After 130 hours of gameplay I have finally beaten The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and honestly, I’m not even sure how to write this post. The amount of love, respect and sheer amazement I feel for this game is staggering. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed Breath of the Wild but my goodness this game completely consumed me for over a month. I will do my very best to convey that in this post.
What Goes Up Must Come Down
The beginning of Tears of the Kingdom is one of my favorite parts of the game. It has you go through a tutorial of sorts to get familiar with the new game mechanics but it never holds your hand. Instead, it encourages you to begin experimenting with the new abilities right off the bat. It’s because of this that I was still trying out new things towards the end of the game. I really enjoyed figuring things out on my own with Nintendo’s gentle nudge guiding me ever so slightly.
After doing a few shrines in the sky, watching a few cutscenes and getting a feel for the game, you’ll find yourself jumping straight down into the middle of Hyrule field and seeing a nice title screen while you’re at it. Water splashes, Link comes up for air and just like that Hyrule is once again yours to explore at your own pace. Things have changed since we were in Hyrule last so the world feels both familiar and fresh at the same time. I don’t know about you but it has been a while since I have played Breath of the Wild. Because of that, the world certainly felt new to me.
After an opening like that, I just couldn’t put this game down. It would be way past my bedtime and I would think, “just one more shrine” and find myself up for another hour or two. This game never stopped playing to my curiosity and I think that’s what really made me fall in love with it.
Link’s New Abilities
Tears of the Kingdom wouldn’t feel like a proper sequel without giving the player some new things to play around with. This time around, Link has a brand new set of abilities, each more useful than the last. These new abilities tie into the world so much better this time around, really creating a new and exciting gameplay loop.
Ultrahand lets you move items around and piece them together to make all sorts of contraptions. Need a vehicle to explore Hyrule in? Build one! Fuse allows you to take almost any item in the game and combine it to a weapon or shield. This can create some pretty exciting creations. Ascend allows Link to float straight up and shift through any surface, making world traversal that much easier. It especially helped me to get out of caves. Autobuild lets you save previous creations and recreate them using a material called Zonite or the parts necessary to create the item. I liked that they let you use Zonite if you needed to because I didn’t always have all the parts with me. Rewind allows you to send an item back through time. Turning fallen rocks into elevators is just one example of this.
I really enjoyed how much these new abilities put more emphasis on the world of Hyrule. Fuse alone encouraged me to hunt down monsters so that I could have the appropriate materials to fuse to my weapons and make them better. Each monster camp didn’t just feel like a random camp, they had purpose to them. Each camp now meant new and exciting Fuse combinations to try. Ascend was another one that kept surprising me. Instead of having to knock down Stone Taluses you can Ascend up and through them and go for their weak point. I kept finding new and creative ways to use Link’s abilities that just made the world feel that much bigger.
Sorry Zelda, There’s A Whole World To Explore
Much like Breath of the Wild, Tears of the Kingdom lets you do things in whatever order you would like to. For me, this meant going to the Rito first, Zora next, then Gerudo, and lastly the Goro. Each area had its own questline that was extremely well-written and kept me engaged the entire time. I don’t remember spending much time in those places in Breath of the Wild but the questlines for each area here are much longer and worthwhile.
In general, the story this time around is much deeper. They definitely put a lot of thought and effort into this game and it shows. Even side quests and side adventures had more meat to them. The rewards may not have been great, but I found myself completing quests just to see how they ended. That is how open world games should always approach side quests. I never once felt like I was wasting my time. Granted I didn’t do all of the quests, but I did do all of the ones that I found. That alone was a pretty hefty amount.
In Tears of the Kingdom, Hyrule offers an abundance to explore. However, Hyrule isn’t the only thing on offer. Even though Hyrule would’ve been more than enough on its own, Nintendo also offers two new areas to explore. Those areas are the Depths and the Sky. Now, thanks to the trailers we knew about the sky islands, but Nintendo kept the entire Depths a secret. The Depths exist under Hyrule and the map is just as big as Hyrule down there. I personally didn’t even explore it all after investing over 130 hours into this game.
With all there is to explore, of course I took my time getting to the end. There’s a lot to do, but I decided that I would at least get all the shrines before deciding to beat the game. There are plenty of other worthwhile activities to find in Hyrule and beyond, but alas my job and other games were calling my name.
Ancient Hyrule and the Zonai
Tears of the Kingdom fills its world with lore beautifully. It arguably does this too well since most of the happenings in Breath of the Wild seem to be gone. However, I feel like Nintendo intended this game to be enjoyable for newcomers and returning players alike. On that note, I believe they do a great job making this sequel feel new. There are a few call backs to Breath of the Wild that will be appreciated by those who have played that title, but Tears of the Kingdom doesn’t rely on your knowledge of its predecessor.
Instead, Tears of the Kingdom gives players a brand new set of lore and history to explore. That history is the one of the Zonai and Hyrule’s beginning. Granted, it is more complicated than that, but I do not want to spoil anything. The game does a fantastic job presenting the player with enough information to keep them invested in what’s to come. I don’t think I have been this invested or immersed in a game in quite a long time.
Hyrule is full of stories to explore, flashbacks to unlock and a wealth of riches waiting to be plundered. On top of that, everything there is to do has a purpose whether it is shrines giving you a Light of Blessing or monsters dropping parts you can fuse to your weapons. No matter what you do and how you choose to do it, Tears of the Kingdom is sure to keep you busy for hours.
