Sometimes a game just consumes so much of your time that the only thing you want to do aside from the things you need to do – go to work, keep your living quarters hygienic, raise your kids, cook meals, sleep – is play. It’s easy to get lost in a game when you’re a kid or if you’re “funemployed,” but only the most engrossing and impressive of games will keep you conscious into the wee hours of the night, bleary eyed and ass-dragging the next day if you have an actual livelihood to tend to.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is that game.
I intimated on here last week the reason I have been lax in updating the newsletter has been this game, and it’s not a lie. Between purchasing the game on May 12, its release date, and completing the main quest on June 14, I spent 215 hours playing it. Not a single nanosecond was wasted in this endeavor. I may be naturally biased towards the Zelda franchise because it has housed my favorite games ever since playing the first installment in the series. But with the bar set so high, one might think it a challenge to clear. TOTK not only jumps over the bar, it moonwalks over, setting a standard for any game to be played on a Nintendo system. Let’s break it down.
Gameplay – The Zelda series underwent the most fundamental shift in gameplay with Breath of the Wild since the first game went from overhead 2.5D to a world map-to-sidescroller action event in Zelda II: The Adventures of Link. On the surface, the changes did not seem as drastic as they could have been. BOTW had the soul of a Zelda title, just borrowing from the franchises that took the original Zelda series as their inspiration. TOTK takes that mantel and improves upon it mainly by adorning it with improvements rather than taking out the guts and rearranging it again.
The main vector is located in the rune system, where it is simplified and expanded. The only real drawback is that the Bomb rune is gone, but it has been replaced with the addition of bomb flowers, a staple item in the series since Ocarina of Time. These new runes – Ultrahand, Ascend, Rewind, Fuse, and Autobuild – break the game open and give the player so many more options for creativity and problem-solving. Ultrahand and Autobuild especially are cornerstones of the improvements made. While BOTW introduced Zelda fans to a sandbox, TOTK gives them the best toys possible to make the best use of the space, which has more than doubled from the last game. If you’ve been on social media at all over the last six weeks, you’d have noticed all the people building various vehicles and constructs. This is not a fun side effect; it’s a central feature of the gameplay. One does not have to be as elaborate as the folks doing things like making laser Keese trappers or giant effigies with flamethrower penises, but the fact that you can be as extra as you want is such a quality of life improvement.
Lesser players bemoaned the return of weapon durability, and the game actually forces your hand to use the Fuse ability given that most of all the weapons are decayed thanks to the unleashing of the game’s final antagonist. Fuse actually turns out to be the most useful of the runes not just because of how the various add-ons to your weaponry improve attack, durability, and function, but for how wide open the options become. Monster parts are but one thing that one can attach to their implements, and while most of them simply increase the attack power, some of them will end up adding a cool effect. For example, Keese/Octorock/Aerocuda eyes turn arrows into homing missiles, and elemental Lizalfos horns and tails give weapons and shields power of fire, frost, or shock.
The flora of the world and Zonai devices that one can find around the various levels of Hyrule really open up Link’s combat capabilities though. New plants such as Dazzlefruit and Muddle Buds add new effects that can build a layer of strategy on top of a player’s everyday battle regimens. Gone are the specialty arrows, but with the Fuse ability and items such as Fire Fruit and Bomb Flowers, these items are easily replaced AND cheaper to implement if you’re a studious enough explorer to look for all the different bushes in the overworld and in the sky or for the various plants of bomb flowers in caves and in The Depths. And you haven’t lived until you’ve attached a Flame Emitter device to a shield and created a defensive flamethrower.
I mentioned being a studious explorer, and the sheer size of the map rewards the curious and inquisitive player over the speedrunner. BOTW’s map was massive, and TOTK more than doubles the area to explore. While the sky was the big selling point, it’s the underground areas that make this game so overwhelmingly rich and vast. The caves, which are considered part of and entered through the surface, would be enough to up the joy for the naturally inquisitive, but the Depths, with their seas of Gloom, roving packs of monsters, and monolithic mining structures, would be fodder for three games all by themselves. Having real estate to over, quests to fulfill, things to do, all of it has been a reason why Zelda has had such an allure for gamers throughout history. TOTK smashes the ceiling on how much can be packed into a single adventure.
Overall, if you loved BOTW for the gameplay, there’s absolutely no reason why you wouldn’t love TOTK. Perhaps the construction and crafting are a bit too much, but I always found it to be intuitive outside of a few shrine challenges. Then again, there are 152 shrines, so if you find two or three are too hard, you’re not missing out on too many power-up rewards for them.
Score – 10/10
Difficulty/Satisfaction – When I play a Zelda game, I want something meaty, something that will make me think but not frustrate me. The upper limit of “gamer skill” I can tolerate with this series is the last battle in Zelda II: The Adventures of Link which is just you doing a coinflip, literally stabbing high or low and hoping the hit lands where your dark doppelganger’s shield isn’t. TOTK comes closest to that frustration limit if you encounter the Gloom Hands early in the game, before you’re really ready to battle them. The enemy difficulty generally ramps up proportionately with how much progress you’ve made in the main quests. That is, you’re not going to be facing off against Silver Bokoblins when you’re fresh off completing the first area. But Gloom Hands are different, because they spawn at any level in fixed locations. I’m putting this up front because otherwise, the game is perfectly tuned to keep you challenged but not frustrated.
The addition of Boss Bokoblins, larger variants of the stock monster that are bigger than Moblins but not mini-boss sized like the cycloptic Hinox, enhances the common battle experience. Additionally, the forces of evil have learned to build fortress-like structures where you’ll encounter bonfires or entrances fraught with slopes for spiked balls to roll down and combo crush-impale you. None of these make the Bokoblin encampment fights from BOTW impossible, but they add an element of peril, upping the ante if you will. Additionally, some old and new enemies make appearances to round out the common bestiary. The most common and most welcomed ones are the Like-Likes, the shield-eating mounds of glob that terrorized players all the way back from the original game.
Another improvement from BOTW is the readdition of temples rather than the Divine Beasts. Although each temple follows an almost carbon-copy template from each other, they still feel more natural to the Zelda experience than the Divine Beasts from BOTW did. Plus, there’s no cumbersome and confusing building reconfigurations here. The bosses in the temples, as well as the roving mini-bosses in the actual field of play, provide an excellent challenge on first encounter. The only one of these intermediate creatures that might end up being pushovers for BOTW veterans are the Hinoxes. Molduga remains as much of a bastard as it was in BOTW. The Stone Talus got a huge glow-up in TOTK with the addition of Battle Taluses. Not all the Taluses are Battle Taluses, but enough of them are that the uptick in difficulty is noticeable. Additionally, the Flux Construct, Gleeok (another blast from the past!), and Frox round out the megafauna roster.
Each of the 152 shrines in the game present their own challenges, but again, there are maybe two or three of them where at least I had to resort to looking up a guide online to complete. Even the “proving ground” shrines where you’re stripped of all your equipment and are left to defeat robotic sentinels called Constructs only with the things laying around are only temporarily frustrating before you get the hang of them. In most cases, I found myself figuring out the kinks in each shrine challenge, be they the shrines where the challenge is located within or where the challenge is external. There’s such a feeling of satisfaction that comes with figuring out a physics puzzle on your own.
Overall, TOTK provides the optimal engagement. You will be challenged, but these challenges will provide you with immense gratification once you solve them. Because the game is so huge, the well from which you can draw this satisfaction is deep enough to be confused as being bottomless.
Score – 10/10
Aesthetic – BOTW’s Hyrule was a pristine land, mostly reclaimed by nature outside of the ruins of former towns and the settlements where monsters lurked dotting it. The aesthetic fit the vibe of the game. The challenge in making a direct sequel with totally different vibes while utilizing pretty much the same map lay in changing the landscape just enough to establish those themes and that mood. The sky and the Depths provide the template for how the surface map would be changed and morphed into a wholly different experience than what mostly the same topography provided in the game that came before. Those changes on the surface punctuate how much of the tone of the game has changed while so much of the basis of TOTK did not from BOTW.
The various ruins that dot the landscape, the gaping chasms that have opened up across the land, and waystations full of construction materials all symbolize the grand spirit of TOTK. Progress can never happen independent of decay, and those two forces are always butting heads. Hyrule was just coming out of The Calamity when The Upheaval happened, and so much of the rebuilding was wiped off the map before it could really come to fruition. Yet, all is not lost. Lookout Landing and Tarrey Town are still growing strong from the ground up. The Zonai Survey Team continues to lay down groundwork understanding the new additions to the landscape. Even Addison, the obsequious young intern holding up signs for Hudson Construction Company on his own, shows an indomitable spirit. All the threads weave together to form this strong rope that ties the series together.
I had one complaint about the overall vibe of the game at first, but as I played on, it went away. I am used to the Zelda series having a big sweeping musical overture in the background while exploring the main open area, be it the original overture from the original game and Link to the Past, the varying melody from Ocarina of Time, or the grandiose flight music in the sky from Skyward Sword. This was missing in BOTW as well, but as with BOTW, the music rises up when it needs to, during battles, in dungeons, in the background of cutscenes. Outside of shifting the inventory/recovery paradigm, the musical tendencies are the biggest change in the series, maybe ever, but I don’t mind it at all.
Score – 10/10
Graphics – Gamer dipshits will point out the most nitpicky bullshit “flaws” in a render or whatever and say that a game doesn’t have good graphics. While I disagreed but ceded ground on this front with Pokémon Legends: Arceus, TOTK is gorgeous. There’s no pop-in. Everything is rendered perfectly. The art meshes with the function, and visually, the game is as stunning as it is to play. There were times when I accidentally caught a breathtaking portrait shot just standing around. Like, I am not sure I could want more from a game visually.
Far be it from me to defend Nintendo, an evil corporation that sues people for the ticky-tackiest reasons to “protect” their IP, but I don’t think they’ll ever beat the charges that their games don’t have “good” graphics, which makes me want to learn necromancy to raise Roger Ebert from the grave to tell him, yes, he was right, video games are absolutely not art if this is how the consumers of them treat their critical analysis. Wind Waker was one of the most gorgeous games ever, and people still bitch about it today because it looks like a cartoon and not like a hyper-realistic war zone like whatever army simulator they’re all beating their dicks to nowadays looks like. Sorry your games need to occupy every square inch of your console’s hard drive, bro and Nintendo can make a beautiful game with the same file size as a single patch update.
Score – 10/10
Story – Did you know outside of those godawful CD-I games from the early ‘90s, the only games you can actually play as Zelda are the Smash Bros. series and those Hyrule Warriors strategy RPG games? I feel like by now the mainline series would let you play as Zelda, but alas, Nintendo still is working up the courage, I guess. Still, TOTK is the game where Zelda plays the most active role in the story, even more than Ocarina of Time or Wind Waker (where she still ends up a damsel in distress anyway, both times). This isn’t so much a bland appeal to idpol to have more female representation in video games. If that were the case, you could make Link a girl, I don’t care.
It's more or less elevation of a full third of the trinity here. Zelda is a Triforce holder; she should have more agency. In TOTK, without giving too much away for those who still haven’t gotten up off their keysters and gotten this game yet, the only time she’s really in distress is right in the beginning, at the end of the prologue portion. From that point on, she is playing an active role in the events in the background (again, without giving too much away, although I reckon that the main conceit of 𝖙𝖎𝖒𝖊 𝖙𝖗𝖆𝖛𝖊𝖑 is probably pretty well-known by now). I think that adds so much richness to the story because it plays around with the existing paradigms. Part of the reason why Star Wars, Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker was such a steaming pile of shit was Disney’s inability to do something they nor George Lucas had ever done – explore the antagonist with absolute power rather than as a subordinate to a minor villain in the plot. Kylo Ren killed Snoke, but he can’t NOT be the apprentice so let’s drag Palpatine’s ass out of carbonite. I’m digressing.
Overall, the story feels like the most direct way to be a sequel to Ocarina without actually saying it was a sequel directly. There are so many themes at play: environmentalism, dealing with loss, staving off fascism vs. actively destroying it, learning from the past, the importance of following through on journalism, preservation of native cultures. But overall, the story is what I described in the aesthetic section. How do you react to devastation so soon after you’ve just started cleaning up from the last one? Link is the vessel through which you can enact those changes and reactions, but the cast of characters, from Zelda, Rauru, and Ganondorf all the way down to bit players like Addison, Cece, and Fugo weave a beautiful tapestry of what it means to be a nation in aftermath thrown back into the fire so quickly.
Score – 10/10
Sidequests! – The true measure of a Zelda game is how much time you can spend not doing the main quest. I probably logged 100 hours in the game before I even thought about venturing to Rito Village to start the main thrust of the game, and it wasn’t because I was dicking around making penis statues or crucifying Koroks either. I spent so much time doing the so-called extraneous shit that by the time I started on the main quest, my item inventory was massively rich with things like bomb flowers, hearty truffles, and muddle buds. I had already illuminated a good two-thirds of the Depths. I had so much armor I didn’t even know what to do with it. I had over 20 hearts. I made a good chunk of change off doing the Lucky Clover Gazette reporting side mission.
Let’s face it; no time spent in service of your own entertainment and enjoyment in any video game can be considered wasted. I spent 215 hours on it, but I could easily have doubled that time. I suspect the reasons I didn’t were two-pronged. One was that I am invested in the Zelda series in such a way that I can’t help but beat the game to see what those rascals throw at me emotionally. Two? Those fuckers finally patched up Pokémon Scarlet/Violet and Pokémon HOME so that they were compatible with each other, and at heart, I wanted to get started on my Pokémon raising stuff before I fell too far behind before the DLC dropped. I hear reports of people clearing this game in 60 hours, 40 hours, TEN FUCKING HOURS and I guess I get that not everyone is a digestive gamer like me when it comes to Zelda. Still, from a personal POV, I could not at all think about playing a Zelda game and not wringing as much liquid out of it as I could. TOTK’s washcloth is never completely dry in that regard.
Score – 10/10
Overall – I had my doubts whether they could top Breath of the Wild, but honestly, looking back, those doubts were ill-founded to begin with. BOTW was a game developed first with the WiiU in mind. TOTK was designed to the full capabilities of the Switch. Nintendo is a lot of things, but willingly negligent towards meticulousness is not one of them. One can only look at the Mario series for proof. Every single mainline Mario game through Super Mario Odyssey had more and more layers heaped onto it. BOTW was their magnum opus to date; I shouldn’t have expected them to try anything less.
But trying and succeeding are two different things. Maybe I was afraid that after BOTW, they didn’t have another fastball in them. I was wrong. This game was heat from opening frame to closing one. The Great Sky Island itself could pass for an entire game on its own, and it’s only the tutorial space. Exploring the Depths could be separated from the rest of the game, and it would be the game of the year. I’m still floored and I haven’t played it in a week. Goddamn. GODDAMN.
Score – 100/100, perfect game, no further notes, your honor.