The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

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Sometimes a game comes out that redefines how we look at gaming as a whole. It’s a pretty big deal. You might even call it a landmark moment for the medium. Yes, Redfall was definitely pretty memorable, but for all the wrong reasons. And a little company called Nintendo was kind enough to release a new Zelda game. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, a pretty solid experience, as it turns out, so if you can stop hunting vampires for a few minutes, you might want to check it out.

The Kingdom of Hyrule has been through a lot, but thanks to smart leadership under Princess Zelda and legendary swordsman Link, things are finally looking up. When our heroes explore a mysterious cave underneath Hyrule Castle, though, everything gets a little sidetracked. An ancient evil is awakened, Link is quite literally disarmed and ancient sky ruins arise. With the help of the remnants of the long-forgotten race responsible for the ruins, Link’s off to work saving Zelda and Hyrule once again.

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Breath of the Wild was a story about making your way in a barren world using what limited, expendable resources were available to you. Tears of the Kingdom, meanwhile, goes in the opposite direction. There’s stuff all over the place now, and rather than scrabbling and making do, your purpose is to rebuild and create something new as you proceed through your adventure. Over and over, again and again.

You’ll achieve this using the new set of abilities associated with the new arm that replaces the one Link lost. Chief among these is Ultrahand, a dual-purpose tool that can both pick up objects and stick them together. You’re able to construct vehicles, buildings and more with liberal application of Ultrahand, and much of Tears of the Kingdom revolves around creative solutions to problems. Planes, trains and automobiles are all great ways to get where you need to go, and on the combat front you can even produce little customizable monster-hunting drones. The variety on offer is staggering.

On a smaller scale, you can also Fuse handheld items with pretty much anything to create new weapons, shields and arrows, enhancing their power and sometimes adding unique qualities.  A sword with a rock on the end is effectively a hammer, while a stick with a laser-emitting device makes a sort of lightsaber. Try sticking a cannon to a shield sometime. It’s a blast, literally.

Along with these, Link can also Ascend through ceilings, allowing easy access to great heights. Combining this with some Ultrahand-enabled platforming can yield interesting results, allowing the player to skip obstacles that might have stopped them in their tracks otherwise. Finally, it’s possible to Rewind objects in time to a variety of ends. The obvious use for this is to futz about with machines, but some experimentation can lead to a quick way up to the sky for some aerial exploration, just as one example.

Oh, yeah, the sky. Tears of the Kingdom builds on Breath of the Wild’s already-huge map by adding in a little verticality. It’s no secret that Link can go airborne now, climbing to great heights to explore floating ruins, but there’s also an entire underground map to explore as well. The Depths are home to some of Tears’ best moments. They’re dark and require extra effort to navigate, the enemies are more powerful and can temporarily drain Link’s maximum hearts…they’re a great answer to complaints that Breath of the Wild got a little too easy.

Breath of the Wild veterans won’t be surprised to hear that a world this big is brimming with things to do. You’ve got your towers, your shrines, your Korok seed collection, all of the fan favorites from the original game return. In many cases they’ve been spiced up with Tears’ new mechanics; the shrines, in particular, benefit from actually requiring a little thought here and there.

There’s also more of a nod to the classic games’ dungeons. While Breath of the Wild had the giant mechanical Beasts that served as dungeons, Tears of the Kingdom’s take on the idea is more coherent and satisfying. Further, there’s a unique take on expanding Link’s arsenal of abilities after completing them, but we’ll avoid getting into that kind of spoiler territory. On top of all that, you’ve still got cooking, elixir-brewing, horse-taming, various ways to use Ultrahand to do these in more hilarious or creative ways…there’s a lot of game here.

We’ve got a unique set of concepts and plenty of great ways to explore them, in other words. How does it all look? Does the presentation tie everything together? Shockingly, given the Switch’s status as the elder statesman of modern hardware, it does! You’re not getting sick 4K 120FPS action off a tablet from 2017, of course, but Tears of the Kingdom’s stylized look is just as fresh as Breath of the Wild still is.

Special mention goes to the impressive design of the open-world such that you’ve essentially got two and a half full games’ worth of content layered on one another without requiring regular loading screens. Combine this with a sublime soundtrack and superb audio design that helps bring Nintendo’s fantasy world to life like never before. It’s witchcraft, surely.

It’d be easy to continue expounding at great length about this game’s superlative quality, but at Popzara we try to avoid retreading the same ground. That’s particularly true when said ground’s been tread so much we’re reaching bedrock, and a whole lot of words have been written, spoken and sung about the wonders of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Bottom line: it’s a great game. No doubt legendary for some. Seldom has a game been so familiar, yet so groundbreaking and new at the same time. Switch owners everywhere should reach for the stars, by any means necessary.