So at the time of this writing, there are 1460 reviews from other users on this website. And certainly, I’m struck with the immediate conflict of being in the position of creating a review which I hope will be different enough from the other 1460 people who also wanted to create a review. Odds are this won’t get seen by more than the few friends I decide to share it with, and I would assume it only gets read by 2 or 3 of them, since they’re normal people. So what exactly is my role in this critique, and how serious is the expectation for me to put forth quality writing, exactly? Well, I don’t really have the answer to that, which sucks, but I at least have thoughts and opinions which I’m willing to share to anyone unfortunate enough to put their valuable time into reading this.
I have talked a lot about ‘The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’, whether that be good or bad. Ultimately, my feelings settle to finding the game fun, but ultimately finding it meanders through a campaign which does little to evolve itself past the first few hours, failing to fulfill the same energy for the other fifty hours I spent with it. It’s important to make the distinction between ‘Breath of the Wild’ having core mechanical flaws versus its apathy towards expanding upon its most engaging concepts. In fact, the level of polish, even with the chugging framerate at times, is immaculate, as few games of such size manage to stay as consistently thorough in their design and functionality. ‘Breath of the Wild’ was an incredibly cool concept, but with a scope grander than what the designers were able to fill.
So when ‘The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’ was announced as a direct sequel, it was easy to have optimism. On one hand, you have people unlike me, which is most people, who saw ‘Breath of the Wild’ as one of the greatest games ever made now getting a direct sequel to that. Then you have the subset of people in my camp who thought ‘Breath of the Wild’ was fine, but missed out on a lot of potential to be significantly better. Potential which, given the talent behind the team, could certainly be achieved with enough tinkering. But all of that faded a bit, at least for me, when it was confirmed that the overworld would be the same. Any excitement I had was flushed away when this was announced. I’m not suggesting that I knew, at this point, the game would be bad or anything. But the greatest strength of ‘Breath of the Wild’ was its ability to amaze you with its surprises. There were so many times in ‘Breath of the Wild’ where you would find something which felt completely new and unexpected, and it was really cool to figure out what you needed to do to get whatever reward may be waiting for you. Once it got to the point where I realized every reward was a weapon that broke after a few fights, this feeling of wonder quickly left, but at least it was there for a little bit.
‘Tears of the Kingdom’ removing this feeling of exploration, discovery, and reward is an unfortunate side effect of reusing a map from a previous game. The sense of discovery is lost quickly when you figure out how much of the game really is the exact same. As much as I love the sound effects the Koroks make, did we really need this many more of them with almost no change? The only legitimate changes I noticed were Ascend puzzles and puzzles where you help a Korok find their friend. The former is where you ascend through a log from below, which is just as mindless of a puzzle as the other ones. The latter is one of the least fun methods of engaging the game’s new Ultrahand ability, where you fuse different objects onto each other to create all kinds of different things. Primarily, what these puzzles ask you to do is to create a vehicle capable of transporting the Korok to where they need to go, which is a fun idea in theory. However, the magic of building is torn away after realizing most of the vehicles are extremely situational, and that strapping a rocket to a Korok is a much quicker method of crossing large gaps with less resources. Similarly, strapping a couple of fans onto a steering stick was by far the most efficient way of traversing all three of the game’s massive overworlds. Combine this with an overall jankiness the Ultrahand fails to manage, and you’ve essentially trivialized a mechanic which feels like it took a majority of the development time to piece together.
Similarly to these new Koroks, we’re also introduced to another game-wide puzzle involving a man who cannot figure out how to keep his sign standing. It’s the same man every time, but you’re meant to use the Ultrahand to piece together objects in order to hold the sign in place. These puzzles are always incredibly easy, and the reward was never worth the time spent in doing them. I eventually just began ignoring them. These are the two most common types of puzzles the game throws at you, and they never evolve these ideas. They just continue to show up everywhere you go, with little to no alteration of difficulty. Obviously you don’t have to engage these, but when a game is reusing the same overworld which is heavily reliant on the sense of discovery, it’s the added content which is important to make exciting or surprising. Knowing that the biggest surprise I might find is a Korok who whines about needing to reach their friend, or the sign guy who’s gimmick ran stale after his third appearance, is not a fun way to engage players of the previous game.
Shrines are back, and they do little to improve upon where they were at in the previous game. While the Test of Strength type shrines have been revamped from 1-on-1 fights into larger sandboxes which force you to fight without the gear you came in with, they feel more like far less interesting versions of Eventide Island than improvements upon their predecessors. There are still a ton of shrines which don’t contain a puzzle, and even more where the puzzle is far too simple to feel like a legitimate reward. While I couldn’t give an exact number of shrines which I felt were legitimately fun, I’m certain it didn’t exceed five. I completed 90, according to the loading screen, and towards the end of the game I started to ignore shrines altogether. They continue to serve the sole purpose of allowing you to upgrade your health and stamina, neither of which feel like good ways to implement their growth. I’ve already spent way too much time telling people why I think the stamina wheel is among the most poorly-implemented mechanics in open-world gaming, so I’ll spare this review of any of that discussion for everyone’s sanity. My argument has never been all too convincing, so I’m willing to just accept it’s a bad take.
What I refuse to accept as a bad take is the durability mechanic, which was awful. From what I could gather, based on the arguments for it, is that it was meant to create tension and emergent gameplay as you cycled through a variety of weapons with their own unique movesets and interactions. I find this argument to be troubling, however, as ‘Breath of the Wild’ isn’t really difficult or varied enough to facilitate any of those feelings. The flow of action is incredibly important to any game with regular combat, and the addition of such a regular need to open a menu and swap your equipment so that you can continue fighting is a massive issue in dire need of being fixed. Even worse, Link remains locked in place when you do a standard attack for any weapon, removing any forward momentum and causing the combat to feel stiff. You really aren’t going to be able to make exciting combat if this is what you’re expected to work with. ‘Tears of the Kingdom’ doesn’t fix any of these problems, but one thing it does do better with is the new fusion mechanic. Allowing me to improve the strength and capabilities of weapons depending on what random resource I attach onto it is great, and I love that you can attach basically anything onto any weapon. You can even attach a piece of raw meat onto the Master Sword if you’re a sick fuck. The ingenuity runs its course by the middle of the game when you realize there are only a few interactions in total, which merely vary in strength with rarer materials, but I appreciated it for giving more of a reason to engage the durability mechanic, since I was actually going through my strong weapons as opposed to hoarding them like I did in ‘Breath of the Wild’.
But I do want to be careful in suggesting that this is a fix. It’s more of an improvement. Limited inventory and poor durability are still issues which don’t jive well with the game’s overall feel, but the addition of fusion allows those problems to be more of a headache than a migraine. Where fusion takes it’s biggest hit is with some pretty baffling interface in relation to what you’re able to fuse onto weapons. The menu you pull up is a single line of everything you’ve collected at any point in the game. You get a few sort options, but if you’re aiming to try something new, it can take a number of seconds to scroll to the necessary items. When a friend told me about how Keese eyeballs functioned, I wanted to try these out, but I was so far into the game that I’d already used so many different items, and having to sort through the menu each time I wanted to attach an eyeball to my arrow would keep me in menus instead of actually fighting. Perhaps it’s a shallow argument to make, but it only furthers how dull combat manages to feel, being locked into menus instead of engaging the action directly. There could’ve easily been a method of saving certain materials to a smaller chain of boxes to choose from, but instead we have an interface which disincentivizes trying anything new.
Another addition to this game is the use of sage companions. The first one I got was Tulin, who uses gusts of wind to push you forward. This is an excellent ability and is much appreciated. It makes flying on your paraglider a much more feasible option for moving through areas, at least until you get enough Zonai charge for the aforementioned steering stick and fans combo. It also activates any time you jump from a decent height. This is awesome game design and gets an S+ rating. Good shit. But then I got the other sages, none of which are anywhere near as helpful. The key issue is that the other four sages you acquire are almost specifically dedicated to combat. You can make the argument that Yunobo is more for clearing rubble, and you would have a point, but I can’t really identify any reason why the other three would be used outside of combat. The issue is less of what they add, and more about how they’re implemented. In order to activate their specific powers, you have to walk up to them and press the interact button. This sometimes overrides other things you might be doing, like collecting items, and can actually impact this by having Tulin blow them away from you or Yunobo burning them. It also directly interferes with the flow of combat yet again. I know I’ve spent the past few paragraphs harping on how much they botched the combat in this game, and I’m sorry if you’re still reading, but this is just such a critical part of the game to have messed up this badly. In order to activate the unique powers of each sage you have to step away from the fight to try and interact with each individual sage. They are also going to be fighting with you, and are sometimes actively running away from you, towards the enemy, making it a chore to actually use them. I basically never used my companions for combat because activating them is more of a struggle than just swinging a weapon at an enemy. There’s a button dedicated exclusively to whistling which I used in exactly two situations over the course of the entire game. Why not change that into a menu where you can whistle, but also easily summon the powers of your sage companions? This would completely alleviate the issue and would allow a more free environment to actually experiment with the tools you have. Also, on the subject of whistling and summoning things, why the hell are we still dealing with stables as the only means to access our horse? “The Witcher 3’ figured out, in 2015, that having your horse summoned to you at the press of the button was a good idea. I doubt it wasn’t even the first game to do that. Hell, in 2022, Elden Ring realized that having your horse on you at all times was a good idea. You just press a button and you can start riding. It’s perfect. Why are these open-world ‘Legend of Zelda’ games heralded as innovators when there are so many piss-poor decisions I wouldn’t even anticipate from mid-2010s game design philosophy? Sorry, this is a bit of a tangent, but why?
I dunno, I kinda just don’t want to bother talking about my other issues, as I’ve pretty thoroughly sent my message, at least I feel I have. I’m not even going to delve past the surface level into my issues with the uninspired dungeon design (Outside of the Fire Temple which was quite good), the poor storytelling (Story itself has legs, but it’s implementation is sloppy. Still better than ‘Breath of the Wild’ though.), or the disappointing realization that The Depths are not very dangerous and are actually super boring (I loved this place and the concept behind it for my first 2 or 3 hours down there, but man, you see everything exciting it has to offer incredibly quickly). The only real solace I can give the game is that it is a little bit better than ‘Breath of the Wild’, but you really have to squint to see it. Hell, some of the reasons I feel I enjoyed this more are less about the game correcting any flaws, and more about me optimizing my play. During ‘Breath of the Wild’ I put little focus in upgrading stamina, and I would remain focused on a singular objective, even when that objective was intruded upon by rain or a lack of resources. In this game, I prioritized stamina, and made the decision to immediately move away from what I was working on if it started to rain or if a wall was too steep or if I didn’t have the right materials to complete a quest. The game was only more fun because I altered the way I play, and I think part of that is my own fault for misreading the queues the game initially sent me. But I think it truly is a massive let-down that I need to play this game in a specific way to have fun. Because these games are supposed to give you the freedom to do whatever you feel like. That freedom rings hollow, however, when you’re at the mercy of the systems which oppress those opportunities. Actually wait, are these games metaphors for capitalism? Shit, nevermind, these games rule.
In my initial draft of this rambling stream of consciousness masquerading as a review, I ended it there. A silly joke meant to lighten the mood of my fairly dour take on the game. But that’s not fair to the game, nor is it fair to anyone reading this, or even fair to myself. I have been playing 'Zelda' games since I was quite young. I honestly can’t remember a point in my life where I wasn’t at least somewhat engrossed with the franchise. The games played a critical role in my most formative years, helping to shape what video games would inevitably mean to me. And while delving into the extent of that is far beyond the scope of what you’re reading today, I sincerely do mean it when I say that I love these games. Don’t get me wrong, there have been plenty of lows (coughTri Force Heroescough), but it doesn’t separate this franchise from that key feeling I experience when I simply think about it. I think there is great importance in taking a critical examination of the games we play, and I feel this rings especially true when it comes to the games we love. And those critical examinations need to be treated seriously.
I try my best to be harder on these long-running Nintendo franchises simply due to how established and prestigious they are. Whether or not it’s fair to take that approach or not is a different debate entirely, but it’s the critical and fan feedback which affords creators the chance to see how their work has impacted others. Whether I like it or not, ‘Breath of the Wild’ was a wildly transformative game, not only to the franchise and the medium as a whole, but to a large amount of individual people who were impacted by it. And, whether I like it or not, ‘Tears of the Kingdom’ appears to have captured that same feeling in most of the people who have played it. Not everyone wants to be hard on the games they love, and, sometimes, what you play just amazes you so much that it’s hard to see others share their more negative experiences. One of my favorite games of all time is ‘The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker’, and I can say, from experience, that seeing people address their personal grievances toward it is a really crappy feeling. But the ‘Zelda’ games would not have taken the shape they currently do if not for those same people showing that same passion in addressing legitimate flaws of ‘The Wind Waker’, ‘Twilight Princess’, and, quite crucially, ‘Skyward Sword’. If everybody just accepted the critical reaction to these games as evidence of their total quality, we would still be getting games which were making the same mistakes while doing little, from a design standpoint, to actually advance the franchise. And unfortunately, I feel the reaction we are seeing, at both a critical and commercial level, may inadvertently be contributing to us repeating the cycle started by ‘Ocarina of Time’ over two decades prior. ‘Breath of the Wild’ was able to capture that same flame its older brother did back in 1998, and it did so by taking bold risks and challenging itself to build into something unlike what anyone had seen, while remaining familiar enough to be comforting for those who grew up with the games. Those efforts can’t be overstated.
With ‘Tears of the Kingdom’, the development team had the chance to continue the boldness that allowed ‘Breath of the Wild’ to flourish. The opportunity to continue shaking things up and to make continued steps forward, expanding on the strengths of ‘Breath of the Wild’ while eliminating the flaws. To continue moving forward instead of stagnating and becoming comfortable in what the expectations for them are. They have the skill to do that. And I guess I just feel a bit melancholy that, despite those opportunities, the creators of my favorite video game series have decided to remain in the safety of what they know will be acceptable. 3/6
I have talked a lot about ‘The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’, whether that be good or bad. Ultimately, my feelings settle to finding the game fun, but ultimately finding it meanders through a campaign which does little to evolve itself past the first few hours, failing to fulfill the same energy for the other fifty hours I spent with it. It’s important to make the distinction between ‘Breath of the Wild’ having core mechanical flaws versus its apathy towards expanding upon its most engaging concepts. In fact, the level of polish, even with the chugging framerate at times, is immaculate, as few games of such size manage to stay as consistently thorough in their design and functionality. ‘Breath of the Wild’ was an incredibly cool concept, but with a scope grander than what the designers were able to fill.
So when ‘The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’ was announced as a direct sequel, it was easy to have optimism. On one hand, you have people unlike me, which is most people, who saw ‘Breath of the Wild’ as one of the greatest games ever made now getting a direct sequel to that. Then you have the subset of people in my camp who thought ‘Breath of the Wild’ was fine, but missed out on a lot of potential to be significantly better. Potential which, given the talent behind the team, could certainly be achieved with enough tinkering. But all of that faded a bit, at least for me, when it was confirmed that the overworld would be the same. Any excitement I had was flushed away when this was announced. I’m not suggesting that I knew, at this point, the game would be bad or anything. But the greatest strength of ‘Breath of the Wild’ was its ability to amaze you with its surprises. There were so many times in ‘Breath of the Wild’ where you would find something which felt completely new and unexpected, and it was really cool to figure out what you needed to do to get whatever reward may be waiting for you. Once it got to the point where I realized every reward was a weapon that broke after a few fights, this feeling of wonder quickly left, but at least it was there for a little bit.
‘Tears of the Kingdom’ removing this feeling of exploration, discovery, and reward is an unfortunate side effect of reusing a map from a previous game. The sense of discovery is lost quickly when you figure out how much of the game really is the exact same. As much as I love the sound effects the Koroks make, did we really need this many more of them with almost no change? The only legitimate changes I noticed were Ascend puzzles and puzzles where you help a Korok find their friend. The former is where you ascend through a log from below, which is just as mindless of a puzzle as the other ones. The latter is one of the least fun methods of engaging the game’s new Ultrahand ability, where you fuse different objects onto each other to create all kinds of different things. Primarily, what these puzzles ask you to do is to create a vehicle capable of transporting the Korok to where they need to go, which is a fun idea in theory. However, the magic of building is torn away after realizing most of the vehicles are extremely situational, and that strapping a rocket to a Korok is a much quicker method of crossing large gaps with less resources. Similarly, strapping a couple of fans onto a steering stick was by far the most efficient way of traversing all three of the game’s massive overworlds. Combine this with an overall jankiness the Ultrahand fails to manage, and you’ve essentially trivialized a mechanic which feels like it took a majority of the development time to piece together.
Similarly to these new Koroks, we’re also introduced to another game-wide puzzle involving a man who cannot figure out how to keep his sign standing. It’s the same man every time, but you’re meant to use the Ultrahand to piece together objects in order to hold the sign in place. These puzzles are always incredibly easy, and the reward was never worth the time spent in doing them. I eventually just began ignoring them. These are the two most common types of puzzles the game throws at you, and they never evolve these ideas. They just continue to show up everywhere you go, with little to no alteration of difficulty. Obviously you don’t have to engage these, but when a game is reusing the same overworld which is heavily reliant on the sense of discovery, it’s the added content which is important to make exciting or surprising. Knowing that the biggest surprise I might find is a Korok who whines about needing to reach their friend, or the sign guy who’s gimmick ran stale after his third appearance, is not a fun way to engage players of the previous game.
Shrines are back, and they do little to improve upon where they were at in the previous game. While the Test of Strength type shrines have been revamped from 1-on-1 fights into larger sandboxes which force you to fight without the gear you came in with, they feel more like far less interesting versions of Eventide Island than improvements upon their predecessors. There are still a ton of shrines which don’t contain a puzzle, and even more where the puzzle is far too simple to feel like a legitimate reward. While I couldn’t give an exact number of shrines which I felt were legitimately fun, I’m certain it didn’t exceed five. I completed 90, according to the loading screen, and towards the end of the game I started to ignore shrines altogether. They continue to serve the sole purpose of allowing you to upgrade your health and stamina, neither of which feel like good ways to implement their growth. I’ve already spent way too much time telling people why I think the stamina wheel is among the most poorly-implemented mechanics in open-world gaming, so I’ll spare this review of any of that discussion for everyone’s sanity. My argument has never been all too convincing, so I’m willing to just accept it’s a bad take.
What I refuse to accept as a bad take is the durability mechanic, which was awful. From what I could gather, based on the arguments for it, is that it was meant to create tension and emergent gameplay as you cycled through a variety of weapons with their own unique movesets and interactions. I find this argument to be troubling, however, as ‘Breath of the Wild’ isn’t really difficult or varied enough to facilitate any of those feelings. The flow of action is incredibly important to any game with regular combat, and the addition of such a regular need to open a menu and swap your equipment so that you can continue fighting is a massive issue in dire need of being fixed. Even worse, Link remains locked in place when you do a standard attack for any weapon, removing any forward momentum and causing the combat to feel stiff. You really aren’t going to be able to make exciting combat if this is what you’re expected to work with. ‘Tears of the Kingdom’ doesn’t fix any of these problems, but one thing it does do better with is the new fusion mechanic. Allowing me to improve the strength and capabilities of weapons depending on what random resource I attach onto it is great, and I love that you can attach basically anything onto any weapon. You can even attach a piece of raw meat onto the Master Sword if you’re a sick fuck. The ingenuity runs its course by the middle of the game when you realize there are only a few interactions in total, which merely vary in strength with rarer materials, but I appreciated it for giving more of a reason to engage the durability mechanic, since I was actually going through my strong weapons as opposed to hoarding them like I did in ‘Breath of the Wild’.
But I do want to be careful in suggesting that this is a fix. It’s more of an improvement. Limited inventory and poor durability are still issues which don’t jive well with the game’s overall feel, but the addition of fusion allows those problems to be more of a headache than a migraine. Where fusion takes it’s biggest hit is with some pretty baffling interface in relation to what you’re able to fuse onto weapons. The menu you pull up is a single line of everything you’ve collected at any point in the game. You get a few sort options, but if you’re aiming to try something new, it can take a number of seconds to scroll to the necessary items. When a friend told me about how Keese eyeballs functioned, I wanted to try these out, but I was so far into the game that I’d already used so many different items, and having to sort through the menu each time I wanted to attach an eyeball to my arrow would keep me in menus instead of actually fighting. Perhaps it’s a shallow argument to make, but it only furthers how dull combat manages to feel, being locked into menus instead of engaging the action directly. There could’ve easily been a method of saving certain materials to a smaller chain of boxes to choose from, but instead we have an interface which disincentivizes trying anything new.
Another addition to this game is the use of sage companions. The first one I got was Tulin, who uses gusts of wind to push you forward. This is an excellent ability and is much appreciated. It makes flying on your paraglider a much more feasible option for moving through areas, at least until you get enough Zonai charge for the aforementioned steering stick and fans combo. It also activates any time you jump from a decent height. This is awesome game design and gets an S+ rating. Good shit. But then I got the other sages, none of which are anywhere near as helpful. The key issue is that the other four sages you acquire are almost specifically dedicated to combat. You can make the argument that Yunobo is more for clearing rubble, and you would have a point, but I can’t really identify any reason why the other three would be used outside of combat. The issue is less of what they add, and more about how they’re implemented. In order to activate their specific powers, you have to walk up to them and press the interact button. This sometimes overrides other things you might be doing, like collecting items, and can actually impact this by having Tulin blow them away from you or Yunobo burning them. It also directly interferes with the flow of combat yet again. I know I’ve spent the past few paragraphs harping on how much they botched the combat in this game, and I’m sorry if you’re still reading, but this is just such a critical part of the game to have messed up this badly. In order to activate the unique powers of each sage you have to step away from the fight to try and interact with each individual sage. They are also going to be fighting with you, and are sometimes actively running away from you, towards the enemy, making it a chore to actually use them. I basically never used my companions for combat because activating them is more of a struggle than just swinging a weapon at an enemy. There’s a button dedicated exclusively to whistling which I used in exactly two situations over the course of the entire game. Why not change that into a menu where you can whistle, but also easily summon the powers of your sage companions? This would completely alleviate the issue and would allow a more free environment to actually experiment with the tools you have. Also, on the subject of whistling and summoning things, why the hell are we still dealing with stables as the only means to access our horse? “The Witcher 3’ figured out, in 2015, that having your horse summoned to you at the press of the button was a good idea. I doubt it wasn’t even the first game to do that. Hell, in 2022, Elden Ring realized that having your horse on you at all times was a good idea. You just press a button and you can start riding. It’s perfect. Why are these open-world ‘Legend of Zelda’ games heralded as innovators when there are so many piss-poor decisions I wouldn’t even anticipate from mid-2010s game design philosophy? Sorry, this is a bit of a tangent, but why?
I dunno, I kinda just don’t want to bother talking about my other issues, as I’ve pretty thoroughly sent my message, at least I feel I have. I’m not even going to delve past the surface level into my issues with the uninspired dungeon design (Outside of the Fire Temple which was quite good), the poor storytelling (Story itself has legs, but it’s implementation is sloppy. Still better than ‘Breath of the Wild’ though.), or the disappointing realization that The Depths are not very dangerous and are actually super boring (I loved this place and the concept behind it for my first 2 or 3 hours down there, but man, you see everything exciting it has to offer incredibly quickly). The only real solace I can give the game is that it is a little bit better than ‘Breath of the Wild’, but you really have to squint to see it. Hell, some of the reasons I feel I enjoyed this more are less about the game correcting any flaws, and more about me optimizing my play. During ‘Breath of the Wild’ I put little focus in upgrading stamina, and I would remain focused on a singular objective, even when that objective was intruded upon by rain or a lack of resources. In this game, I prioritized stamina, and made the decision to immediately move away from what I was working on if it started to rain or if a wall was too steep or if I didn’t have the right materials to complete a quest. The game was only more fun because I altered the way I play, and I think part of that is my own fault for misreading the queues the game initially sent me. But I think it truly is a massive let-down that I need to play this game in a specific way to have fun. Because these games are supposed to give you the freedom to do whatever you feel like. That freedom rings hollow, however, when you’re at the mercy of the systems which oppress those opportunities. Actually wait, are these games metaphors for capitalism? Shit, nevermind, these games rule.
In my initial draft of this rambling stream of consciousness masquerading as a review, I ended it there. A silly joke meant to lighten the mood of my fairly dour take on the game. But that’s not fair to the game, nor is it fair to anyone reading this, or even fair to myself. I have been playing 'Zelda' games since I was quite young. I honestly can’t remember a point in my life where I wasn’t at least somewhat engrossed with the franchise. The games played a critical role in my most formative years, helping to shape what video games would inevitably mean to me. And while delving into the extent of that is far beyond the scope of what you’re reading today, I sincerely do mean it when I say that I love these games. Don’t get me wrong, there have been plenty of lows (coughTri Force Heroescough), but it doesn’t separate this franchise from that key feeling I experience when I simply think about it. I think there is great importance in taking a critical examination of the games we play, and I feel this rings especially true when it comes to the games we love. And those critical examinations need to be treated seriously.
I try my best to be harder on these long-running Nintendo franchises simply due to how established and prestigious they are. Whether or not it’s fair to take that approach or not is a different debate entirely, but it’s the critical and fan feedback which affords creators the chance to see how their work has impacted others. Whether I like it or not, ‘Breath of the Wild’ was a wildly transformative game, not only to the franchise and the medium as a whole, but to a large amount of individual people who were impacted by it. And, whether I like it or not, ‘Tears of the Kingdom’ appears to have captured that same feeling in most of the people who have played it. Not everyone wants to be hard on the games they love, and, sometimes, what you play just amazes you so much that it’s hard to see others share their more negative experiences. One of my favorite games of all time is ‘The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker’, and I can say, from experience, that seeing people address their personal grievances toward it is a really crappy feeling. But the ‘Zelda’ games would not have taken the shape they currently do if not for those same people showing that same passion in addressing legitimate flaws of ‘The Wind Waker’, ‘Twilight Princess’, and, quite crucially, ‘Skyward Sword’. If everybody just accepted the critical reaction to these games as evidence of their total quality, we would still be getting games which were making the same mistakes while doing little, from a design standpoint, to actually advance the franchise. And unfortunately, I feel the reaction we are seeing, at both a critical and commercial level, may inadvertently be contributing to us repeating the cycle started by ‘Ocarina of Time’ over two decades prior. ‘Breath of the Wild’ was able to capture that same flame its older brother did back in 1998, and it did so by taking bold risks and challenging itself to build into something unlike what anyone had seen, while remaining familiar enough to be comforting for those who grew up with the games. Those efforts can’t be overstated.
With ‘Tears of the Kingdom’, the development team had the chance to continue the boldness that allowed ‘Breath of the Wild’ to flourish. The opportunity to continue shaking things up and to make continued steps forward, expanding on the strengths of ‘Breath of the Wild’ while eliminating the flaws. To continue moving forward instead of stagnating and becoming comfortable in what the expectations for them are. They have the skill to do that. And I guess I just feel a bit melancholy that, despite those opportunities, the creators of my favorite video game series have decided to remain in the safety of what they know will be acceptable. 3/6