| Platform | OVERALL |
|---|---|
| Nintendo Switch | 9.80 |
| Overall | 9.80 |
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It’s been a bumpy road lately with my favorite franchise ever, both Skyward Sword and Breath of the Wild rank last on my 3D Zelda lists. BOTW drastically changed the series forever and while I enjoyed it tremendously, to the tune of 200 hours of play, I felt it was still an idea that needed more fleshing out. Tears of the Kingdom is everything BOTW wished it was. With breathtaking innovation and mechanics that blow my mind, Tears of the Kingdom is absolute marvel of game design and gave me all the feels I once had for Zelda. I can safely say Zelda is back on top. In a bold choice, that most any other developer would get endless criticism for, TOTK takes the world map of BOTW and simply uses it again. It uses the same art, the same models, a lot of the same songs, the exact same controls; not even Majora’s Mask felt as direct a sequel as this game does. It should feel redundant, and yet it mostly does not. Nintendo pretty much realized exactly what I was thinking, BOTW was a great first draft, but we can make it better. What they birthed is the most mechanically interesting open world game I have ever played. They did this by giving the players more powers, more freedom than I could have even imagined and overloading the world with great content. The powers Link gets in this game would basically break nearly any other game. Just ascend alone, being able to go through any ceiling and pop out on the other end no matter how high it is, that would break pretty much every game. That’s the least impressive power you get in this game. You can also rewind basically any moveable item as every movement is recorded. Oops I dropped cart down a mountain, recall it and watch it rewind and come right back to where it started moving. Then there is ultra hand which turns Zelda into a vehicle building game that while not as complex as Minecraft, works perfectly in this world which has a full adventure with puzzles and dungeons, something Minecraft totally lacks. All these systems work perfectly, alone and together. Want to get high up, well you can grab any platform with the hand, hold it over your head for a while, drop it, rewind it so it hovers over your head and then ascend through that platform. Anything you imagine you can do with these powers actually does work; also glitch free. I don’t understand how any one of these systems doesn’t come with a multitude of game breaking bugs, but all of them work together in harmony without any hitch in sight, it’s a miracle of game design. BOTW to me had a downward curve of player interaction to the amount of time you played. That game starts off very interesting as it’s a part survival game with all these incredible physics and gameplay systems working together. Those beginning hours were compelling while learning the ways to keep Link warm or keep cool. Gaining better armor, getting better meals, getting more health and stamina so you can explore harsher parts of the world. That was all exciting until you reached a decent level where you had all the armors that negate status effects, high enough attack and defense to get through most enemies easily. All of a sudden all those survival elements didn’t matter anymore, the game got easier, more simple and at that point I began to lose interest. TOTK is the opposite, it’s a game where player interaction grows as the game goes on. You start off with limited powers, you can build some rudimentary devices but most of the best devices are out of reach. As you play Link grows not just in power to defeat enemies but in abilities that grant more and more gameplay freedom. By the end I felt like a god; I could summon an army of laser drones to wipe out enemy bases. I could soar through the sky in my own flying contraption. I had every kind of damage combination fused to my swords and shields. My interaction with the world is limited only by my imagination. That push to keep seeing what else is there? How far can I push this power? That kept me engaged for over 200 hours. Of course a game should give the player reasons to use these abilities, and this game does so in many different ways. From something as basic as helping deliver a korok to his friend or helping a guy hold up a sign, to navigating the sky islands with nothing but your own engineering to get around, it’s a game full of opportunities to use the tools given to you. The key part of the ultra hand ability are these zonai devices which are found in sort of gum ball machines throughout the world, each of these devices can greatly aid in the creation of wild contraptions. There is the very useful fan which can allow the wing device to fly, or a boat to have a motor. There are rockets which can be attached to anything and send that object soaring in whatever direction wanted. Wheels for cars, springs, auto targeting drones and many devices that have an attack which can make any vehicle into a death mobile. I was still finding new devices many many hours in, the game almost always has a shrine or quest that teaches you the basics for the item before leaving the player to then create anything they desire. It might be more fun when the plan you had explodes in your face Wile E Coyote style than when it actually works. I cannot tell you how many times I burst out laughing at my beautiful invention catching fire and burning me alive in a death trap. That moment when you put vehicle together and it’s time to see if it actually functions is so exciting, even if the results are usually what not what you would expect. Maybe one side weighed too much, maybe a rocket was facing the wrong direction, maybe it just topples over and spins in endless circles; keep trying, eventually something will work and you will feel like a genius. Or you can look online and see what others are creating and think “yeah I’m no engineer, I’ll just copy their build”, there is no shame in that. I’ve incorporated many vehicles I saw online into my play. Still every once and in a while I get the urge to try something on my own, ultimately it’s a failure and I go back to what was working before. The point is you can spend countless hours being a make believe engineer or just follow a guide online and ignore the creative side all together. Either way they’re so much fun to be had in the near endless ways you can navigate the world and kill enemies. I remember in BOTW stretching the limits of the gameplay to try to make combat interesting. My main go to was if there was a thunder storm I would get something metal and move it near enemies so lightning would strike, it’s impressive to see a world with that level of interactivity but still a very limited mechanic that wasn’t all that useful. Now anything and everything can be done to enemies. I don’t need a thunderstorm to create a lightning trap, I can save metal cages from around the world to my auto build, summon multiple cages from thin air and trap enemies in them, then take out a lightning device and attach it to the cage and watch them electrocute to death in a cell. But that’s too easy, why not get a bunch of metal sheets, create a sort of giant walled cage out of them, leave a space open so they could enter, lure enemies in with food, close up the open spot, then energize the walls with electricity and drop some bombs into the middle and watch the insanity of them running into electric walls to escape explosions. That’s just me being sadistically mean, I could also be efficient and just drive up in a bike that has 15 homing lasers on it and melt enemies. I can fly from above on a plane with cannons underneath and have an arial bombing run before jumping off the plane and while falling from the sky rain down bomb arrows in slow motion obliterating everything before I even land. I haven’t even talked about mechs, yeah people make entire mechs. Every day I can go online and see something that blows my mind, how can this game do all these things, how is this possible?! I hardly even want to talk about the basic sword play because it’s mostly the same with one major upgrade, the fuse system which makes the entire breakable inventory system work so much better than BOTW. Now every sword or shield you find can be fused with nearly any item to create a better item. Want a fire sword, take the guts of a fire like like and attach it to your sword. Want a shield that shoots a cannon, attach a cannon to it. Every enemy has materials they drop when killed, these monster parts increase the base damage of your sword by significant amounts. The harder the enemy the better their parts are meaning every single time you kill a high level enemy you get a high level part, which means you get a high level weapon, any base weapon will do. No longer do you need to protect the one good sword you found in that hard to reach area in BOTW, everything you find can become a high level weapon or a situational weapon like an elemental sword, explosive sword, or maybe have one just to break rocks. The way shields work now, allowing them to be offensive as well as defensive is genius. Oh and arrows, what a difference the ability to attach anything to base arrows make. In BOTW I was struggling to find arrows, and even then you had a limited amount of each kind. Here there are arrows everywhere, a sea of arrows and you get to decide what that arrow becomes with fuse. You can make bomb arrows using just plants, or arrows with a plant that confuses enemies so they attack each other, or homing arrows by attaching the eyes of bats to them. This makes the bow and arrow a much more integral part of the combat. Overall the fuse system feels so much more alive with so many more options. At its core it’s still very basic sword play but this system makes the “loot” part feel much more rewarding. This is Zelda, where are my puzzles and dungeons?! This game has them but it’s the area I still think needs the most work. The shrines are back and I honestly think the puzzle ones were a step back in this game. Here shrines serve as a sort of tutorial for each kind of device you can make. The first puzzle introduces the pieces you can use and how to fit them together to create something useful, like say use a fan to move wheel. The next puzzle takes it a step further and puts you in a room to create this device in such a way to escape. Now the genius part is that players can all come up with different solutions, many times forgoing the actual device and use other abilities to “cheat” their way to the goal. For instance recall can be used in so many ways that it can render building useless, for instance you can create a moving platform from nothing; just move it, the get on it and recall it. That level of freedom which allows everyone to be creative in their own way is very welcome. The problem is this game rarely ever pushes the puzzles past the first layer of complexity. There is so much they could do with any one of these mechanics, never mind the hundreds available to you. Oh and this game keeps introducing new mechanics throughout, total fresh new ideas are introduced and discarded near instantly, “woah I could do that, wait that’s it?!”. I feel Nintendo could make an entire 10 hour puzzle game exploring any one these mechanics to its fullest but instead they decided to go with quantity of various things to do but never make it too complex. Past Zelda games weren’t exactly the most complex puzzle games but at least I felt they used their items to their full potential. One great choice Nintendo made in regards to the shrines is the removal of test of strength shrines, those extremely repetitive boring one enemy battles. Now there are proving ground shrines which serve like mini eventide challenges where you go in with only your underwear and have to use what you find to get out. I loved these, I wish there were more, especially with the fuse system making finding ways to survive so much fun. One of them was a full on MGS level, complete with alarms going off, amazing stuff. But there is a bad kind of shrine that repeats too much, the reward shrine. Normally these shrines appear after you do a specific quest in the overworld to get to the shrine, the puzzle was what you did to reach it, so inside the shrine there rests a prize. In this game way too many times I would come across a prize shrine while not doing anything interesting to earn a reward. A few times I entered a cave, broke a rock wall, found a shrine and it was just a prize shrine. This means no puzzle, no challenge; it’s such an empty gesture and clearly was there to pad the amount of shrines. If Nintendo wants to do that just get rid of shrines, they work when it’s a complex puzzle or unique combat situation, not when it’s some brain dead reward. Enter the dungeons, or temples as this game calls them, what an improvement over the basic mundane beasts of BOTW. Themed dungeons are back! Now they don’t have the structure of past Zelda dungeons, they are still too free form and ultimately are a series of puzzles you can do in any order to unlock a boss but at least now they are designed to feel more dungeon like and make use of new powers in each one. My favorite was the fire temple which was like a rollercoaster park where you had to use mine carts to get around and rotate the track to reach where you need to go. The best dungeons of old always made you think of the entire dungeon itself as part of the puzzle and this temple does that (or you can ignore all that and use your abilities to reach each area, I choose to play it traditionally). Not only are the dungeons filled with great puzzles and new mechanics but the entire lead up to them is nearly as good. The way up to the wind temple has link traversing sky islands and bouncing on flying ship sails to launch higher and higher. These dungeons do have a much better mix of enemies in them, it’s still not like past games but at least they aren’t mostly empty. The best part by far is that at the end you get a unique boss battle, not a stupid form of ganon, it is a brand new creature that makes use of the skills you learned like the best Zelda bosses of old. These battles are tremendous show stoppers, one of them takes place in the air, you are skydiving through the boss and navigating tornadoes while shooting arrows at it. I can’t believe the things I was doing in this game, I’m going to keep saying it. There still could be more dungeons and they could be better dungeons. I would rather scrap the entire shrine system and have 15 good dungeons instead. At least it scratched that itch I had for more classic dungeon like moments. Hyrule is now filled with more interesting locations that almost feel like a small mini dungeons, mainly due to the sky islands and the new caves that are all over the surface. It’s crazy to think that BOTW had no caves, one of the most basic adventuring cliches of Zelda is exploring the land, finding cave and going in, that’s Zelda. So now there are a bunch of caves and sometimes it’s a basic cave, few enemies and chest, no big deal. Other times I would spend an hour in some sprawling underground tunnel. Rocks blocking so many hidden paths, mini bosses hiding in some rooms, dangerous threats and terrain in others. Here is where you will find many of the armors that Link can collect, I will admit the majority of rewards are shit but there are enough unique rewards to keep my interest going. Where you end up at the end of a cave journey is one of the highlights as it could lead you to a destination, with new points of interest and a million other things to be distracted by in this engrossing world. Every thing is hand crafted, these designers know where one cave starts and ends and where the player will end up specifically to put some point of interest in view when they pop out, it’s so well designed. If you get bored of the surface take flight into the air and go sky island exploring. Now I wish the skies were populated with more content. As it stands, outside the first tutorial island, they feel like the small islands you would find in wind waker; but in wind waker that was the entire game, here it’s just a small percent of it. Plenty of islands do repeat their design, you will find similar structures around the world but they usually have some specific puzzle tied to it. One of my favorite sky moments was this ring of islands in low gravity and there were rockets and floating platforms which could be used to keep making rocket flights to the next island, and to the next, until I could reach this huge orb that held my prize with some great mirror and light puzzles. The sky houses some tough bosses as well which give specific rewards that can be used to upgrade your companions (oh right you gain companions, I’m not even going to get into them, this game has mechanics for days). There are also maps to find which give you a location to the treasures below… in the depths. Oh yeah there is an entire underground the size of hyrule, that’s the attitude of this game. Most games would be selling this for all it’s worth; “a second full map!!!!”, here it’s “yeah it’s there” just another cool thing to do. The depths are the anti surface, where on the surface you can explore anywhere you want with complete untethered freedom, the depths take away your light and the ability to see. It has huge rock walls blocking paths and evil red poison everywhere. It’s such a fantastic contrast to the surface and sky and completes a sort of beautifully designed three level map system where each has a role to play which feed into each other. The depths are were you go when you need zonite, the material used to build objects using auto build and what is used to buy the crystals needed to upgrade your battery so that you may run your contraptions longer. In here you must light your way through the dark using light plants and finding these roots which are located under every shrine in the surface. In a way the depths are a sort of mirror dark version of the surface, you will find the two maps connect so well. Ultimately there isn’t much to see down there. There are no cities, rarely you will find an NPC. It all looks the same and has repeating structures like mines, enemy bases and yiga clan hideouts. The player isn’t meant to explore it in the way you do the surface, the depths are to go in, light a path and have a goal in mind. The best weapons are found down there and special boss battles which yield many crystals are found. The Yiga clan has a great side quest which takes place below ground as you find their bases and learn their schematics to build all kinds of cool vehicles. The depths is where the game wants you to go wild with the vehicle creation because getting around on foot is too dangerous, there are stations of zonai supplies like caches to build freely. Those maps I mentioned that you find in the sky point out the location of unique armor or weapons, usually from past Zelda games. In a stroke of genius they put all the amiibo locked classic Zelda costumes from BOTW into the depths as part of the main game. Instantly I wanted to collect every Link tunic from all his games, and this time they could be upgraded to high levels to be a viable piece of armor. Finally I can play the game looking like Link should. I was absolutely hooked into finding all the classic gear, it’s like a Zelda museum down there. So after some time in the depths you may upgrade your belt and have some new ideas for vehicles; well it’s time a to try it out on the surface where most of the game will take place. Here is where you will get most of your quests, explore towns, play mini games and ultimately just lose yourself in this massive world. It does suck that most everything is in the same place it was before. There are still three labyrinths and they are exactly in same spot but at least they are way more complex in this game. There are still just four fairy fountains and you upgrade armor in the same way. The towns are still in the same place and serve most of the same functions though there are plenty of great new quests with them. The sense of familiarity takes away from that sense of wonder that BOTW had, I wish they did more to move things around but I can’t complain much when it’s filled with so much better content and enemy variety. There are some new mini bosses, the best by far being the Gleelok which would be the best boss of many games, here it’s just an enemy you fight. A bunch of the world is still filed with the same Talus and Hinox bosses, just goes to show how basic they were compared to the new ones. Some quest lines feel like something out of Majora’s Mask as you save entire towns from some calamity which is threatening their land. I loved exploring a Goron town that has been brain washed by some addictive poison rock. Link can get involved in a city election for mayor and play both sides to reach the best outcome. The beach town has been over run by pirates requiring Link to exterminate the threat (oh what a playground for destruction that was) and then rebuild the city. Tarry Town has a great monster picture quest with something out of Pokémon snap, as you get pictures of the rarest of monsters which becomes statues you can decorate. I really enjoyed many of the quests, I will say the rewards are usually awful, like a few coins or some item you already have 50 of but the fun is in completing it. There are some wild quests I accidentally stumbled upon that lead to entire sets of armor or even a full heart piece, I wish there were more of those but simply having some around made the exploring all the more satisfying. Of course no Zelda game is without mini games, so many mini games. Most of these now involve building something and then using it to complete a task in a certain time. Two mini games in particular had the potential to be an entire spin off game, Zelda racers where you make a car and race it. Sadly the mini game is extremely basic and the few courses are a few check point lights you drive through for time and that’s it. They could have done an entire racing circuit, instead it is another example of an idea only explored in the most basic of ways. One clever mini game has you creating a giant contraption to hit a bell as hard as you can like in those carnival test of might games. You have play with the physics and weight of different materials to see if they could be launched or catapulted. I spent over an hour creating different ways to hit this bell, I laughed, I cried, I yelled, and eventually I triumphed. Best part is every player will have a different story to tell. I wish there were more like those, overall it’s a great selection of games but again I feel this is an aspect that can go even further. The story is still told through flashbacks and out of order. At least the overall plot is more compelling due to an actual speaking villain in Ganondorf and a great mystery surrounding Zelda. It all comes to a head in what is maybe the best final hours of any Zelda game I’ve played. No one aspect of it might be the best but the way all the elements come together with challenging combat, big story moments, incredible music all make for a thrilling finale that had me jumping up and down in excitement. Speaking of music, oh man what a soundtrack. Every dungeon has a song that evolves with each objective you complete, it swells and swells until it hits a crescendo for the epic boss battle. The music most of the time is still understated, there are many returning tracks as well but when the game needs it the music goes hard. Also the main theme is majestic. I cannot fathom how Nintendo got this game to work on that ancient Switch hardware but it works damn near perfectly and looks good to boot. There are some performance issues, usually when there are many characters in screen and some extra effects like rain. The game tries to stay running at 30fps and does so for most of it. Graphically it looks mostly like BOTW, clearly it’s time for an upgrade but there are moments of breathtaking beauty. I’ve played many games in my life but never have I seen a sunrise above the clouds in a sky island, light beginning to creep across the landscape begging me to leap down and fall and fall and fall not just to the surface but right into a chasm and continue to fall and fall into the underground world completely seamlessly with no loading. I am constant awe of this game despite the hardware, it’s so beautiful in its own way. I could go on forever, there is a lot more I can talk about but it’s best to discover things on your own. I can also give you a list of hundred things I would do better, but just because something can be better doesn’t mean what I played wasn’t fantastic. This game sold me on open world Zelda, but I still want some more structure. I am a big fan of linear gameplay moments that have purpose and meaningful design, I do feel the freedom of the gameplay and those very handcrafted segments can coexist better than they do here. That’s my dream game but we aren’t there yet. So it doesn’t make it to my top Zelda games but it’s in the top 5, and honestly this makes all those Zelda games I hold dear feel so basic, they are going to feel so limited gameplay wise. Tears of the Kingdom is a masterpiece in so many ways. I usually do not play games for 100 hours and if I do I’m struggling by the end to just get through it. I am well over 200 hours on this game and for the grand majority of the time I was captivated by what I was playing, what I am still playing. 200 hours and I don’t want to stop, I finished the story, I almost always just throw the game in a drawer and not think about it after I see the credits roll. This game is endlessly playable, its mechanics are genre defining. It reminds me of MGSV, a game mechanically better than anything else I’ve ever played, something I could play forever, and also in that I wish the structure of said game was more to my tastes. This sets a new standard action adventure games. This year we had Horizon 2 and in that game you can fly on a robot bird through the clouds… and you can’t even shoot an arrow, not that impressive. Here I can fly in a aircraft of my making with canons and lasers and battle a three headed dragon in the sky and then jump off and sky dive down after the dragon while firing arrows at it, this game is CRAZY! How is this game possible?! This is why I love this series, this is the feeling of magic and wonder all those Zelda games gave me years ago. Tears of the Kingdom is pure magic. |
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Posted by Dvader Fri, 23 Jun 2023 09:48:57
Great review though, hopefully you have an outlet hwere these are posted beyond the few people here.
Like MGSV I can go on and on about aspects I would change with these games to be more like older titles but keep the great gameplay. That doesn’t mean the games are bad, the gameplay is on a different level, it makes the old games feel like some ancient simplistic entertainment product.
It felt like a long wait for something that wasn't that much different from BOTW.