Warning: this review contains spoilers for the first few hours of Tears of the Kingdom.
Part 2: Features that were altered or fixed
One of the primary concerns voiced about Tears of the Kingdom in the months leading up to its release was that the map would be re-used—a fact that had been confirmed by the developers—so people were worried that the game would be uninteresting to explore. Personally, I doubted that the developers would have come up against that issue and either failed or neglected to find a solution for it, and it turns out that my trust was well placed, because the map has been expanded and refreshed plenty enough to renew that sense of wonder and discovery. This revamped version of the original Breath of the Wild map is better for many reasons, but one of the subtler ones I noticed is the way that the sky islands in TotK are what the sky islands in Skyward Sword wanted to be.
Skyward Sword was my first Zelda game, and one of the main complaints people have always had about it is that it felt too limited. The game is set on one larger sky island among many, but only a few of them actually have areas of interest. You descend through the clouds to the surface—but only through very specific openings—and the surface areas aren’t even connected to each other. I could say a lot about what makes Skyward Sword work well, and about what I loved about it, but it’s difficult to argue that it really delivers on its own premise in terms of setting. Tears of the Kingdom, though, does deliver on that premise, in a way that makes me confident that it was a goal the developers had in mind. When they made Skyward Sword, they didn’t have the technology necessary to really flesh out the idea of sky islands in the clouds and of diving down to the surface. But now, built on the success of BotW, they do have that technology. Skyward Sword was a formative game for me, and it is difficult to describe how satisfying it is to see the promise of what that game was trying to do, now fulfilled, twelve years later.
Like me, most people playing BotW and TotK grew up with previous Zelda games, and probably the most notable staple of those games that changed significantly in BotW is the dungeons. In some ways, dungeons were replaced with the shrines, but their most direct successor is the divine beasts, which many people were pretty disappointed with, myself included. Conceptually, they sound incredibly cool: enormous, mechanical animals, themed to their respective areas, and whose interiors serve as standalone dungeons. But something about their execution just didn’t quite work. The puzzles are hit or miss, the dungeons are over fairly quickly, and the boss fights leave a lot to be desired, especially because they are all so similar.
In Tears, though, the divine beasts have been replaced with proper dungeons, and they feel like a huge leap forward—retaining the aspects of older dungeons that appealed to people, while still embracing the freeform design philosophy of the new games. The puzzles are more interesting, the boss fights are totally unique, and the leadup quests for unlocking each dungeon add a layer of anticipation that makes the dungeon reveal that much more exciting. Comparing, for example, the sequence leading up to divine beast Vah Medoh with the sequence leading to the wind temple makes the former look even more lackluster than it already felt. Maybe these new dungeons don’t feel exactly like dungeons from classic Zelda titles, but I don’t think I would want them to. They fulfill all the important criteria while still slotting in nicely with the newer style, and I think that’s about the most you could reasonably ask for.
Another feature that improved a lot in TotK is the crafting and collectibles economy. In BotW, the consumable items you could collect felt like they were sometimes useful and sometimes obsolete. But everything is impressively well-purposed in TotK, mostly as a result of the new fusion mechanic. Literally every item can be used on a weapon or shot with an arrow, even if the added effect is only a bit of extra damage, and a surprising amount of items do have unique effects. Anything that gets outclassed by another item in functionality can still be sold for rupees, and anything that gets outclassed in selling price still has some function. Additionally, there is much more to spend money on—expensive armor upgrades and the customizable house by Tarrey Town are two that come to mind, with prices that mean you’re always working towards buying something worthwhile, rather than just stocking up on infinite bomb arrows like in BotW.
Of course, if you choose, you can use one of many discovered glitches to duplicate expensive items, thereby circumventing the gameplay loop of earning rupees, and ruining the game’s economy in the process. But that’s a topic for another piece.
In fact, there are plenty of other things that were disappointing in Breath of the Wild and have drastically improved in Tears of the Kingdom. The enemy variety, the weapon durability system, the quality of the side quests, even the storytelling, including the ending, which outclasses BotW’s ending in almost every conceivable way. But I can only discuss so many features in a single piece, even a two-parter.
Breath of the Wild had a huge impact on games for years after its release, and I have no doubt that Tears of the Kingdom will do the same. Like so many other Nintendo successes, these games took a concept that existed already—in this case, open world exploration—and did it right in a way that nobody had done before, thus becoming a blueprint for that genre.
What remains to be seen is specifically what aspects of Tears will be replicated by other developers in future games. Will they try to shoehorn some kind of freeform vehicle crafting system into every game that doesn’t need it, or will they take cues from combat mechanics or puzzle design? Personally, I’m hoping that they choose one thing at a time to learn from, because the way Tears of the Kingdom puts it all together is going to be pretty hard to match.
Photo credit: me, using the in-game camera function again
Phil Rienstra (they/he) (‘21) studied writing and music, and since graduating has developed a deep interest in labor rights. They currently work at a unionized Starbucks and volunteer with Starbucks Workers United. They’re an amateur chef, a perennial bandana wearer, and an Enneagram 4. He lives in St. Paul with his spouse, Heidi.
