The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Review

Having thought about it for a considerable period of time now, I feel I can say with relative certainty that at no point in time have I thought to myself that what the Zelda franchise has been missing is buildable robots with functioning weaponized genitals. Having now had the experience, I’m not against it. That being said, when your Zelda game allows you to violate the Geneva Suggestions, it may or may not come with some caveats, and that’s certainly true of Tears of the Kingdom. This is a particularly challenging game to review with minimal to no spoilers so I will do my best – just bear with me.

To say that Breath of the Wild went over well is an understatement and so when Nintendo announced that the following Zelda game was in fact going to be returning to the world Breath of the Wild introduced us to, it got a lot of people very hot and bothered. While it was an easy win to just say it, actually pulling off what would essentially be a direct sequel to what some people consider the greatest game ever made would surely be easier said than done. How do you exactly improve upon something so highly rated and well received? Evidently, the answer to that question is to double the available map to explore and, with the power of a million mechanics behind you, turn the world into a nearly true sandbox.

Right off the bat Link is where you’d expect him to be – silently walking around behind Princess Zelda, making sure she doesn’t accidentally blow a tire and break a nail on a rock or something. It seems someone has been heavily vaping throughout Hyrule, but it seems to be mostly coming out from the bottom of the castle. Clearly, Tingle has broke bad. Zelda brings you along for a little spelunking to investigate and, like the good scholar she is, she notices that murals on the walls appear to be Zonai in nature. What are the Zonai? Well… as it turns out there’s a small chance they’re aliens that came to Hyrule and may or may not have listened to a 90s Will Smith song which precipitated the Hylian royal bloodline… Allegedly. Look, it doesn’t really matter right now, and Zelda agrees as you press on into the cave to come across something far more sinister – a particularly dehydrated Ganondorf. Unfortunately, he’s a light sleeper, and after waking up and reminding you how amazing Matt Mercer is on the microphone, Link is forced to intervene with his trusty sentient Master Sword which promptly gets shattered into several pieces before Link blacks out.

Link awakens (sorry I swear that’s unintentional) in the presence of Rauru – yes, that Rauru – who brings Link up to speed regarding Zelda’s disappearance and informs him the only reason he survived is thanks to hooking him up with a sweet new arm. Not only does it look cool, but you can do all sorts of new and exciting things with it which will come in handy for tackling that one thing Link can never quite cross off his honey-do list: killing Ganondorf. This is where you part ways, and you’re left to your own devices to explore what is essentially a tutorial zone in the sky. Unfortunately, someone forgot to tell Nintendo that while yellow is a nice colour in moderation, going all in on it like you’re gambling your life away in roulette is perhaps too bold. The entire opening zone is obnoxiously bathing in a shade of yellow second only to CD Projekt Red’s Twitter update cards for burning your retinas.

It'd almost be ok if it wasn’t for the fact that this opening zone goes on for far too long while managing to only just breach the surface of the mechanics you’ll be adding to your repertoire. Jokes aside, the first several hours of Tears of the Kingdom are a plodding, mind-numbing experience that not only does nothing to ground you in the world to make you feel you’re doing something important here but also only does a passible job at giving you the basic mechanics you’ll need to understand to be successful in your endeavours. A not insignificant number of people publicly bounced off the game because of this and given you can easily spend north of 4 hours wandering around R Kelly’s fever dream, I can’t really judge them for the decision.

Once you do manage to get your feet down on Hyrule ground, it doesn’t really get demonstrably better for quite some time. One of the biggest blunders Tears of the Kingdom makes is its entire lead-up to its core gameplay loop. In my opinion, a great open-world game that is character and story-driven needs to do a few things before truly letting the player loose upon the world. Ideally, it almost immediately plants you in a place where you get a sense of community and solidify your character’s purpose. It also wants to make sure that, while you’re on your own, you’re equipped with the knowledge to operate within the world based on the mechanics you have at your disposal. Lastly, it should all but railroad you until you’ve completed one cycle of the gameplay loop so that you know what it looks like before you spend the next thirty hours aimlessly wandering in an attempt to do anything that isn’t the main quest. Tears of the Kingdom doesn’t accomplish any of these things in the first 4 hours and arguably doesn’t accomplish two of these at any point in the game.

You’d think that given Link and Zelda have been widely known to be missing for a period of years that your old friends you come across and the other townsfolk would be as relieved to see you as they would be saddened to hear of Zelda’s continued missing persons status. Nope – the general reception you get is bordering on nonplussed, which doesn’t exactly help you care much about what’s going on, but that doesn’t stop them from just immediately dumping on Link and getting him involved in their shenanigans. As one would expect in a Legend of Zelda title, you’ll be visiting some Temples, and you’ll be killing some monsters. In between these set piece moments, you’ll be working your way through more than a few shrines again, and a host of other quests big and small whilst you trapes around Hyrule. How you complete all these tasks does of course differ dramatically from the Breath of the Wild experience since that fancy new arm you’ve got becomes the center of your gameplay world.

The core of this new set of mechanics is the Ultra Hand ability which is sort of like Breath of the Wild’s Magnesis ability on steroids. Not only can you pick up, rotate, and move an enormous amount of items in the world around you, but you can also attach items to one another with Fuse to create a load of useful and…less useful arts and crafts. Nintendo also felt nice enough to give you a dev hack in the form of Ascend, the ability to relive your most embarrassing moments in real-time with Recall, and more. All of these abilities can be used alone or in combination to tackle the many puzzles you may come across in your journey, and while there are obviously intended solutions to all of these conundrums, they really just let you do damn near anything you want if you can make it work. Being able to do just about anything to navigate, interact with, and solve puzzles in the world of Tears of the Kingdom is perhaps its greatest accomplishment and where I derived the majority of my entertainment. It also makes for a very unique experience – or at least one you won’t get among most of its peers.

That fuse ability? Not only good for building comedically long log bridges. Fuse also allows you to strap damn near anything to your melee weapons, shields, and arrows. Sadly, for the denizens of Hyrule, the calamity event that’s got everything so vaped up and gloomy has had an effect on the weaponry left behind, leaving them rusted and far less effective. Luckily, Link can fuse everyday household items and the remains of his slaughtered enemies to his arsenal to increase their power, grant them elemental stats, and more. While this doesn’t necessarily eliminate the tedium of having your gear degrade with use it did seem to lessen the impact of that system versus Breath of the Wild if only a little. Truth be told, I still didn’t find the combat particularly fun or engaging in Tears of the Kingdom, and so between that and not wanting to have to retrieve replacement weapons after breaking a few over the head of some tough mobs, I only fought when absolutely necessary. Thankfully, there aren’t many instances of combat where you can’t avoid it one way or another, and for that I am grateful. Oh, and yes – the Master Sword, despite being created by god, and in all its sentient glory, still runs out of energy and has a refractory period with all the disappointment you can piece together with that analogy.

When I did get to tackling those temples, I can’t say I was particularly thrilled with them. One of the temples was certainly far better than the others, and while the bosses you’ll face at the end of them are unique and generally fun, a majority of the temples are eerily similar and shockingly short – most taking longer to get to the temple than to finish them. In fact, two of the temples are nearly identical, both in how you reach the temple and the design. Speaking of identical, easily one of the most damning parts of Tears of the Kingdom is its all but cut-and-paste cutscenes and dialogue awaiting you at the end of the temples. We’re talking a few words swapped out to account for whatever area you’re currently in, and then the rest is a spitting image. Moreover, the one cutscene to rule them all does nothing to progress the story and barely adds any meaningful development to the characters. This results in a non-trivial amount of the main quest line feeling like it spins its tires for tens of hours and by the end of it all I was left with nothing to do but laugh at the absurdity of it all. So THAT was the im…you know what I’ll let you discover that one.

The temples aren’t the only requirements, nor are they the only place in which you can try to grasp what’s going on from a narrative perspective. You’ll also be seeking out memories found at what is Hyrule’s version of the Nazca Lines. These geoglyphs are spread across the map of Hyrule and the memories stored within them give more context but it’s not much and it’s made worse by the fact you can attain these memories in random order which muddies an already vague and minimal story. It’s also poor in that unless you binge-run all the glyphs, your acquisition of these memories could be many hours apart and lose a lot of impact. That’s not to mention one of the most impactful memories can be missed entirely and lose you access to the “perfect” ending. Many of the memories could have easily been part of the temple cutscenes to not only ensure they weren’t all the same damn thing but also give way more weight and a measured delivery of the story’s most important beats. The geoglyphs instead could have been left to the handful of existing memories that offer nothing but character flavour and other non-essential world-building to reward those who seek them out but instead, they’re a forced and awkwardly used plot vehicle and progression gate that hurts the story delivery more than it helps.

As you might have guessed, nearly all narrative progression is held close to the chest until the eleventh hour upon which they dump everything on you in short order. This is the most disappointing aspect of Tears of the Kingdom for me because I believe the story is the best modern Zelda has had post-Twilight Princess, and it’s sadly delivered in a truly horrible way that both drags along while somehow also rug-pulling its own biggest reveals which it doubles down on for good measure. I wish I could talk about it in more detail but it’s impossible without spoiling. I’d also have vastly preferred the available bonus cutscene given for the “perfect” ending be part of the standard ending as it ties up loose ends in a far more satisfying way instead of the standard ending you’re more likely to be rewarded with after your many hours of play. It’s a shame because, other than being occasionally annoying, the main character cast is fantastic, whimsical, and criminally underdeveloped given how much game time the main quest demands.

Granted I can’t just ignore talking about how much stuff there is to do in Tears of the Kingdom so let’s do that. There is an absolutely monstrous amount of things to get caught up in during your second trip to this version of Hyrule – arguably far more than Breath of the Wild even – but whether or not you’re enamoured with it is another story. You of course will have loads of side quests big and small as you talk with the townsfolk in the various towns and outposts, but you of course also get to look forward to the haunting task of collecting a small nation’s worth of koroks should you wish to upgrade your storage or hear Hestu’s jingle another million times. More importantly to me, there are a handful of “quests” that aren’t something you get a note for in your quest log and are more about you interacting with certain NPCs in certain ways that are more organic discoveries which feel super rewarding and make the world feel so much more alive. It’s a good thing they feel rewarding, because sadly not all of them actually result in even a tiny reward for your efforts, unfortunately.

Then there’s the Depths. Oh boy, the Depths. Underneath Hyrule, you now have access to the purgatorial darkness that is a mirror image of the land above called the Depths. It adds a massive amount of area to explore, and without much light, you’ll have to get creative which is the intent of course. Without getting spoilery, while you, of course, have to spend some time below, much of it is open for you to simply explore and acquire some fun items and tackle some challenges but they’re so…so very far apart which can sometimes make trips down south a bit dull despite the unknown. That’s actually a bit of a theme in Tears of the Kingdom. Between the Sky lands, Hyrule, and the Depths, there’s a plain silly amount of real estate here and much of it is devoid of anything interesting to see or do. It’s no small blessing that you can fast travel to shrines or use towers to get around efficiently by air because doing it all on foot or even by horse is, as far as I’m concerned, only for those who are truly head over heels and find themselves immersed beyond measure. Breath of the Wild felt a bit spread thin already, so taking a similar amount of content and sprinkling it across what might as well be twice the area doesn’t help keep things feeling very dynamic.

Some of that empty feeling may also be attributed to just how similar Hyrule feels coming from Breath of the Wild which makes sense given well over a third of it is a jumbled-up version of what you know. It was a bold move making a second trip to the well in this location and they clearly made some effort to make it feel different with mixed results. No other Zelda game has been such a direct sequel both in timeline and in location, and while some people have been quick to try and describe Tears of the Kingdom as Breath of the Wild’s Majora’s mask – it’s definitely not that but for the continuity of the story between games. Majora’s Mask felt much more like a wholly new experience, whereas Tears of the Kingdom feels closer to a DLC addon than a true sequel more often than not. Not that it is, of course. I can’t blame them for doing it, really, given the enormous success that Breath of the Wild had. Given just how much they crammed into this sandbox, and knowing how well it’s selling and will continue to sell, I do wonder what they’ll do with the next main Zelda title. Do they keep all the sandbox stuff? Do they leave it open world and stay clear of traditional dungeons and temples? I suppose that’s for another day.

So, what then about the elephant in the room? The elephant that’s sort of blurry and moves kind of janky and slow? Listen, I’ve played a hell of a lot of games in my time at cripplingly low framerates. I am a lover of the N64 after all. That being said, it’s very hard for me to grapple with any game that drops below 30fps these days. However, this is a pretty fringe exception. What Nintendo did to have all of these mechanics and this big open world run this well on a console that I’m pretty sure my Nokia 3310 could compete with is black magic. It’s sorcery plain and simple. It is so refreshing to play a game this big and complex without experiencing a single solitary bug. While understanding the monumental task they had to get it to run this well makes it a bit easier to stomach, the reality is that Tears of the Kingdom often looks very rough and runs just as rough in more than a few places. It might be targeting 30fps, but I’m also targeting 10,000 steps a day and I think we all can guess how that’s been going.

To put this into perspective, I’ve only had roughly three games give me a headache in all my years of degenerate-level gaming and now Tears of the Kingdom joins that list. I played it on my 65” C1 with moderate black frame insertion turned on to mitigate the issues but it was still not ideal, to say the least. You can actually see the four or so zones or strata in which the engine draws in detail and it’s almost entirely from Links's foot to the top of his head. You’re less likely to see it out in the wild but in shrines with the flat stone floor that has all that detail in it, it really stands out. Again, just so we’re clear, this is still absolutely wizardry, and I don’t think any other team would have been able to get this much out of the Switch, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t still very rough.

The art design does swoop in to save the day in some respects, primarily in the characters which is for most people ideal. I particularly love the designs of the Gerudo, though they always seem to knock that out of the park. The landscapes on occasion can still look great but depending on several factors they more often than not look flat and lifeless. A mid-2000s level of bloom does make up for a multitude of sins, as they say, but boy would I love to have been able to appreciate all this work in at least native 1080p at a constant 60fps. Maybe not that starting island, though…@%#^ that place.

What are the sights without the sounds, of course, and big shocker here but the sound design is top-notch, and the music is great…when you get to hear it anyway. The music is honestly kind of lacklustre much of the time you’re playing. It borders on minimalist ambient most of the time, and a lot of the combat music or other flourishes you’ll get are just not inspired – some of it like the “don’t listen to Led Zeppelin records backward or you’ll hear satan” stuff is just grating, at least to me. The temple music is all really good stuff thankfully although it makes you work for it and ends up leaving you only enjoying the fullness of it for a short time. Generally speaking, I just couldn’t shake the feeling that the music wasn’t present enough to help me enjoy just moving about the world and I hope in the future that changes.

The voice acting is hit or miss in English with Matt Mercer doing a lot of the heavy lifting as Ganondorf. Zelda’s delivery continues to be a bit too dramatic for my liking and got to be nails on a chalkboard after a while though I’ll chalk that up more to direction than the actress. I do think it’s long time that Zelda games be fully voice, aside from Link of course. The times in which Tears of the Kingdom decides to start and stop voice overs seems bordering on random and it’s often jarring. I really don’t think there’s an excuse anymore, and they could still include all the awkward but endearing grunts and grumbles that have marked the franchise’s NPC stylings for an age.

I really battled with how to reconcile my critical feelings for the game with my appreciation for the technical wizardry they pulled off without really any major bugs to speak of aside from item duplication which at this point is almost comedically canon in Zelda games. Truly, I want to be clear that I’m in awe of what they’ve done here from a technical standpoint. However, a game cannot be judged solely on its technical merits, even when it does make it feel that much more deserving versus its peers. Much the same, I can’t review a game solely based on nostalgia I may have for the franchise. Tears of the Kingdom has a story that is arguably top three in the franchise but is delivered in a horrific manner that undermines the best parts of its narrative. It’s a truly massive game, but like many like it, that scale requires substance and so unless you’re someone who enjoys going out of their way to use the sandbox tools to create your own fun, you may be like me and feel the world to be too sparse. The combat is serviceable but also creates work in the form of broken weapons, shields, and bows. The Fuse ability is remarkable in how it enables creative solutions to the game’s many puzzles, but it can be hard not to just use one of the more efficient builds to conquer it all, making many of the over 150 shrines feel monotonous.

I think many of you would have heard the old saying “greater than the sum of its parts.” Well, Tears of the Kingdom’s individual parts are greater than their sum. In a vacuum, that which makes up Tears of the Kingdom is impressive, but the way in which the parts have been brought together – much like many of my fusion projects gone awry – doesn’t do the parts much justice despite getting the job done. If you liked Breath of the Wild, it’s hard to argue you won’t like Tears of the Kingdom, but just be aware that you might have to lean on your love of the former to truly enjoy the latter.