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Warning: this review contains spoilers for the first few hours of Tears of the Kingdom.

The first, most notable thing about Tears of the Kingdom is that it is a direct sequel to Breath of the Wild. In the history of the Zelda franchise, which now includes twenty mainline titles, there was only one time when the very next project for the developers was a direct sequel: Majora’s Mask, after Ocarina of Time. It’s easy to make the connection here between Ocarina and BotW—both games were extremely critically acclaimed, massively popular, groundbreaking titles that shaped the landscape of games for years to come—and the decision to make a direct sequel was, in part, in order to capitalize on those successes.

But where the development cycles for Ocarina and BotW mirror each other—both took five years—their sequels differ. Majora’s Mask was rushed out, releasing less than a year and a half after its predecessor, while ToTK has taken the last six years to be completed. And it shows. Tears of the Kingdom manages to not only meet and exceed the expectations set by Breath of the Wild, keeping and expanding on every good feature, but absolutely, explosively surpass it, fixing nearly every issue and adding a plethora of new elements that expand and enhance the experience far beyond even my most hopeful predictions.

I’ve now had four weeks to play the game, and I can say confidently that the perfect scores awarded by every gaming outlet aren’t misplaced or even exaggerated. Tears of the Kingdom is undoubtedly one of the best games I have ever played, a masterpiece of modern game design, and a preeminent model for what a video game is capable of accomplishing, both technologically and artistically.

 

Part 1: Features that were retained and improved

Probably the biggest overarching aspect of Breath of the Wild that made it special was the exploration. “Open-world” means something very different now than it did before that game, largely because BotW redefined the scale that an open-world game could exist on while still having interesting things in every corner of the map.

There’s an incredible moment at the start of BotW, where you step out from the shrine of resurrection, the title theme plays, and your view zooms out, revealing the gorgeous landscape in front of you, and giving you your first sense of just how much there is to explore. This moment was truly magical in 2017, and it has its own analog at the very beginning of TotK, a moment that’s beautiful in its own right. But there’s a different moment that I think more closely replicates the feeling I got the first time I played BotW: the moment when you first enter The Depths. I knew TotK would use the same surface map as BotW, and I knew there was a whole new strata of sky islands to explore, but I never expected that there would be a third, underground layer, just as expansive as Hyrule itself. That moment of revelation surprised and impressed me all over again.

The transition from realizing the scope of the game into setting out to explore it further is also extremely smooth. Each reveal of a new element in the world points to the existence of an entire category of discoverables that spread out over the enormous map. In other words, stumbling upon your first cave implies that there might be many more caves—and the game more than delivers on that promise: dozens of caves, dozens of wells, dozens of pieces of armor, dozens of plants and animals, hundreds of korok puzzles, and so many more features that, even though they fall into the same category, still differ plenty enough to keep them interesting. These features constitute probably the core gameplay experience of TotK, and they make wandering aimlessly just as rewarding as going somewhere with specific intent. Everywhere you look, there is something you haven’t seen or a new version of something you have seen.

Of course, all of this was true to a certain extent in BotW, but TotK manages to do it again, by expanding the map to more than twice its original size, and revamping the original map to stay interesting. Even if you saw everything there was to see in BotW, all of it has been heavily altered in TotK, such that the thrill of exploring the brand new domains of the sky and The Depths is easily matched by the thrill of finding out what has happened to your favorite people and places from the previous game, the most familiar of which have often changed the most.

Part of what makes this exploration so enjoyable, though, is an amazing atmosphere that permeates the game, starting with the music. One of the biggest complaints people had about BotW was that the music was far too sparse, too minimalistic, and therefore unmemorable. What this complaint forgets is that the premise of BotW directly informs this music choice. Sure, it was experimental at the time, but it made complete sense in a game where Link is the main character and the landscape is his closest companion. Breath of the Wild is a lonely, somber game that takes place in a damaged world, and if some epic, sweeping theme played during every second that you run across a grassy field or hike through frozen tundra, it would feel disturbingly incongruous. Instead, BotW saved its best themes for the places where people are still gathered: the towns. As a result, those places feel like a refuge, places of surviving life and community in a world that desperately needs healing.

In Tears, a few years have passed, this healing has begun to take place, and you can tell because the atmosphere is completely different. Construction projects have begun all over Hyrule, teams of Hylians are out together fighting monsters, and people are investigating the Zonai ruins, trying to understand the Upheaval. There are new gardens, new outposts, an official Hyrule newspaper, and even a recently-constructed school for children. This new age of rebuilding, of community, and of healing in Hyrule is centrally represented in Lookout Landing, which functions as a hub for most of the main story beats, and eventually serves as a gathering point for all the different races of Hyrule to join together.

It’s difficult to describe just how well this hopeful atmosphere—which is captured perfectly in the lookout landing theme—bolsters the explorative gameplay loop in Tears of the Kingdom. Instead of feeling like a lone, confused hero with an almost insurmountable responsibility to solve the issues of Hyrule, save Zelda, and defeat Ganon, you instead feel like part of a burgeoning community of resilient people working together to solve many important issues concurrently.

In BotW, immersion was almost paralyzing, because you were constantly torn between the desire to go defeat Ganon right now, and the sense that you weren’t near ready enough to do so. Consequently, even the most altruistic of sidequests ultimately felt like distractions from your main objective, loosely justified by the idea that they were somehow preparing you for whenever you decided to finally complete it. This tension was deliberate, I think, and aligned with the aesthetics of BotW overall.

But in Tears, it’s fairly clear that rebuilding Hyrule has been Zelda’s top priority for the last few years, and taking up that project in her absence feels equally as important as discovering what has happened to her, especially once you discover the answer to that question. Defeating Ganondorf is important still, but the urgency is lower, and the problems in the various domains feel considerably more immediate by comparison. It’s a bit less about you, and a bit more about everyone else—and that feels good.

I mentioned earlier that BotW redefined what it means to be an open world game, and the way that TotK adapts and improves this open-world-ness is what really ties the entire experience together. It’s obvious, once you start noticing it, that the developers took great pains to ensure that any route is a viable one. You can go in any direction you choose, complete any set of tasks in essentially any order, and the game encourages and rewards you for doing so. The most guided direction the game ever offers you are gentle suggestions in the direction of something of primary importance, like Lookout Landing or the regional phenomena, but you’re still allowed to ignore them, if you want.

In fact, the best evidence for the game allowing total flexibility is the current any% speedrun, where the main objective is completed in under an hour. Heidi and I have been joking that this approach is “textually inaccurate,” as in, the game sort of intends for you to complete the main regional quests first. But the beauty of these games—both BotW and TotK, is that this isn’t really true. The story might lose some substance as a result of skipping the majority of the middle stuff, but as far as the game itself is concerned, this is a perfectly viable way to finish out the story. It might be more difficult, but nothing outright stops you from completing the game this way.

Some people will play for two hundred hours, collect every piece of armor, and defeat the final boss using the best gear available, while others will hoof it straight to Hyrule Castle in their underwear and fight that same boss with a single spear they found along the way. Either way, they’re going to have a great time doing it.

 

To be continued in part two…

Photo credit: me, using the in-game camera function

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