The Legend Of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom (2023)
The Legend Of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom, which is the sequel to 2017’s Breath Of The Wild is so vast and big, that I still feel that I barely scratched the surface of the game, even after completing it. Before getting into the actual game, I do need to mention how special this series is to me. In 2017 I was newly married, and on March 3rd 2017 the Nintendo Switch and Zelda: Breath Of The Wild launched. My wife and I adored that game and spent many nights over the next month or two staying up and playing the game together until like 3 or 4am in the morning. It’s a memory that I’ll always cherish and love forever.
We both waited for years for the news of the next Zelda game, and it just felt like it kept dragging on and on for what should have been a simple sequel. Alas it took six years for the game to come out. Mostly due to the ideas starting out as DLC and wound up being fleshed out into it’s own sequel. I believe they made the right call as the new powers introduced really change the way the game is played, for better or worse depending on your play style. I first noticed this once after the first couple of days with the game, as it places a much bigger emphases with attacking a issue with powers. The combat is nearly an afterthought in the sequel, since I think they already had the combat solidified pretty well. Instead the vast new powers lend itself to the exploration and tackling combat encounters in different ways.
This is most likely also due to seeing Speedrunners and people break open the potential of the game with Breath Of The Wild in online videos. Watching someone use the time manipulation and momentum really just made coast to coast traversal merely a simple 15 second task. But with Tears Of The Kingdom, all those powers are removed and replaced with others, which while still cool, still hindered my initial enjoyment of the game. Learning to not rely on those classic powers and instead craft my own solutions took much more guess work, trial and error and even just time to solve a somewhat simple problem.
But as that replacement of powers started to click, I really started to try and think outside the box for most solutions. Sure it took much longer, but ultimately it was more satisfying building a flying glider, or a rocket propelled car instead of just throwing a bomb. And that is really what I think the heart of the game is. Looking at a problem, and coming up with several different solutions to solve a single problem. One of my favorite moments streaming the game was when I would enter a shrine and solve the puzzle and then ask chat how they solved it, and there was usually several different answers. It’s the creativity that makes this game thrive and become something very special and unique.
The verticality of the game is also something that really needs to be mentioned. The sheer amount of space to travel in this game is nuts. Not only do you have the entire landmass of Hyrule to traverse once again, just like in Breath Of The Wild. It also includes an underground cavern system called “The Depths", that is just as big, with its own maze-like structure, enemies, weapons and collectible waypoints called “Light Roots”. Plaguing The Depths is abject darkness, only to be dispelled by activating the Light Roots or tossing Brightbloom Seeds and letting them illuminate a small section
The Sky is equally as vast, but in a very different way. As the sky islands are much smaller sections of ground lifted up in the sky, but broken up and spaced so far apart most of it is just empty sky that needs to be glided to or traveled across with a created vehicle. I did enjoy trying to find different ways of tackling the empty space with vehicles, but one disappointment I had was the battery system of not being able to just infinitely fly a glider plane as long as I wanted. I understand the reasoning behind the limitation, it was to break the game in a way the developers really wouldn’t have wanted it to be broken open. But the lack of having some simple way to go from one large sky island to an entire new section really hindered part of my enjoyment.
Mostly due to the fact that instead of Fast Traveling everywhere, I would have rather hopped on a car or plane and enjoyed the journey and stopped along the way from point A to point B and explored at the drop of a hat. But instead the game severely limits the time your vehicle can be used by the implementation of a battery system. It’s not very well explained and even worse coming back to the game over a year later to try and pick it back up again for streaming. There is a way to use some collectable Zonai material to upgrade Link’s battery capacity, allowing for vehicles and other Zonai equipment to have a longer lasting effect. All great and cool in theory and even execution, it just is another mechanic that can be easily forgotten about unless you really dig deeper into the game.
The collectable Zonai equipment scattered throughout the land and even the bubblegum like dispensing machines are a great addition and really helped craft new ideas with the random assortment of stuff littered that populated the areas I came across. I could always fashion something together fairly simply, but having it work the way I intended it to, was something entirely different. It’s a great tool to teach younger kids about engineering and physics in a way I wish was possible when I was a kid. I would have loved to have a game like this, as an open sandbox to say “Play around in this work with these objects, and see what crazy stuff you can come up with”. I remember when the game first came out, there was a website dedicated just to showing off the materials on how to build certain items.
This would have been so much more useful to me if I didn’t totally forget/couldn’t even find to begin with one of the forgotten powers, the AutoBuild power. Being able to build a machine/vehicle and then just pop open a menu and say “yes, build that car or airplane again” and have it just auto build it right in front of me using materials I already have in my inventory would have been perfect. And it is… I just didn’t come across it until around halfway through my playthrough. I spent so much time early on in the game just running around Hyrule doing side quests that I’d come across, or shrines or Korok seeds that I just didn’t do the main story and didn’t get to have the majority of my powers activated until 25 hours into the game. It really is a double edged sword sometimes with this type of game. The freedom is nearly unfathomable, but also sets you up to miss a ton of stuff if you go off the beaten path the developers want.
One thing I’m still going back and forth on is the story itself… I’m a big fan/advocate of story in Video Games. I love stories and it’s the main reason why I play bigger games, I want to be told a story and enjoy it. With Breath Of The Wild, I really did enjoy the adventure the developers came up with. Seeing Link locked away for two hundred years and save Hyrule from Calamity Ganon. It was even expanded upon in the Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity game that came out in 2020. It did take me a little bit to become used to the voice of Zelda, as it just sounded nothing like what I would have pictured, mostly because it does sound much older than what Zelda appears to be, also the British accent through me for a loop too.
The characters in Breath Of The Wild also really did seem to be more fleshed out and given more backstory that helped me grow to love them fairly easily and quickly. With Tears Of The Kingdom, these “Champions” as they were called were almost all gone and replaced with Sages who are younger kid characters that I really disliked for the most part. Especially Yunobo the Goron, mostly the slang term “Goro” he uses which doesn’t seem to fit well in with the dialog. Most of the new Sage’s powers are useful for combat and not traversal, and even then it takes a lot of time and planning to get the Sage’s powers to be ultimately helpful. They run around and constantly are running in the opposite direction from where you want them too. Most of the time when I needed to use a Sage’s power, I spent more time chasing them down than actually fighting. I ended up giving up on them in most combat encounters because it was just easier to do it myself.
Since we are on the subject of story, the big bad for the game, “The Demon King” Ganondorf is easily the most terrifying and hardcore awesome bad guy in all the Zelda games. His character design is top notch and every time he showed up on screen I just wanted to pay attention to everything he had to say. Dripping with great design, he commands a very powerful presence on screen and in the game’s world. He is a terror, even if he is a mummified corpse for most of the game. Surrounded by another new mechanic in the game, Gloom, which affects Link’s health in a very specific way.
The Gloom when touching Link starts to damage his heart containers and eventually breaks them when he is in contact with it for over a second or two. The only way that Link can fix his broken heart containers is by using a special food or going to the depths and staying under a Light Root for a few moments to mend the heart containers. Even eating super powerful food will not fix Link’s heart containers broken by Gloom. It’s an interesting and cool mechanic that really ratcheted up the intensity of the final boss fight.
And here is just a [SPOILER WARNING] for those of you who don’t want to be spoiled for the end game.
The final section of the game was such an interesting moment in gaming for me. As I ended up holding off the end part for another stream because I didn’t want to rush through it, I ended up finishing the game (which was July’s Game Of The Month) on the final day of July. It worked out perfectly and even though I did end up having to do a major fight over again because I accidentally loaded a wrong save, I ended up learning a few things about the combat and really enjoyed it. So that final Ganondorf fight was as intense as nearly anything I’ve ever encountered. I’m really surprised with the level of difficulty the game presented, especially for a Nintendo and Zelda game. Nintendo isn’t known for difficult games, especially with their top franchises. I famously lambasted the Mario games for how they seem to cater to very young audiences and present no perceivable difficulty.
Ganondorf and even some of the later game fights and sections really made me rely on skills built up over the game, and even if you are quick enough to just refill your health over and over again, you still have to be good enough with the much harder enemies. Fighting Ganondorf and having the clutch final moment of the stream, where I flurry rushed, and then Ganondorf countered mine with his own flurry rush and then I countered his counter was incredible. All with a single heart container, thanks to Gloom breaking my other 16 heart containers. It was a boss fight I’ll never forget.
I don’t know if I would classify the final Dragon fight to really be a boss battle. It’s not really difficult because Zelda is a dragon and is constantly flying around and catching Link so I couldn’t die and the large scope of the battle just takes some time to maneuver around. But the whole battle itself ramps up the “cool” factor to unprecedented levels. I can’t think of many other rad boss fights than Tears Of The Kingdom’s Dragon Boss Battle. And the ending cutscene as Zelda is transformed back into her human form and is falling down towards the ground and Link has to sky dive and save is really beautiful. I won’t like I did actually get a tad emotional from that.
Which is why I love stories in Video Games! A video game story can be so well done that one about an elf-like boy who can fight an evil dragon and save a princess can still get the ol’ waterworks going sometimes. While most characters are goofy in some form, exaggerated features or speech patterns and come off as just childish. There are some that can really tug at your heartstrings as well, if you give into the suspension of disbelief.
When it comes down to it, this game deserves the hype it had before it launched. Sadly, I think a lot of people got put off by it keeping the main Hyrule landmass and didn’t explore enough to really give it the fair try it deserved. Because it requires a bit of digging deeper to really uncover the special nature of the game. Sure on the surface it’s basically Breath Of The Wild, but that isn’t a bad thing at all. In-fact, that’s exactly what it should be. Everyone seems to have forgotten how bored we all were with the 3D Zelda formula that started with Ocarina Of Time in 1998 and ended with Skyward Sword in 2011. It wasn’t till 2017’s Breath Of The Wild that we got a break from the formula. And having a true sequel where Link and Zelda stay the same characters in the same in-game universe is a huge addition. It does what a good sequel should do, expand.
Maybe some of the characters didn’t have the same impact or enjoyment, maybe I had a harder time giving up those original powers for new ones that didn’t initially seem worth it. But at the end of the day, Tears Of The Kingdom is a phenomenal game that deserves much more recognition than it did. 2023 was touted as “one of the best years in gaming” and I fully disagree with that. I played most of the games that came out and I had a very hard time coming up with a top 10 list. There were a solid 5 games that actually were worth it and I went back and forth on my actual number one game.
I used to say that you can’t name a game “Game Of The Year” if you didn’t play through it all the way. It’s something that I picked up as I would spend hours and hours listening to podcasts at the end of the year and read off games in their Top 10 where half of them didn’t even finish or play the game. It frustrated me. And while I loved some games, I did pick Tears Of The Kingdom as my number 1 game of the year (you can read the full list here and also listen to the Podcast). I could tell that in the time I spent with the game, it was better than all the other’s I had played even without finishing the game. But now that I have, I can honestly say that The Legend Of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom is easily my Number 1 Game Of The Year for 2023! I can’t wait to come back to this game and finish the side quests, find and upgrade more armor and find all the shrines (maybe not the light roots or Korok seeds, those are just too much for not enough reward).
This is a special game that means a lot to me, and even though I didn’t get to play the ending with my wife, she is the one who suggested that I make it Game Of The Month, and stream it so she could watch when she was able to, since she is in bed by the time I start streaming at night. So a very special shout out to my wife for suggesting it and also being rad enough to let me play it without her. Because these games were great experiences we had together. I just hope that the next true 3D Zelda game not only matches how amazing this game was, but also surpasses it to become even better. We’ll be waiting quite a while, as I don’t think we’ll see a true real 3D Zelda (Not the top-down Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom later this year) will be in 2029. However if we do see one sooner than that I will be there with bells on (and maybe a Tingle suit).
