What a brilliant mess this game is. Breath of the Wild, when it came out, felt like a flawless jewel. You could complain (and I did!) about how weapon durability disincentivized engaging with the combat, or bemoan the relative weakness of the dungeons, but those were all gripes around the edges of the monumental fact that they had near-perfectly delivered on the promise that open world games had been making for decades. It was reacting to the larger world of video games in a way Nintendo largely refused to do, and at the same time it was like nothing we'd seen before.
Tears of the Kingdom is very much like something we've seen before. The core conceit is identical to its predecessor despite the different array of magical abilities, and even the plot is largely unchanged: Zelda is gone, again. The great evil is back, again. Climb the towers, find the shrines, do the dungeons, save the princess.
But to see this as just more Breath of the Wild is also to miss the point. The first game was constrained by its immaculate crystalline structure. It had to be the open-world game. Tears of the Kingdom could never be that because that's already been done, and it uses the extra freedom of the younger sibling to get weird with it.
In a lot of ways, this weirdness isn't for the best. The control scheme is onerous to say the least, particularly when engaging with the construction mechanics. The combat scaling is way off, with enemies either taking ten hits from a top-tier weapon or dying immediately. Once you get a feel for the patterns in the depths, they're largely empty and repetitive.
But damn if it isn't also interesting. The truth I keep coming back to is this: although I think Breath of the Wild is a "better" game in some abstract design sense, I lost interest after about 100 hours. Meanwhile, I've spent twice that playing Tears of the Kingdom and I'd be happy to continue if only there weren't more games to get around to.
This game takes huge swings, and while not all of them hit the ones that do are incredible. You only have to glance online to see the videos of mechs and drones players have built. The depths feel genuinely terrifying. Fusion is fully brilliant, simultaneously solving durability and making room for countless moments of discovery. There are genuinely good boss fights for maybe the first time in any Zelda game.
And I could rhapsodize endlessly about the way the world interconnects with itself. To my mind, the only real justification for the concept of "open world" is the idea that your actions as a player have non-local effects on the world you exist in. Breath of the Wild gestured at this, but Tears of the Kingdom fully embraces it. Conversations continue across the map from one another as NPCs wander from place to place. Refugees you meet in one region return home to another as you rebuild their houses. The world feels alive in a way that games seldom attempt and almost never achieve, and I love it for that.
Tears of the Kingdom is very much like something we've seen before. The core conceit is identical to its predecessor despite the different array of magical abilities, and even the plot is largely unchanged: Zelda is gone, again. The great evil is back, again. Climb the towers, find the shrines, do the dungeons, save the princess.
But to see this as just more Breath of the Wild is also to miss the point. The first game was constrained by its immaculate crystalline structure. It had to be the open-world game. Tears of the Kingdom could never be that because that's already been done, and it uses the extra freedom of the younger sibling to get weird with it.
In a lot of ways, this weirdness isn't for the best. The control scheme is onerous to say the least, particularly when engaging with the construction mechanics. The combat scaling is way off, with enemies either taking ten hits from a top-tier weapon or dying immediately. Once you get a feel for the patterns in the depths, they're largely empty and repetitive.
But damn if it isn't also interesting. The truth I keep coming back to is this: although I think Breath of the Wild is a "better" game in some abstract design sense, I lost interest after about 100 hours. Meanwhile, I've spent twice that playing Tears of the Kingdom and I'd be happy to continue if only there weren't more games to get around to.
This game takes huge swings, and while not all of them hit the ones that do are incredible. You only have to glance online to see the videos of mechs and drones players have built. The depths feel genuinely terrifying. Fusion is fully brilliant, simultaneously solving durability and making room for countless moments of discovery. There are genuinely good boss fights for maybe the first time in any Zelda game.
And I could rhapsodize endlessly about the way the world interconnects with itself. To my mind, the only real justification for the concept of "open world" is the idea that your actions as a player have non-local effects on the world you exist in. Breath of the Wild gestured at this, but Tears of the Kingdom fully embraces it. Conversations continue across the map from one another as NPCs wander from place to place. Refugees you meet in one region return home to another as you rebuild their houses. The world feels alive in a way that games seldom attempt and almost never achieve, and I love it for that.