I’ll admit, I was a bit skeptical about Tears of the Kingdom in the run up to its launch. Breath of the Wild was a monumental release that aided Nintendo in a transitional stage of their brand, moving on from the shadow of the Wii U into the spark of light that was the upcoming Switch. Likewise, it came at a transitional stage of my own life; I was in my final year of school and going to University that September. It felt like the game served as a last hoorah for my childhood, my favourite series was reinventing itself with a mix of melancholy nostalgia and a more ‘grown up’ open world sandbox format that enabled it to better fit in with its contemporaries and, in many ways, surpass them. How could you follow on from that?
Now don’t get me wrong I still pre-ordered and played it on release back in May 2023 and, for a while at least, I was completely hooked. I had completed the first dungeon, filled in a good chunk of the map and was by all means having a great time; but then I just… stopped. Why? Was I burnt out and overwhelmed? Was I being superficial over how the game ran on the ageing Switch hardware and holding out for a heavily rumoured Switch Pro? Or maybe, perhaps, it was because I was now an adult with a full time job and trying to navigate the wonky game design of life. So when the Switch 2 was announced alongside enhanced editions of the recent Zelda’s (and with myself in a better position with more free time), I had no excuse but to skydive back into this title to give it a proper go. And, as it turns out, I’m so glad I waited.
There’s enhancements, but they come at a price.
Let’s get the technical stuff out of the way: it runs and looks way way better than it did before. No longer clamped to the OG Switch’s 2015 Tegra architecture, both Wild and Kingdom leverage the new Nintendo system’s beefier specs to produce a far more appealing image on a modern 4K display. All textures are replaced with higher quality assets, distant objects render from further away leading to a world that feels even more tangible. All this while running at 60fps, a good 60fps at that. Previous stress points like the Korok Forest are just not an issue any more, it just feels right. The resolution is now bumped to an ideal 1080p in portable mode, and a respectable 1440p upscaled to 4K in docked play; both resolutions being dynamic depending on system stress. It’s a huge leap from the muddy 900p but there’s some issues with the quality of the upscaling, using AMD’s FSR 1.0 instead of the Switch 2’s built in (and far superior) Nvidia DLSS hardware, recently put to good use in the system’s Cyberpunk port. It’s not as sharp as it could be and, as blasphemous as it sounds, makes me wish they included an optional 30fps quality mode that aimed for a native res closer to 4k.
It’s worth noting that Nintendo is asking for £7.99 for these enhancements, or alternatively an active subscription to their Online Expansion Pass, despite enhancing other Switch 1 games at no additional cost. Is it worth it? Depends on your point of view, but personally I would have gladly sacrificed the pretty trivial Zelda Notes app integration for a free upgrade.
Zelda is the princess, but gameplay is King.
Breath of the Wild revitalised the series with the first true open world rendering of Hyrule, a dynamic landscape bringing back previous locations from across the convoluted Zelda timeline, reimagined with a grander scope than previously possible. This successor takes no shame in reusing this overworld, though slightly remixed and updated, and it feels every bit as alive as it did before. Changing weather and climate conditions require you to think about your choice in clothing, wandering traders of the land’s differing species travel the path between different settlements, villages full of the series’ staple quirky characters going about their daily lives, armies of monsters patrol the highways and giant dragons gently float across the sky. Simply climbing the tallest peak in eye distance and admiring the landscape below is a heart tingling experience, the cel shaded art style blurring in the distance to create the illusion that you’re actually playing an interactive watercolour painting.
Also brought over from the predecessor is Link’s physics and moveset, a welcome return. It’s the perfect blend of him feeling sturdy and heavy, but also responsive and agile; you can still sprint, climb, glide, backflip and sidestep your way over mountains and into combat encounters. But this is all familiar ground, so what’s new? Well, Link has been granted a brand new set of abilities thanks to the procurement of a strange new right arm after his own is severed in battle, allowing him to interact with the elements around him.
Ultrahand enables you to pick up damn near anything and join them together, chopped down trees can become bridges and ladders. Recall will send any objects back along the path of which they’ve previously travelled, while Ascend causes you to dart upwards through any ceiling and come out on top; very handy in the brand new cave systems jotted around the land. Finally, Fuse lets you join together materials with your regular equipment, further increasing attack power or adding elemental effects that play best with the game’s stellar physics system. Want to electrocute an entire squad of moblins? Douse them with a Splash Fruit, attach a Shock Fruit to a well aimed arrow and ZAP!
But perhaps the most entertaining new toys are the Zonai Devices, electronic gadgets leftover from an ancient society with varying gimmicks and functions. As easily as playing with LEGO, you can use Ultrahand to combine these into awesome contraptions; hover bikes, fighter planes, giant spinning tanks that shoot missiles. The only limit is how much of an Engineer you are in your heart and brain. And yes, you can crucify Koroks. But why, why would you do that? You’ll have to get to grips with these devices if you’re to pass the brand new Shrines, mini dungeons that litter the landscape like they did in Wild, each with their own puzzles of varying ingenuity; though it was disappointing to see a slight downgrade in the length of some of these in comparison to the previous entry.
It’s a testament to the talent of Nintendo’s design team that these abilities never seem overpowered or game breaking, but rather compliment the open sandbox they’ve created. These abilities are revealed and taught to the player in the opening Great Sky Island, a visually stunning sky-bound remake of Wild’s Great Plateau, serving as a curated run through of the game’s core mechanics. It never feels condescending or handholdey, and encourages multiple routes of exploration. But speaking of the sky islands…
Ain’t no Sky Island high enough. Ain’t no Depths low enough.
Hyrule has gained two new dimensions that have appeared seemingly out of nowhere; the Sky Islands we see plastered on the box art and below the surface, a dark cavernous land known as the Depths. Running in parallel with the surface, this dimly lit land is the exact same size as the overworld. However, to be superficial, a huge part of the overworld’s appeal is in its beauty and diversity, its changing biomes and climates. In the Depths we have one aesthetic: Cave, grey, black and dark red. With no settlements or meaningful NPC’s, what we’re left with is the same series of repetitive enemy camps and the occasional abandoned mine.
To top it all off, it introduces two new gameplay mechanics. Gloom, an evil gunk that permanently reduces the player’s health until they return to the surface, and Bloom seeds, the entire underground being shrouded in darkness necessitating you throw these seeds on the floor to illuminate a small space. For permanent brightness you must find a Lightroot pod, which will bring permanent light to a larger area. At first these mechanics provide a somewhat interesting challenge but after so many hours they just wear thin, to the point where I would dread exploring this dimension. Sure there’s rare pieces of armour that help negate these annoyances but in the end, illuminating and exploring the Depths becomes a tedious checklist that only highlights how ugly and empty it is. There’s a reason the Oblivion realm sections in (well) Oblivion are reduced to concise areas with a direct objective.
In contrast the Sky Islands are just so beautiful, decorated with autumnal trees and shrubbery that sparkle in the golden twilight sun. There’s far less landmass to explore here, requiring the player to think of inventive ways to travel between them. But despite the smaller scale, there’s a lot of repetition going on, the same island designs being repeated several times. These islands are supposed to be the land of the Zonai, an ancient extinct tribe who lived thousands of years ago. But there’s very little evidence that they did beyond the odd temple ruins, no settlements, no memories, no signs of life beyond the occasional Construct Robot. The island’s designs are surreal, impossible and abstract, complimenting the shrines and puzzles we find up here; it’s very gamey, feeling less like we’re exploring the remnants of a forgotten people and more like Link is trapped in the innards of a giant pinball machine.
The Overworld’s success is in the sum of its parts; it’s simultaneously huge, beautiful, gamey, diverse, dynamic, organic etc. Meanwhile the new dimensions take one or two of these aspects and present them in isolation, highlighting their shortcomings and giving us the worst of both worlds.
No Link in the Past
While investigating the tunnels beneath Hyrule Castle, Zelda and Link discover the skeleton of the Demon King Ganondorf. He jolts back to life, destroys the Master Sword and Link’s right arm and unleashes chaos upon the land of Hyrule, lifting the Castle into the sky in an event called the Upheaval. Zelda meanwhile is transported back in time to the founding of the Kingdom of Hyrule by a mysterious stone, seemingly trapped there with no way of returning home. Here she meets Rauru and Sonia, the king and queen of this new land, and begins to set into motion a grand plan that will aid Link thousands of years later.
In essence it’s a retread of Breath of the Wild: travel to the four corners of Hyrule and help the different races with their issues (essentially extreme weather conditions), before returning to the castle to defeat the evil and rescue Zelda. Fine. Zelda as a series is no stranger to reusing formulas, but my issue lies with Link’s (i.e. the player’s) involvement in events of importance. Zelda’s story is told through unlockable cutscenes, during which she explores an unfamiliar land, meets new friends, helps found a new kingdom, witnesses the rise of Ganondorf and his eventual imprisoning; all while setting up a bootstrap paradox that ensures the events of the prologue occur. In comparison we are tasked with cleanup duty, payoff with no involved setup. The narrative is a puzzle that is 99% complete, the player must slot in the last couple of tiny pieces.
Nintendo made a point of giving these new open world Zelda’s less ‘in your face’ storytelling, leading to the misnomer that Breath of the Wild’s story took a backseat to its gameplay. But this isn’t the case; its gameplay was its storytelling. Playing as an amnesiac Link who wakes up a hundred years after a calamity, we are exploring this new version of Hyrule alongside him, forging new allies and rebuilding old frienships. By directly witnessing how the people of the land have been affected by this catastrophe and aiding their plights, we are healing the physical and mental trauma of what happened a century prior. But in the sequel the world is already set up; we are left literally and figuratively treading old ground, clinging to various leads of information about the princess. Even a good portion of the returning characters pay little attention to Link, despite all he did for them in Wild, spouting some variation of “Hello Link… where’s Zelda?”, then lumbering a fetch quest on him. Why aren’t we playing as Zelda? Oh wait.
It all leads to a lack of emotional resonance, damning in a series arguably led by emotion. Sure Ganondorf is back but this version has no prior connection to this Link, and little personality or motivation beyond “I’m evil”; a far cry from the melancholy soliloquies we got from Wind Waker’s incarnation of the character. Even the side quests, usually a fun highlight of these games, have no standouts, mostly reduced to banal fetch quests. There’s still quirky, flamboyant characters to talk to, but their stories never go much deeper than cheerful, camp dialogue. Heavier emotional beats like Link witnessing the death of the Deku Tree or waving goodbye to his grandma as he sails away to save his sister have been the crux of this series, and they just don’t seem to be as present here.
Bigger is not always better.
I love Zelda and I really wanted to love this entry. If you’re looking for an open world sandbox with outstanding physics and mechanics, this is the game for you. Its graphics, controls, sound design and music are absolutely stunning. And despite my grievances, I still put in over 150 hours, even on an adult’s schedule. But I can perhaps see now why I dropped this game shortly after launch, it’s a less cohesive experience than Breath of the Wild, exemplifying not only its best qualities but also some of its weakest. Perhaps open world Zelda has reached its natural peak; will the next entry try to somehow top it, or will it return to the old formula that I seem to be hung up with nostalgia for? Time will tell.
