The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Review

After a long wait and more than a few delays by Nintendo, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is finally here. The game features the return of Breath of the Wild’s Hyrule, enemies, visuals, and a whole lot more whilst introducing a bevvy of new ideas of its own, including an original story and characters. There are also unique gameplay mechanics and brand-new areas that are exclusive to this title. So with all that said, does Tears of the Kingdom validate its existence as a sequel? And just how good or bad is this game? Well, let’s grab our Ancient Tunic our tarnished Master Sword and embark on an adventure of a lifetime to see what we have in store for us.

Tears of the Kingdom starts beneath Hyrule Castle, with Link and Princess Zelda examining the tunnels and the gloom within them. The two are attempting to find the source of the gloom because it is poisoning the water supply and making everyone sick in the process. But as they’re doing that, they accidentally come across a dehydrated Ganondorf. After waking him up following a brief monologue, he destroys the floor beneath them, which drops the Princess into a hole with Link jumping after her before a mysterious glowing arm catches him. It is then where the game starts properly, with the Hero of Hyrule coming to his senses and learning everything he can from the inhabitants of the Great Sky Island, where the tutorial takes place. These inhabitants are called Constructs.

The green robot guys come from the age of the Zonai, who, according to legend, are from an ancient era of civilisation that had an incredible grasp on technology. Thus, their presence is much more significant this time around. Following a brief mention in a specific area in Breath of the Wild, they can now be found worldwide, allowing you to use their cool stuff or scavenge their bodies for parts following a well-placed arrow to the face from the trusty Link. So naturally, now that the Zonai are back, we have a bunch of new tools at our disposal.

Similar to the runes from the previous game, Link now has four new abilities that he can activate with his arm after getting a new one from King Rauru, who greeted a shirtless protagonist in ghost form following the debacle at Hyrule Castle. Yes, Rauru was the mysterious voice mentioned a few paragraphs ago. Anyways, these new arm powers are Ultrahand, Ascend, Recall, and Fuse. Ultrahand allows players to manipulate almost anything in the world and stick it together. Ascend lets you quickly rise up and pop through virtually any surface (say goodbye to climbing!) Recall enables you to fix almost any mistake or solve a puzzle in a fun way by sending it back to you with a simple button press. And Fuse is perhaps the most exciting as you can fuse literally anything to your shield, sword, or arrow and use it as a weapon or a way to get somewhere faster or more efficiently. Seems like a lot, right? Well, that’s because it is, and it’s some of the best game design in the history of the medium. Seriously, if you think you can do it, you probably can and even better than you ever imagined. Then there are all the Zonai devices, such as the Wings, Rockets, Stabilizers, and much more.

The world is way more interactable this time, too. Like, this is Breath of the Wild times a hundred. Signposts found almost anywhere present a fun challenge for the player to figure out how to keep them standing in whichever way you can think of. You come across stranded Koroks that somehow drifted far away from their friends, and you have to figure out a way to get them to their destinations with as little obstruction and enemy interference as possible. Stables are populated with a travelling band that needs Link’s help so they can bring the nearby Great Fairy out of its slumber, but they always have some sort of predicament, which results in the player making use of nearby Zonai devices to get them to where they need to go. This quest goes on for a long while, and it continues to be surprising and exciting even after a hundred hours of gameplay which is just insane. Tears of the Kingdom took what its predecessor did with its world, looked at it, and kicked it into the stratosphere with all of this interactivity and stuff you can do. In the beginning, you have four main quests, which quickly balloon into a laundry list of things to do and no matter how much you do, you’re always coming across new discoveries in the sky, the depths, or just a random cave. Hyrule has so much cohesion in this game, and it’s so awesome.

So that’s a look at what you can do in this title; let’s talk about what your goals are or, in other words, the story. And sadly, the plot isn’t very good. Ok, let’s be fair, it’s definitely good for Nintendo standards, but there is so much repetition in these cutscenes that it becomes incessant. Every time you finish one of the five dungeons, you are greeted with a cutscene that’s a carbon copy of the one before it. The native of the respective region meets their ancestor, and they provide some short monologue about the Demon King and the Imprisoning War; one of your dungeon assistants acts surprised; they give Link their powers, and so on and so on. That’s it.

To make matters worse, this game has the same issue that Breath of the Wild did, which is you’re constantly looking all over the map for Princess Zelda, and everybody’s telling you where to go, but Zelda’s presence in the story never feels as established as it could if she was constantly adventuring alongside you. For example, one of your main quests is to find Dragon Tears, which are this title’s form of memories from before. These are great and provide a level of action never before seen in the Zelda series. The Princess is yet again separated from her appointed knight, which significantly affects your motivations because instead of being in touch with her, you’re only getting updates from random civilians, and the actual conclusion only really happens near the very end. It’s not that the story is terrible; it’s just that the developers didn’t learn from the previous criticism, and this current setup prevents any of the story beats from ever really landing for the player. If Nintendo actually wanted to have a darker story that reaches the heights of Titans like Majora’s Mask, then it should’ve at least made a more prominent role for Zelda or kept that depressing atmosphere intact for the entire experience. To be fair, there is a major change for the titular character near the end of this game, but that, too, gets retconned, which feels like a cop-out. It just kind of feels like another cookie-cutter story, you know?

We’ve now discussed the gameplay and the story, so let’s talk about the visuals. They are gorgeous! Tears of the Kingdom brings back the stylised visuals reminiscent of Wind Waker and even Ghibli films, which is outstanding. Especially when they all line up during a thunderstorm or a sunset, making you stop for a moment and gaze out beyond the horizon. Now, in the shrines, the graphics are predictably different. But, somehow, they made them look a lot better when compared to before in terms of their ugliness and repetition. They’re still repetitive because there are many more of them this time, but they’re easier to look at now, and the music is much better, too. For the dungeons (which have gone through a ton of improvement, by the way), each has its own visual style, music, and atmosphere. This might be one of the best changes in the entirety of Tears of the Kingdom because the temples are what many people remember from these games, so changing up the style each time goes a long way. It’s still not Forest Temple levels of design, but hey, at least it’s something. Oh, and due to your new abilities, the shrines are better as well, and you can find some amazing loopholes or instead turn your brain off and be surprised by whatever nifty contraption the developers have come up with. Now, one of the main complaints about the previous title was its lack of music.

So while you’re not going to be hearing something like the Hyrule Field theme from Ocarina of Time in this game, the soundtrack is still much more prevalent, and sometimes it even feels like a song ripped straight out of Red Dead Redemption 2. The towns return, and all their themes sound great, which is to be expected, but no less appreciated. Since the world is much more populated, you would expect some new towns, and that’s exactly what happens as you come across various settlements, including a major one right in front of the castle. It’s called Lookout Landing, and it, too, has a banging theme which is very much appreciated. Seriously, all this effort to make Hyrule feel alive in terms of all the stuff you can do, the soundtrack, and the increased population validates Tears of the Kingdom as a sequel in a big way.

However, it still has some problems. As previously mentioned, dungeons have been greatly improved, but it’s what comes after that’s the problem. See, before you enter a dungeon, you have to help solve the town’s issues, which usually involves the leader of whatever race you’re assisting. Then, you enter the temple, clear out the enemies, and solve the puzzles with the help of the town’s leader, eventually leading to your encounter with the boss. So after that happens and the sage learns of their role in the story, they grant you their powers. And these powers create a ton of issues because instead of the Divine Beast powers being tied solely to Link and his Sheika Slate, they are now on his damaged hand, leading to five Sages following you throughout your entire adventure in spirit form. These five Sages always get in your way when you’re trying to do something very specific, and you’re constantly accidentally interacting with them instead of getting a Korok or killing an enemy. There had to be a better way to do this because it goes against one of the best parts of Breath of the Wild, which was the lack of contact sensitivity. You interact with the Sages via the A button, and that’s the same button used for a lot of other stuff, creating an experience that’s often confusing and a little clunky. Plus, these menus are terrible because of the constant scrolling and fumbling through several different tabs leading to you missing the thing you’re looking for nearly every time you open it up. Why not just use a radial menu like the one in Twilight Princess? They already used one for the ability menu, so why not use it for everything else? It just doesn’t make sense.

The performance can also take a big hit sometimes, and it will definitely have you wishing for a more powerful Nintendo Switch. It’s not the biggest deal, but it happens often enough to get in your way while fighting many enemies or doing a lot of things at once to get a little annoying after a while. Thankfully, this only occurs when a lot of stuff is happening on screen, and the rest of the time, the frame rate is locked at 30 frames per second. Still worth mentioning, though.

But even with all those issues, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is still a fantastic game. Nintendo has once again raised the bar for interactivity in an open-world setting, and it often reaches a peak far beyond its contemporaries. Its world, puzzles, atmosphere, and overall game design are some of the best in the history of the medium of videogames. So while its story and accessibility definitely missed the mark, you should absolutely play this Tears of the Kingdom when you get the chance because it really is that good.