The Legend of Recycled Content: Tears of the Kingdom
It’s completely pointless to pretend that The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom has any chance in hell of winning Game of the Year at The Game Awards against Baldur’s Gate III, and that even if it did win then everyone would assume that Geoff Keighley got bribed by Nintendo with a lifetime supply of Mountain Dew and Doritos. So there is no need to elevate the game’s merits just to give Nintendo fans the false hope that it can gain some worthless metal prize.
That said, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was indeed one of the best open world games of all time. It was a fun, relaxing, accessible and breathtaking experience about exploring the wildlands of Hyrule by walking, running, galloping and flying aimlessly around a large map. However, that freedom came at the cost of having complex temples and interesting storytelling, and the good news is that Tears of the Kingdom didn’t fix any of this. The new temples are as simple as the divine beasts, while the storytelling is almost epic, but also clichéd and generic.
Breath of the Wild was so successful that it must have been very tempting to make a sequel that’s the same game with some random new gimmicks tacked on, and it’s also tempting to say that Tears of the Kingdom is just an creatively bankrupt rehash, but that would be an exaggeration. This would also disregard the fact that it is indeed a fun and creative game on its own terms, but that it’s also nowhere near as unique as some people claim.
Antennas to Heaven
Tears of the Kingdom draws way too much from its predecessor while reusing a lot of its own content. It’s also very easy to pin down the inspirations for most of the new abilities. But it still manages to feel very different to play from its predecessor, not just because of the new abilities and environments, but also because it moves away from free-form exploration and towards goal-oriented gameplay.
The main catalyst for change are the floating Sky Islands, and for me this is the most fun part of the game, in part because it completely changes the way I approach exploration. No longer am I wandering aimlessly around the map, but rather I am constantly teleporting to the floating islands in order to examine the world from the sky and decide which way to fall down. This means that for me the gameplay in Tears of the Kingdom is more about making choices of how to progress, rather than just exploring aimlessly.
Running through the lands of Hyrule now plays second fiddle to gliding down from the sky, and that’s a good thing since the land areas are the main reason why the game feels so derivative. It’s literally the same map with some cosmetic changes. The villages have some significant additions, but the new shrines are pretty much the same as the old ones, and they tend to be simpler and work as glorified tutorials. There is some puzzle-based fun here, but it’s the exact same type of fun as in the previous game.
The real problem arises with the third choice you can make when it comes to coonsuming the game’s content, which are the Depths. These are dark and massive empty areas punctuated by reskinned enemy camps and locations where you can farm certain resources. The visual style there is kinda reminiscent of Subnautica, and there are a couple of solid quests you can do in there, but after exploring them on my own for a while I mostly saw endlessly copypasted assets and enemies.
21st Century Schizoid Man
What makes Tears of the Kingdom stand on its own as a pretty solid expansion are the new abilities and the expanded story. The new main quest and new memories in particular are clearly an improvement. The new characters are more fleshed out, the new cutscenes are much more dramatic, and the set-pieces and bosses are a bit more epic and cool this time around. Meanwhile, the gameplay changes are more like a sidegrade.
The coolest new is Ultrahand, which is clearly inspired by video games like Besiege and Garry’s Mod. This new power lets you build contraptions and vehicles as long as you have the necessary parts. Sadly, this is constrained by the fact that vehicles are expendable, and that both parts and energy charges need to be farmed at specific locations. Also, I think the vehicles are only really useful when traveling in the sky islands and the depths. They can be used in combat, but most of the time it’s not worth the effort.
Another fun ability is Fuse, which is reminiscent of the crafting systems found on a million survival games since the age of Minecraft began. On one hand, it’s great to be able to craft some really crazy and weird weapons; on the other, the combat system remains mostly the same. So often I find myself attaching a bomb to an arrow, when the previous game had bomb arrows instead, which was a more sensible solution to the same problem.
I think Ascend is the most unique and original ability of the whole bunch, and the one I don’t remember seeing in any previous game. Personally I don’t find it super interesting, and its use is very situational, but it certainly adds a new dimension to exploration and traversal that leads to rethinking how to interact with the environment. I could totally see this one being used in a more interesting way in future games.
Recall is the coolest-looking ability, even though it’s also the one that’s more easy to pin down as inspired by games like Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and Braid. The influence here is especially obvious since there are also mirror puzzles that are extremely similar to those found in Sands of Time. This is not a complaint though, I quite liked the gameplay in the Prince of Persia trilogy and I like seeing someone do this kind of time rewind puzzles once again.
So Falls the World
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is a fun game that maintains much of what made Breath of the Wild great, and it doubles down on the playground approach to open world gameplay that I praised so much. What I think drags the game down is how it’s so derivative of its predecessor and how the depths are so repetitive and frustrating to explore.
I think that the lack of complex temples and the weak storytelling wouldn’t be a major problem if the game was full of unique content, but the reality is that a lot of the content in here is just endlessly copy-pasted. And I do think it’s perfectly possible for open world games to have both better dungeons and storytelling. Last year Elden Ring came out with fairly complex dungeons, while Subnautica and Outer Wilds both have more elaborate stories with stronger emotional resonance.
In the end, the vehicle-building mechanics elevate Tears of the Kingdom beyond being just a glorified DLC, but sadly the vehicles are not really the core of the experience. Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts might have been harshly criticized many years ago, but it’s clear to me that the future of open world games resides in this kind of goal-oriented gameplay that encourages creativity over following orders. Our fate resides in games that let players make meaningful decisions on how to progress, rather than being led by the invisible hand of a developer.
Lost a limb in a fight,
but don’t worry babe I’ll be cool.
The ultimate power of a god
is now my secret tool.
