It's an almost unheard of experience for a game sequel to completely obsolete its predecessor. To drive this home, let's actually examine that claim.
Iterative sequels are the first to spring to mind when considering where this phenomena might happen, but they often come with a revolving door of features between every couple of releases that ensures some instances of the franchise will excel in different areas. Sometimes the game engine will receive minor tweaks in ways that take two steps back while graphics or gameplay options take one forward.
Other, more narrative games will generally be more of a side grade at best. Judge a game for its story, and the next game most likely has a different story rather than an objectively better or worse one.
Other sequels, poised to put their older siblings in the trash are hobbled by outside hands. A famous voice actor getting fired or upper management pulling funding, time, or creatives. Maybe there's simply a bold creative direction taken in good faith that does not pan out.
It's not really a mystery that I've been building towards Tears of the Kingdom completely obsoleting Breath of the Wild, but I hope you have a sense of how miraculous that is. The timbre of games development is so intrinsically hostile to this happening, and the fact that Tears surpasses one of the highest quality releases of the last decade only solidifies the achievement.
"I'm never playing Breath of the Wild again." was a persistent thought throughout my time with Tears, so let's see why that is.
The spirit of exploration has essentially served as the mission statement for this current iteration of the franchise, and it was extremely pleasing to see the continued embrace of the ethos. New, extremely hostile environments are introduced in Tears in addition to the base Hyrule map we knew from Breath of the Wild. This is a good choice, of course you want new content, but Nintendo played it perfectly by being hush on 50% of the world map prior to release.
What better way to make the player feel like an explorer than to present them with literally an unknown land?
The theme of exploration is a perfect fit for the amount of agency the game trusts the player with. Tears is a game with a lot of content. A lot! Killing all monsters, finding all caves, finding all Koroks, all shrines, all light roots, upgrading all equipment, all the side quests, all the side adventures…
A lot!
But the game is smart enough to not let this get discouraging. A daunting number like 900 Koroks turns off all but a select few players. Nintendo recognized this and did the smart thing of not gating a substantial reward behind it. The same goes for basically all of these “check list” items: If the only players who are going to bother are the players who feel intrinsically rewarded by the journey to get it done and the subsequent knowledge that it is done, why not let that be the main reward? The game knows players will curate their own experiences insofar as what is and is not worth their time to complete. Just as an explorer chooses and makes their own way through the world, a player of Tears of the Kingdom can be an agent of the type of experience they want to create.
It's an extremely good example of ludothematic harmony. Games often tout an adventure focus or an exploration tag, but it's one thing to ship a copy of Horizon Zero Dawn with a preorder bonus of the game map showing all the places to find treasure trundles lest the player ever really be surprised, and another entirely to let the player control Link for about five hours before accidentally falling into a hole and stumbling upon the other half of the entire world.
Breath of the Wild was another game with a lot to discover, but, save for the first moment encountering a dragon, nothing was ever as surprising or truly unknown as some of what one will come across in Tears. I try not to phrase this as anything too derogatory; my point isn't that Breath of the Wild has shortcomings, but rather that Tears has surpassed a masterful game.
Let's go back to those dragons from Breath of the Wild. Cool, right? The devs agreed, so they brought them back, made them easier to interact with, gave them (and others) a much more prominent place in the game's story and let them figure into the climax. If you want a cool dragon moment, Breath of the Wild has been once again made redundant.
It's this ability to perfectly hone in on what worked, why it worked, and how to rework it beyond that to be even better that pervades Tears. Shrines are another example. Fun physics puzzles that regrettably included a few too many samey combat challenges? How about replacing all of those with extremely unique no equipment scenarios? Too many shrines dotting the landscape reducing the fun of finding them? Much more of them are hidden in caves or in the sky to restore the fun challenge of accessing them. Shrine quests were pretty fun little puzzles and those stick around largely unchanged.
The Great Fairy fountains were a favorite, of some, in the first game. Upgrading gear was fun, for some, and most people were a fan of Great Fairy redesigns. Of course Nintendo would bring these elements back, but they did so with the good sense to attach fun, meaningful quests for unlocking each fountain. One more thing they identified as worthy of bringing forward and spared no expense improving. The fact that said quests gel perfectly with Tears’s new physics tools is particularly inspired.
These physics powers are yet another aspect of Tears that obsoletes Breath of the Wild. How quaint is making an ice block when you can scale through solid matter? How blaise is picking something up when you can now pick it up and attach it to anything? What is the more impressive invention: Localized time travel, or a bomb?
Could I tempt you with a square bomb?
Not all of these are intended direct comparisons, nor are all of these questions fair, but it’s pretty clear that Link has a larger variety of options this time around with his powerset.
The tools in Breath of the Wild were impressive in how they played with each other. Bombs could jettison the things one put in stasis, or the ice blocks would elevate objects placed onto them. It was a cohesive kit that gave players the most powerful iteration of Link to date, save for Soul Calibur 2.
Tears kicks things up a notch by not focusing on the intra-activity of Link’s kit, but the interactivity of all the ways it can modify the various objects occupying Hyrule. This is most easily seen with the contraptions one can build with any interactable object, but the weapon fusing system goes even deeper. I imagine it will take players cumulative years before they stop seeing videos of new possibilities posted online.
Did you know a wing shield gives you a higher jump out of a shield surf? Did you know a floating platform arrow will fly for a bit before spawning a platform for link to use, thus grating stable ground in midair? Have you ever made the butter sword?
Every object in Tears asks the implicit question: “What can I do with this?” The options are indeed exponential in scope, but the genius is how optional it all is. If you answered “No” to all of the previous questions, you likely didn’t struggle with the game. Everything is designed to be possible at the “base level” of gameplay; the skill floor is relatively low. The skill ceiling, or perhaps the nonsense equity, is extremely high to match.
A little knowledge goes a long way in Tears, and I imagine subsequent playthroughs will involve a lot of sideways thinking for the seasoned player. BotW had this too, but whereas in that game it involved the mechanical skill of pulling off unintended jobs from odd angles, Tears makes the edge gained feel much more organic as it simply stems from knowhow.
In this section of the review I will discuss the dungeons.
What a success! I was in the crowd (Minority?) that was happy to see dungeons replaced with Divine Beasts in BotW. They were relatively open ended, featured inspired designs, and had exciting attack sequences leading up to them. Unfortunately the nature of the puzzles involving moving the beasts wasn’t so exciting intellectually, and the boss encounters lacked personality. While the dungeons in Tears don’t require a rocket surgeon on hand to solve, they do largely ameliorate both issues.
Puzzles, save for one exception I still wake up in the dead of night thinking about, have a clear intended solution that of course does not boil down to “Move the beast this way”. As mentioned they aren’t difficult, but the need to find a new solution each time is just enough mental effort to keep the player engaged. As for the boss fights, they are simply night and day with BotW as they feature unique enemies that call for special tactics to take down. Fitting climaxes for the dungeons preceding them.
To find flaw, which I am almost (Almost!) loathe to do, the choice to repeat these fights in the Depths does not sit right with me. It’s never exciting to find the second copy of what was presumed to be a unique encounter, and the fights are involved enough to make taking them down multiple times a nontrivial task. These subsequent encounters lack coolness and demand time, which is a truly dreadful combination.
Coolness is salvaged, however, in terms of lore. Each dungeon is contextualized within the local lore of each tribe to varying degrees of subtlety. My first visit to any of the peoples of Hyrule saw me interacting with Gorons, and without the context of what was to come, I blew off Gorondia as a silly joke. Egg on my face when I rolled up there with my fat fuck boyfriend only to find it’s a literal Fire Temple. It was a cool moment, and while the surprise factor wasn’t there, the rest of the dungeons earned similar respect to their names.
What’s in a name, anyway? In Tears, the answer would be epithets. It’s somewhat standard practice to subtitle bosses like “Steve, Lord of the Clyde”, or “Brendan, Bane of Twitter”, but Zelda has oscillated between having these and not. Perhaps it’s their flakiness that makes their appearance cool, but the reason I bring them up at all is that the dungeons also have epithets in Tears. It’s the smallest thing, but it is quite enjoyable to know that the fire temple is “Lost Gorondia, Rediscovered” rather than just…the fire temple.
These small yet effective elements of presentation are omnipresent in the game. If the words of the devs are true and the game had a year plus of just polish, these are the types of tweaks I imagine they made in that time period. Or maybe Ganon’s health bar always grew longer and harder as his blood flowed into it. It’s hard to say!
From large to small, there really is not an element of Tears that I would not call a success. There are some lumps in the gravy as there always are, for example trying to corner the member of your ghost posse whose ability you need to use is a needlessly tedious process, and the control remains just as clunky as it was in BotW. There are some other flaws as well, but what I need you to understand is that it just does not matter.
A theoretically perfect game doesn’t exist, and thinking about games in that way only serves to devalue your experiences and tarnish your impression of the world. Tears of the Kingdom cleanly surpassed what I considered to be one of the greatest games of all time; the fact that it has minor foibles is as irrelevant as it gets. Taken holistically, the game is a 10, or a 5 as this site would say.
Put another way, in 6 months I’m not going to remember the awkward claw grip I had to employ at times, I’m going to remember how terrifying it was when my second foray into the Depths saw a Frox jump up to greet me, and the wave of fear that single encounter set off that lasted for dozens of hours.
Games, like art, as art, are experiential. I just had a perfect experience.
Iterative sequels are the first to spring to mind when considering where this phenomena might happen, but they often come with a revolving door of features between every couple of releases that ensures some instances of the franchise will excel in different areas. Sometimes the game engine will receive minor tweaks in ways that take two steps back while graphics or gameplay options take one forward.
Other, more narrative games will generally be more of a side grade at best. Judge a game for its story, and the next game most likely has a different story rather than an objectively better or worse one.
Other sequels, poised to put their older siblings in the trash are hobbled by outside hands. A famous voice actor getting fired or upper management pulling funding, time, or creatives. Maybe there's simply a bold creative direction taken in good faith that does not pan out.
It's not really a mystery that I've been building towards Tears of the Kingdom completely obsoleting Breath of the Wild, but I hope you have a sense of how miraculous that is. The timbre of games development is so intrinsically hostile to this happening, and the fact that Tears surpasses one of the highest quality releases of the last decade only solidifies the achievement.
"I'm never playing Breath of the Wild again." was a persistent thought throughout my time with Tears, so let's see why that is.
The spirit of exploration has essentially served as the mission statement for this current iteration of the franchise, and it was extremely pleasing to see the continued embrace of the ethos. New, extremely hostile environments are introduced in Tears in addition to the base Hyrule map we knew from Breath of the Wild. This is a good choice, of course you want new content, but Nintendo played it perfectly by being hush on 50% of the world map prior to release.
What better way to make the player feel like an explorer than to present them with literally an unknown land?
The theme of exploration is a perfect fit for the amount of agency the game trusts the player with. Tears is a game with a lot of content. A lot! Killing all monsters, finding all caves, finding all Koroks, all shrines, all light roots, upgrading all equipment, all the side quests, all the side adventures…
A lot!
But the game is smart enough to not let this get discouraging. A daunting number like 900 Koroks turns off all but a select few players. Nintendo recognized this and did the smart thing of not gating a substantial reward behind it. The same goes for basically all of these “check list” items: If the only players who are going to bother are the players who feel intrinsically rewarded by the journey to get it done and the subsequent knowledge that it is done, why not let that be the main reward? The game knows players will curate their own experiences insofar as what is and is not worth their time to complete. Just as an explorer chooses and makes their own way through the world, a player of Tears of the Kingdom can be an agent of the type of experience they want to create.
It's an extremely good example of ludothematic harmony. Games often tout an adventure focus or an exploration tag, but it's one thing to ship a copy of Horizon Zero Dawn with a preorder bonus of the game map showing all the places to find treasure trundles lest the player ever really be surprised, and another entirely to let the player control Link for about five hours before accidentally falling into a hole and stumbling upon the other half of the entire world.
Breath of the Wild was another game with a lot to discover, but, save for the first moment encountering a dragon, nothing was ever as surprising or truly unknown as some of what one will come across in Tears. I try not to phrase this as anything too derogatory; my point isn't that Breath of the Wild has shortcomings, but rather that Tears has surpassed a masterful game.
Let's go back to those dragons from Breath of the Wild. Cool, right? The devs agreed, so they brought them back, made them easier to interact with, gave them (and others) a much more prominent place in the game's story and let them figure into the climax. If you want a cool dragon moment, Breath of the Wild has been once again made redundant.
It's this ability to perfectly hone in on what worked, why it worked, and how to rework it beyond that to be even better that pervades Tears. Shrines are another example. Fun physics puzzles that regrettably included a few too many samey combat challenges? How about replacing all of those with extremely unique no equipment scenarios? Too many shrines dotting the landscape reducing the fun of finding them? Much more of them are hidden in caves or in the sky to restore the fun challenge of accessing them. Shrine quests were pretty fun little puzzles and those stick around largely unchanged.
The Great Fairy fountains were a favorite, of some, in the first game. Upgrading gear was fun, for some, and most people were a fan of Great Fairy redesigns. Of course Nintendo would bring these elements back, but they did so with the good sense to attach fun, meaningful quests for unlocking each fountain. One more thing they identified as worthy of bringing forward and spared no expense improving. The fact that said quests gel perfectly with Tears’s new physics tools is particularly inspired.
These physics powers are yet another aspect of Tears that obsoletes Breath of the Wild. How quaint is making an ice block when you can scale through solid matter? How blaise is picking something up when you can now pick it up and attach it to anything? What is the more impressive invention: Localized time travel, or a bomb?
Could I tempt you with a square bomb?
Not all of these are intended direct comparisons, nor are all of these questions fair, but it’s pretty clear that Link has a larger variety of options this time around with his powerset.
The tools in Breath of the Wild were impressive in how they played with each other. Bombs could jettison the things one put in stasis, or the ice blocks would elevate objects placed onto them. It was a cohesive kit that gave players the most powerful iteration of Link to date, save for Soul Calibur 2.
Tears kicks things up a notch by not focusing on the intra-activity of Link’s kit, but the interactivity of all the ways it can modify the various objects occupying Hyrule. This is most easily seen with the contraptions one can build with any interactable object, but the weapon fusing system goes even deeper. I imagine it will take players cumulative years before they stop seeing videos of new possibilities posted online.
Did you know a wing shield gives you a higher jump out of a shield surf? Did you know a floating platform arrow will fly for a bit before spawning a platform for link to use, thus grating stable ground in midair? Have you ever made the butter sword?
Every object in Tears asks the implicit question: “What can I do with this?” The options are indeed exponential in scope, but the genius is how optional it all is. If you answered “No” to all of the previous questions, you likely didn’t struggle with the game. Everything is designed to be possible at the “base level” of gameplay; the skill floor is relatively low. The skill ceiling, or perhaps the nonsense equity, is extremely high to match.
A little knowledge goes a long way in Tears, and I imagine subsequent playthroughs will involve a lot of sideways thinking for the seasoned player. BotW had this too, but whereas in that game it involved the mechanical skill of pulling off unintended jobs from odd angles, Tears makes the edge gained feel much more organic as it simply stems from knowhow.
In this section of the review I will discuss the dungeons.
What a success! I was in the crowd (Minority?) that was happy to see dungeons replaced with Divine Beasts in BotW. They were relatively open ended, featured inspired designs, and had exciting attack sequences leading up to them. Unfortunately the nature of the puzzles involving moving the beasts wasn’t so exciting intellectually, and the boss encounters lacked personality. While the dungeons in Tears don’t require a rocket surgeon on hand to solve, they do largely ameliorate both issues.
Puzzles, save for one exception I still wake up in the dead of night thinking about, have a clear intended solution that of course does not boil down to “Move the beast this way”. As mentioned they aren’t difficult, but the need to find a new solution each time is just enough mental effort to keep the player engaged. As for the boss fights, they are simply night and day with BotW as they feature unique enemies that call for special tactics to take down. Fitting climaxes for the dungeons preceding them.
To find flaw, which I am almost (Almost!) loathe to do, the choice to repeat these fights in the Depths does not sit right with me. It’s never exciting to find the second copy of what was presumed to be a unique encounter, and the fights are involved enough to make taking them down multiple times a nontrivial task. These subsequent encounters lack coolness and demand time, which is a truly dreadful combination.
Coolness is salvaged, however, in terms of lore. Each dungeon is contextualized within the local lore of each tribe to varying degrees of subtlety. My first visit to any of the peoples of Hyrule saw me interacting with Gorons, and without the context of what was to come, I blew off Gorondia as a silly joke. Egg on my face when I rolled up there with my fat fuck boyfriend only to find it’s a literal Fire Temple. It was a cool moment, and while the surprise factor wasn’t there, the rest of the dungeons earned similar respect to their names.
What’s in a name, anyway? In Tears, the answer would be epithets. It’s somewhat standard practice to subtitle bosses like “Steve, Lord of the Clyde”, or “Brendan, Bane of Twitter”, but Zelda has oscillated between having these and not. Perhaps it’s their flakiness that makes their appearance cool, but the reason I bring them up at all is that the dungeons also have epithets in Tears. It’s the smallest thing, but it is quite enjoyable to know that the fire temple is “Lost Gorondia, Rediscovered” rather than just…the fire temple.
These small yet effective elements of presentation are omnipresent in the game. If the words of the devs are true and the game had a year plus of just polish, these are the types of tweaks I imagine they made in that time period. Or maybe Ganon’s health bar always grew longer and harder as his blood flowed into it. It’s hard to say!
From large to small, there really is not an element of Tears that I would not call a success. There are some lumps in the gravy as there always are, for example trying to corner the member of your ghost posse whose ability you need to use is a needlessly tedious process, and the control remains just as clunky as it was in BotW. There are some other flaws as well, but what I need you to understand is that it just does not matter.
A theoretically perfect game doesn’t exist, and thinking about games in that way only serves to devalue your experiences and tarnish your impression of the world. Tears of the Kingdom cleanly surpassed what I considered to be one of the greatest games of all time; the fact that it has minor foibles is as irrelevant as it gets. Taken holistically, the game is a 10, or a 5 as this site would say.
Put another way, in 6 months I’m not going to remember the awkward claw grip I had to employ at times, I’m going to remember how terrifying it was when my second foray into the Depths saw a Frox jump up to greet me, and the wave of fear that single encounter set off that lasted for dozens of hours.
Games, like art, as art, are experiential. I just had a perfect experience.