t have its faults or issues, every game does. But what the game brings and does as a whole vastly outweighs the negatives.

Jump to end for TLDR

Tears of the Kingdom is phenomenal and my new favorite Zelda game. My old favorite was Majora’s Mask, and I’ll admit some nostalgia in that but I loved it mostly for its weird/creepy tone. And honestly I think Tear of the Kingdom nails that part too. This game feels not only like Breath of the Wild, which was a fantastic game but could be considered a weaker Zelda game. Missing some mainstays and aspects of the Zelda franchise, but it feels like it’s pulling heavily from all Zelda games before it and not just referencing it. It pulls from Skyward Sword, Wind Waker, Twilight Princess, Ocarina of Time and more and it is stronger for it. Back are the cooler dungeons, back are some original enemies and to me most importantly, back is the interesting and fun side stuff. The game is also effectively 3 times as big as Botw. With the floating sky islands and the depths.

Combat + Gameplay

The base game feels very much like Botw but with a lot of the issues people had with the previous game addressed. The base combat and exploration are relatively untouched. You’re really just given a lot more tools. The slew of new abilities and items really make exploration and combat have endless options, only limited by your own creativity. In a way it very much feels like an Immersive Sim (games like Dishonored, Prey, Deus Ex) and I feel like it is welcomed into that genre. You can go into combat, attach an item that makes enemies fight each other to an arrow and start chaos and run it. You can create a death roomba with a tire and some fire, ice and lighting emitters on them. You can create an airplane that effectively carpet bombs enemies (I was never good enough to do that) but you have so many creative ways to fuse things together. And so many interesting monster bits to use to add to weapons as well. I will say, the fusing of weapon parts could be cooler. A lot of the time it does just end up being this monster part gives me the highest stat boost so I’ll use that. But there are quite a few cool combinations and effects. A personal favorite of mine was the Lizalfos tails and even the different elemental Lizalfos tails would offer freeze, fire and electric. You’d attach it to a weapon and you get a weapon that’d extend super far. Was useful on all sorts of different weapons. But these same tools were also really interesting for exploration. The bomb plant that you attach to arrows? How about attaching to a shield and hop on it for massive damage beneath you and to send you flying! Got some frozen meat? Freeze that bitch onto a shield and you have a skateboard. Create a hoverbike with 2 fans and a steering stick! There’s so much more you can do, to list it all would be endless. But all these tools at your disposal allowed you to solve puzzles in shrines and around the world largely in whatever way you could think of. It’s just so much fun to think of a stupid way to do something and it works out. Alternatively it fails miserably and it’s hilarious. See the following tweets:

Unexpected puzzle solving

Water boarding a korok on accident

Side Content

Botw had some really cool side content but it felt weaker compared to previous Zeldas. I don’t remember doing a whole lot of the side quests specifically. To be fair when I played it originally I did stream it and streaming a game vs playing it for yourself feel dramatically different. But I still think this is true. I love the side adventures like going from stable to stable helping Penn (Soar Long!) and doing the monster battles with the NPCs. It should be no surprise that the side stuff is important to me in a Zelda game since Majora’s Mask is my favorite and that one feels like it’s 1 giant side quest. And I don’t mean to downplay the side stuff in Botw. Things like Terry Town were incredible and sadly I didn’t really encounter anything that felt quite like the Terry Town quest. But all the side stuff, at least the side adventures not entirely true of all the side quests, felt so good to do and I’d take my time to get them done. With how fun the side things were it felt like a flow state of constant distractions. And it was wonderful!

Story

I won’t go too much into the details of the story, I like to leave the story fairly uncovered in reviews just because that’s a major reason I play games and I don’t necessarily want to spoil main story beats. That being said, botw lacked a lot in the story department. Even with doing the memories (which was horrible to find in the original game based off of a picture) the story left more to be desired. TotK really delivers in regards to the story I think. I was gripped and emotional. Ganondorf/The Demon King were also truly terrifying. I love the main cast of characters introduced here. Rauru, Mineru, Sonia, and the sages even though they weren’t new characters but they were all in my opinion greatly expanded upon. Especially Yunobo. I kind of hated Yunobo from Botw but I loved him in TotK. He had an incredible character arc. And the varying issues plaguing the land this time are so interesting. It was harrowing to see no one in the Rito village, depressing to see the Gorons all addicted to crack, and terrifying to see the Gerudo being attacked by the Gibdo. Zora’s domain honestly, despite me loving prince Sidon and Yona felt the weakest. It was cool but the impact of all the others hit me harder than that. I just loved how the story went from start to end with this Zelda and it gave me exactly what I wanted out of a sequel to Botw in that regard.

Music

Everyone knows that the music in Zelda games is always top notch. Zelda is one of those series where everyone loves the music. From LTTP to OoT to Wind Waker and forward. The music is incredible. And while the music from BOTW was beautiful, I felt it didn’t have some of those classic Zelda bangers that the older games had. Largely because a lot of the music was remixed older zelda songs to be more minimalist and beautiful piano bits. And this is by no means saying the music in BOTW was bad, but TOTK brought it back. This has some of my new favorite songs in the series. From Sidon’s sages theme, to the new main theme to the boss battle theme with Colgera. It’s incredible. Some examples of my new favorites linked below:

Sidon's theme

Colgera's theme

Minor Complaints

While I don’t have many complaints and I don’t think they’re very big complaints I figured it is worth mentioning some things.

First is menuing. While it doesn’t really bother me to actually do the menuing in combat, I enjoy the slowed down time to make a hasty decision, I will say that it feels cumbersome initially. I was constantly hitting the wrong button for the wrong menu in combat. It got frustrating at times and it was a learning process. I never truly got over it because I would still hit the wrong button from time to time. And it’s mostly a me thing but I think it’s partially because there are so many different menus.

Second is that built items would despawn pretty quickly if you got too far from them. Which admittedly didn’t happen to me much but it did happen a few times and it was annoying. I know people who were actively having that issue. I never strayed too far from a vehicle I made unless I was fully abandoning it. Related to this point is the spawning and despawning of enemy items. Particularly the ones from Talus and Constructs. Those big items that are meant to be combined to items don’t stay there if you save and load. Which I guess to be fair was me trying to cheese it to decide what weapon to merge it to. But you basically have to decide then and there unless you wanna go to Akkala to separate them. Which isn’t bad but at the time I didn’t realize that was an option.

Third is that there’s some sort of strange disconnect from BOTW in some ways. The guardians are hardly addressed, the divine beasts are gone and just some other things that just feel like loose ends that were retconned. It doesn’t really bother me that much but I can definitely see it bothering a lot of people. It does seem strange that those just feel randomly abandoned. Some speculation is that they were all dismantled within the 8 year time jump from BOTW to TOTK which I think seems likely but would just be nice to have some sort of acknowledgement or mention of it.

TLDR

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is an improvement in virtually every way to Breath of the Wild. In puzzle solving, exploration, dungeons, story, character development and the incredible amount of content. I finished this game at 150 hours and I have not done even remotely close to all there is to do. I will gradually continue to come back to this game from time to time to finish things I hadn’t done. But this game is incredibly fun, really cool and I think is a must play in general but especially if you loved BOTW.