Game review — Tears of the Kingdom understands what a sequel should be

I’ve spent 200 hours so far playing Nintendo’s Tears of the Kingdom. Here’s what I think of it.

Warning: Spoilers ahead for Tears of the Kingdom.

If you’re here to read whether or not Nintendo’s recent release, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, is a good game, I’ll tell you from the outset that this review is exactly what the title suggests: largely a soundboard of praise for what is undeniably a masterpiece of a game.

Why, then, should you bother reading this if you know this review is mostly a celebration of the game? Well, I think there’s merit in exploring the elements the game designers did really well and why these gems had such impact — and, of course, no game is perfect, so I’ll also be delving into what I think could have been improved.

Let’s start with some credit. Tears of the Kingdom was directed by Hidemaro Fujibayashi and produced by Eiji Aonuma; the designers were led by Mari Shirakawa, Naoki Mori, and Akihito Toda; and the art director was Satoru Takizawa; all six of whom worked in similar roles on TOTK’s predecessor, Breath of the Wild (BOTW). TOTK’s programming director was Takahiro Okuda, who worked on the AI navigation programmining in BOTW; and its composers were Manaka Kataoka, Maasa Miyoshi, Masato Ohashi, and Tsukasa Osui.

With so many key figures from BOTW coming over to work on TOTK and the game itself situated in the same world as its predecessor, it was no surprise that my first reaction to the game was one of nostalgia; from the first time you step into the controls of Link once again, deep under Hyrule Castle alongside Princess Zelda, the game felt like an old friend.

And yet, it feels different. While the developers themselves expressed that at many times during the development of the game they felt deja vu, and indeed many critiques have cited that TOTK feels like a glorified expansion pack of BOTW, I have to agree with producer Eiji Aonuma’s sentiments that even the existing elements of the game took a new shape because of the additions they’d created for TOTK. I think it’s a unique strength and a testament to the first game’s world-building that the sequel felt seamless — while also managing to surprise its players with new mechanics, characters, and a shift in the world’s status quo.

Moving further with the positives, I think the game developers made such exceptional choices when it came to creating and retaining; I like to think of each choice as roughly being one of three things in relation to BOTW: kept the same, same but different, and completely new. It’s the combination of these three categories that has created such a beautiful balance of familiar but exciting.

For example, the general topography of the original landscape of BOTW remains largely the same and it’s this continuity that allows you to immerse yourself back into the world so easily. They leverage this feeling of familiarity with the towers — they’re still there and you know innately that they have the same function of allowing you to unlock pieces of the map, but they look slightly different, you interact with them differently, and they’re situated in different places — making finding and activating them a slightly challenging, new experience.

Probably the biggest change of all is the addition of two new ‘levels’ of the world (the sky islands and the Depths) as well as explorable caves. These areas are entirely new aspects to TOTK that differentiate it as a whole new game; and the developers did a great job linking the them to encourage you to explore all of them. For example, you need brightbloom seeds to light your way in the Depths, but they can only be found in abundance in the caves; the three labyrinths now incorporate the sky, land, and Depths; and many of the shrines are hidden in caves, though you can locate them more easily by finding each one’s corresponding Lightroot in the Depths.

It’s this journey of reminding you of the best parts of BOTW, initiating that realisation that this is a new experience by showing you ‘same but different’ landmarks, then introducing you to whole new areas that builds and impresses the totality of the new game into your mind as its own entity. Or, if you’ve never played BOTW, TOTK is a treat of a rich open-world adventure that can stand on its own.

I could go on and on — and I will! To really highlight the parts of the game that I adored the most, I dedicated the first section of this review to those aspects alone.

What I enjoyed the most

The core game mechanics

Tears of the Kingdom features five completely new mechanics that enhance the gameplay for both new and old players of the franchise: Ascend, Recall, Ultrahand, Fuse and Autobuild.

Not only are they fun tools, but the developers seem to have gone to lengths to ensure that using these mechanics is integrated into core storylines and environmental features. For BOTW players, the new mechanics are mimics of the previous game’s, only better:

• Ascend allows you to access areas that would otherwise be impossible to reach or take forever to get to;
• Recall takes Stasis one stop further and not only stops time but rewinds an item’s trajectory — a fun tool when used to throw monsters’ projectiles back at them;
• Ultrahand builds on Magnesis by allowing players to grab things beyond just metal items — something I long becried to myself during the 600+ hours I spent on BOTW;
• Fuse opens up a world of possibilities by allowing you to fuse items with your weapons, creating fun new combos and extending the life of your weapon slightly; somewhat combatting a popular complaint about BOTW, which is that the fragility of the weapons was frustrating; and,
• Autobuild muffles some of my disgruntlement about having to rely so much on building Zonai contraptions (particularly in the sky islands where some areas are just SO fucking far away). I love that it includes both a recent history and a favourites section, giving you some leeway if you forget to add something to your favourites and want to quickly duplicate a recent creation.

They make particular good use of these mechanics in the shrines and in the world’s environment; in case of the former, the disallowment of your inventory Zonai devices in shrines forces you to utilise the new mechanics to solve the shrine’s challenge, and in the latter, you are often presented with environmental obstacles that at first seem like a dead end until you make Ascend and Recall second nature.

Another core mechanic I love is that you can attach items to your arrows. The effect is twofold for me — it does away with BOTW’s sometimes annoying need to go to stores for specific arrow types, and it opens up a myriad of fun arrow combinations that make complete sense. Of course attaching Keese wings (and other types of wings) to arrows would make them fly further, just like how attaching an eyeball to an arrow improves your aim. This also incentivises monster hunting and utilising monster parts; previously in BOTW, I would avoid monsters where I could because I didn’t want to waste my weapons’ durability and their drops didn’t benefit me much.

You can tell the developers dedicated a lot of time, thought and energy into finessing these mechanics. The inventiveness of these tools have enriched player creativity, which is one of my very favourite things about BOTW and TOTK — I’m always seeing crazy things online of things players have pulled off in-game, things I would never have thought of doing myself.

And what a fantastic achievement these mechanics are — because what is more important and impactful than the tools with which you must navigate the world? Take away your special gear, accumulated health and stamina, rupees, inventory items… and the mechanics are still there. Props to the developers, truly.

Visual effects

It would be hard for me to state just how breathtaking the visuals are in Tears of the Kingdom without including screenshots from the game. These screenshots below that I captured in-game will illustrate more effectively than any of my words what a beautiful game this is. The developers and designers really stepped it up.

And this is only a handful! I racked up 800 screenshots alone from my first playthrough of the game — the visuals are that captivating. Compared to BOTW, the visuals seem to have been rendered slightly differently, though I don’t have any training in that field to be able to describe it accurately; you’ll notice it in the look and feel though, if you go straight from BOTW to TOTK.

Visuals aside, the movements — everything from running, fighting and even panning the camera, seem more fluid, especially if you’re playing on an OLED like I am. I’ve also noticed the game handles rendering high-detail environments better, though I’m not sure if it’s because my machine is new or if it’s the way the game has been programmed — again, I’m not well-enough versed in the tech side of it to say. The Korok Forest was a particular example that I remember was janky in BOTW but much smoother in TOTK.

New enemies!

It was both a delight and horror to me that so many new monsters were added to the game. As I touched on earlier, I’m not a huge monster hunter, mainly because I get attached to my weapons and hate to see them break. I also would rather spend my time exploring the world and completing quests. However, the way the developers created new monsters made me keen to see what these new monsters looked like, what their attacks were, how to exploit their weaknesses, and what they dropped.

It was an extra bit of fun to use the new arrow-material mechanic and discover what combinations certain monsters were vulnerable to. Plus, the fact that the very materials I needed for this mechanic usually came from monsters incentivised me to hunt monsters where previously I may have done everything to avoid them.

On one note though: fuck Horriblins. Especially the Depths version of them. These guys are so annoying when you’re just trying to explore a cave or find somewhere to Ascend.

My favourite new monster has to be the Aerocuda because 1) their name is cool, 2) they only take one arrow to kill and 3) the eyeballs they drop are so handy when fused with arrows.

So many more hours’ worth of exploring

As I mentioned earlier, there are three ‘levels’ to TOTK: the sky, the land, and the dark underground known as the Depths. Since the land area itself hasn’t changed all that much (in fact, it’s expanded with the addition of the caves as explorable areas), the exploration potential on the terra-level stands up to BOTW. Add in the sky islands, where there are many shrines to be found, and the Depths, and there is so much to explore.

The Depths, particularly, is such a fun area to explore because it challenges your expectation of being able to see everything if you can find a high enough vantage point; unlike the above-ground landscape, you need the assistance of Brightbloom seeds to guide your way through the pitch darkness. It’s also so vast and once you understand that it’s basically a direct inversion of Hyrule’s above-ground topography, you can spend hours down there scoping it out.

Exploring is one of my favourite things to do in open-world games and BOTW really sharpened my love for it — so to see so much more in TOTK made me giddy. After finally defeating Ganondorf, I eagerly checked the % completion rate on the map and found that despite discovering the locations of all the shrines and lightroots, I was still only at 48%. Imagining how much more of the world of TOTK I have yet to explore is an exciting thought — and I wonder how long it will take me to reach 100%.

Fun new gear

I’m a fashion girlie at heart. I love putting Link in cute outfits — particularly the Royal Guard set, which I’m so glad to see they kept in TOTK. So I was very happy to see they made fun new additions to the armour sets available — including the lightning proof set you get from completing the storm quest in Faron.

While we’re here, I know this is the positives section of the review, but I will say that even though I loved the new sets, I do wish that they had changed the existing ones slightly. I understand the Zora armour had narrative significance, so I was okay with that one staying the same, but c’mon, we could have had some new standard cold weather-proof gear. Don’t the seamstresses at Rito make anything new?

Areas for improvement

I had to dig deep for some of these. The first one, though, was easy and that’s…

The story was kind of weak

When trying to analyse why I found the storyline so average, I tried to put myself in the shoes of someone who hadn’t played BOTW before. If I were that person, what would I say?

After thinking about it some more, I think the story itself isn’t flawed — it’s simple enough, a classic tale of a seemingly insurmountable villain who can eventually be defeated with a combination of training and teamwork. What lets it down is the holes it leaves wide open when it comes to BOTW’s version of events. It’s hard to marry the two narratives into a cohesive storyline without having to think too hard about it.

Where, for instance, are the Divine Beasts? I get that maybe it wasn’t important to the TOTK storyline what the citizens of Hyrule did to dispose of them, but they didn’t so much as allude to it in a throwaway comment from an NPC. Did they dismantle the Divine Beasts? If so, why? And if they did, where the fuck did they put all those pieces?

They also barely reference the Sheikah culture that was front and centre in BOTW; the emphasis instead is on the Zonai. Wrapping your head around the fact that the Zonai exist wouldn’t be so hard if you could figure out how the Sheikah slot into it — but they seem to have ignored their existence completely.

For a sequel that so beautifully builds on its predecessor in mechanics, visuals, and challenges, it’s confusing that it insists on retconning (or flat out ignoring) so many core narrative elements from BOTW. I get that the decision to do this was so that new players to the franchise didn’t feel like they had to do a whole bunch of research to catch up, but it would have been fun to encounter even a few Easter eggs that tied up these loose narrative ends.

Initially when I was writing the first draft of this review, I noted that I appreciated the deep dive into Ganondorf — ‘deep dive’ referring to the fact that we actually see Ganon in his ‘human’ form and see flashbacks of the way he moved through the world when he was a big presence of it. This, to me, directly contrasts Ganon’s presence as simply Calamity Ganon in BOTW; something that always left me wishing I could see more of Ganon in the game.

However, when I shared the first draft of this review with my brother, Mark, a prolific gamer and actual game designer, he pointed out that Ganondorf’s characterisation is actually not deep at all and he agreed with my consensus that the story is lacking. He commented that while Ganondorf is impressive as a spectacle, in terms of the narrative, he is weak for two reasons.

The first is that Ganondorf’s motives are pretty lame — or rather, he lacks motives completely. All we learn about him is that he wants to cast the world into darkness, but not why. They don’t unpack even in a flashback (a narrative device they rely so heavily on) why he wants to do this, other than the fact that he’s just evil. Longtime LoZ players will remember that Ganondorf in Ocarina of Time is seen as more of a legitimate villian because his motives for conquering Hyrule are to provide the Gerudo with a better place to live, but in the process he gets corrupted by his desire for power. This could have been the case in TOTK as we see the Gerudo following him into war, but they kind of just leave it there without deeper analysis of what was incentivising either party. (Mark did also say: At the same time I’m just like, it’s Nintendo, I think people were probably expecting a tiny bit too much in having a more fleshed out villain).

The second reason he cites for Ganondorf and the narrative being weak is that the way BOTW influenced TOTK’s story presentation limited its ability to tell a story in a way that better served the narrative of TOTK. Both games present their narratives through flashbacks. For BOTW, this works really well because of the context of the game; Link has woken up with no memory of who he is or what he is supposed to do, and he has to put together these memories in order to get a picture of his purpose. This melds well with the open world format; the narrative unfolds quite naturally as Link himself explores the world. It’s also why Calamity Ganon is arguably a more impactful villain than Ganondorf; you can see his presence at the centre of the map from almost any vantage point in the world, and as you piece together memories, it builds up the stakes of your confrontation with him, and ensures that he is an ever-present threat looming over you throughout the whole game.

TOTK attempts to tell a more direct narrative and it starts out strong with the introduction of Ganondorf, but from there it falters. The delivery of important narrative elements through the flashbacks doesn’t work as well because the introduction of the game already showed us that he is a big threat, but now we have to find these memories that just reiterate that point — so when you take away that, all the memories do is just inform us of what Zelda did in the past, and the location of the Master Sword. Because we see these memories (which were easier to find than in BOTW, which I think takes away from the mystique of the game), the present day narrative of Link chasing leads by solving issues and defeating bosses in the different regions to find Zelda feels really out of place and unmotivating, because you know you’ll likely not find Zelda by doing this, so all you think about when doing these main quests is, “Ooh, I get another Sage”. While you can argue that the Divine Beasts had a similar effect on the narrative, BOTW had the advantage that it was the first game in the series; discovering them benefitted the player because simultaneously they would be exploring the new regions for the first time.

Finally, Mark argued that the strong introduction of TOTK just makes the whole objective to find Zelda being such a large focus of the game even weirder. You get your ass handed to you by Ganondorf at the start of the game, but for most of the game after that, he is nowhere to be found and you spend your time faffing about Hyrule solving issues that are loosely related to him.

If the game developers wanted him to feel more like an engaging antagonist, Mark thinks he should have had more of a presence in the present day narrative; aside from the start of the game, Link has no real relationship with Ganondorf. All we see of him is his presence in the flashbacks and the only impact is you think, “This dude was scary”. It’s like reading a WW2 history book on Hitler — yes, he was a scary dude, but I don’t fear him in the same way people did in WW2. Had he done more during the events in the present, Ganondorf would’ve been a more compelling villian that would have been satisfying to defeat. As it stands, for me, narratively he is underwhelming and defeating him didn’t really feel that good.

I have to say — I agree with my brother’s points, though that’s not to say that the game itself is weak. I think the fact that TOTK relied so much on BOTW’s story basis while insisting on creating shallow villains like Ganondorf hindered its narrative, though this is a common trap for sequels. I know we aren’t at the summary yet but in the face of such a complex weakness, I think it’s important to consider: with so many additions that built on the strengths of BOTW and made it, technically and aesthetically, a better game, doesn’t TOTK’s conformity (at least in narrative) to a sequel stereotype bolster the argument that it is a successful sequel?

I miss the BOTW Champions

One of my favourite parts of BOTW was being able to use the powers of the Champions once you completed their associated quest line and Divine Beast/boss fight. I didn’t know that I would grow to miss their subtle presence on the left-hand side of the screen, in the form of coloured tokens of their Divine Beasts.

In TOTK, you get help from a whole new set of Champions — most of whom, if you played BOTW, you’ve already met! (This was another confusing element of the narrative to reconcile — so the Champions still exist, which means that they lived through the events of the past game… but we aren’t going to acknowledge those happened. How does that work? But I digress).

Technically, the “Champions” are Sages, which is a nice incorporation of the recurring figures in the LoZ series; the five you get are are Teba (who helped you with Vah Medoh in BOTW)’s child Tulin, Gerudo Chief Riju, Prince Sidon, Yunobo and Mineru. When the initial novelty of recognising four of them fades, you’ll find that they aren’t as useful as the BOTW’s Champions — at least, that’s my opinion. While I definitely leaned on Tulin a lot to help me get further in my exploration of the map, I barely used the others. However, if you’re more combat-inclined or enjoy using Mineru’s Construct to explore from a slightly higher vantage point, you might find you use more of them than just Tulin.

It’s also quite annoying having a full posse with you; once you unlock all the Sages, they just… follow you almost wherever you go. I know you can manually disable this feature but I do miss the subtlety of being able to call on the heroes’ powers without being physically reminded that they’re there at all times.

It seems that they chose these Sage powers with the mind of encouraging players to engage in more combat, but I found it was actually more of a hindrance trying to utilise these Sages’ powers than it was in BOTW. Rather than having a dedicated key to press and hold to activate, you have to find the Sage (who is often standing right near another one) in the throes of battle and press ‘a’ to activate; this is often annoying, as ‘a’ can also activate a number of other things, like another Sage’s ability you weren’t intending to use or picking up something from the ground that you don’t need. Also, by the time you locate and activate the Sage, you’ve probably already been hit by a monster or two.

More sky islands, please

When I was considering the new levels of the game, I felt that while the land and the Depths were both quite expansive, the sky islands were quite sparse. Aside from the main island you start the game on, the other islands are few and far apart, and feature little aside from sky crystal shrine quests, Flux Construct enemies, and the Wind and Water Temples.

I would have loved to see another significant area in the sky islands — maybe a town, complete with a store and Goddess statue. I know it doesn’t fit in well with the Zonai narrative, but Fronk’s wife Mei ended up in the sky islands — it isn’t so far fetched to believe that a Hylian or two could make it up there and set up camp. Maybe a few of the researchers could find a way up there and build a makeshift town? Perhaps we’ll see something like that in the inevitable DLC.

Conclusion

I’m conscious that all throughout this review, I reference BOTW generously. It has to do with a few things: 1) BOTW brought a refreshing take to the Legend of Zelda franchise: an open world that perfectly balanced aesthetics with adventure, 2) the world BOTW created is one I am attached to and spent many hours in, and 3) TOTK set itself up as a direct sequel to BOTW, so there were bound to be comparisons.

In saying that, I think the things that made BOTW so compelling can be said of TOTK — while it does rely on the existing world of BOTW as a base, it is its own new world, with new levels and mechanics. The new features retain the balance of aesthetics and adventure, though with its own distinct brand — whenever I see gameplay videos online, I can pick several unique tokens that mark it as TOTK content, such as Ultrahand creations. With all its new features too, I’ve already spent more time in it at the 50% mark than I did in BOTW, so it’s likely I will be just as attached to this game.

And finally, the fact that Tears of the Kingdom was brave enough to create a whole new narrative (storyline hiccups be damned) in a familiar environment that the developers so diligently improved set itself up for success in achieving what it sought out to do: to be a sequel to Breath of the Wild that was worthy of being considered as a masterpiece in its own right.