Tears of the Breath of the Kingdom of the Wild

I've beaten the Fire Temple and played enough otherwise to form some reasonably-supported opinions.

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Tears of the Kingdom is like Breath of the Wild, but just slightly worse, such that the moments I'm having the most fun are those that are just replicating Breath of the Wild.

Note how those are moments, interspersed in the greater experience of playing the game. We'll come back to that.

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Tears of the Kingdom is like Elden Ring, in the sense that there is a large, visually impressive open world to explore. It is absolutely nothing like Elden Ring in every other way, and I think it would be markedly improved if it was more like Elden Ring and less like itself.

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Tears of the Kingdom is not a sequel to Breath of the Wild, because that would entail having some manner of narrative connection to the previous game. The locations are the same, some of the characters are the same, but it doesn't matter because the events of the first game have been memory-holed. Calamity Ganon is mentioned once (in my play time) in a character profile - even in the opening sequence the events of the first game simply aren't mentioned.

The Guardians, one of BotW's instantly recognizable aesthetic features - are gone. Shekiah technology is an afterthought, limited to the towers - different towers this time. The most continuity I've seen so far is Master Koga yelling at me for knocking him down a pit, and that's played as a joke. I don't even know how much time passes between the prologue and the start of the game, it feels like it could be anywhere from a few months to over a decade.

I am firm on my soapbox that the idea of a Zelda timeline is nonsense. There is no series less interested in continuity than this one. Even games with no continuity care more about it than Zelda, because at least those games don't pretend to care.

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The story adds nothing to my enjoyment of the game, and is not worth inclusion in this review. I wasn't expecting Gene Wolfe, but if it's going to be such a barren narrative why is it here to begin with.

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The opening sky island should get a prominent spot in the annals of bad tutorial levels: it's overly long, difficult to navigate, generally boring, and does not give you the glider, which is the most important item in the game.

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I had to look up how to get the glider, because I was afraid that they had removed it and were going to force me to use zonai mechanisms as a replacement. Good thing I did, too, given how the glider is locked behind part of the main quest. Now, it's not like it's a long way into that quest, but in a game like this who the hell does the main quest first? They went and locked the most important part of the game, with no indication that it was there, behind something that most players will go out of their way to avoid considering the conventions of the genre. Absolutely mind-boggling.

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The game gets a lot better once you get on the surface and start running around and exploring. This is the game at its best, when it is just you, some interesting thing in the distance, and the geography between you.

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The lack of controller remapping is unacceptable. If your game is more complex than selecting things from a menu, it needs to have some way of remapping buttons. Especially when it decides to have a control scheme that bears no resemblance to any similar game on the market and a couple hundred hours of Elden Ring is a hell of a muscle memory to overcome.

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For a game about running around and climbing on everything, it's impossible to do a running jump without having to form THE CLAW, because run and jump are mapped to bottom and top buttons.

Adding insult to wrist injury, you can swap the run and jump buttons - the only remap available in the game - which does nothing because it still means you have to use THE CLAW.

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I like having wells and caves. While they don't really provide anything new they are an essential Zelda thematic element that was previously missing.

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But there's no instrument to play, for a second game in a row, and that feels way out of whack. Especially for a game with so much environmental interaction, you'd think songs to change weather or time of day would be extremely valuable.

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The new enemy selection remains pretty anemic: aerowanas, horriblins, boss bokoblins, like-likes and the hand-shoggoth, that's all I can name off the top of my head.

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There's a very rare animation where Link will stub his toe while opening a treasure chest and my partner got it on her first one. It's a fun little gag, I'm glad it's there.

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Back to controls, the Ultrahand controls poorly enough that, when combined with the intro sky island's dullness, I very nearly gave up then and there. The game wants you to precisely orient items in a 3 dimensional space and then gives you only two axes of rotation to do it. Awful, frustrating learning curve you have to bumble through before you learn the knack of orienting the object to yourself and then changing it from there to what you need in 45 degree intervals.

The fact that you are forced to wiggle the joystick to detach parts where there are THREE unused face buttons is ludicrous, though.

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The Fuse power is honestly a pretty good way of making weapon degradation a worthwhile mechanic, because it means even trash weapons have some value.

Unfortunately actually using the damn thing is nothing but trouble, because Nintendo, in their great wisdom, saw fit to allow you to fuse something from your inventory by using a hotbar but only when using a bow. If you want to attach something to that sword in your hand, you have to open up the menu, scroll to the item, drop it on the ground, make sure you have Fuse active, use Fuse, and then select if it's going to your item or shield. Bow fusion is 3 button presses and a joystick scroll, while doing the same thing form your sword is at minimum 2 (if you have fuse already equipped and an item you want to fuse on the ground) often 4 buttons and a joystick scroll and very often 5/6 if you have to dump things out of your inventory and . It should be two presses and a scroll: One press to bring up the scroll bar, then another to fuse.

UI and UX so cumbersome that I will go out of my way to not interact with it, even if it makes the game harder for me. This will be a recurring theme.

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The implication of "weapons are all corroded and shit now because resurrected Ganondorf has absorbed their cumulative ability to do violence" is so, so good. Gold star on that one.

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Those koroks are going to stay stranded if it means one less opportunity to engage with the Ultrahand.

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You still can't cook multiple meals at once, trade in multiple sets of shrine blessings at once, upgrade multiple pieces of armor at once, or unlock multiple korok seed rewards at once.

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Combat is terrible. It was bad in BotW and it's worse here because they skewed the balance something fierce - you get one shot (or nearly one shot) by most enemies even hours and hours in. Attacks are poorly telegraphed, enemies rarely stagger, we still have no I-frames on that dodge, and armor is now both even rarer and more difficult to upgrade (the Great Fairies are now locked behind sidequests so if you don't stop in at the one specific stable you are shit out of luck without a guide).

Just give us a dodge with I-frames, I beg.

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Looking at some online conversations, it seems that they changed from enemies scaling to your progress to specific difficulty tiers, which means that there is an intended path in Tears and that is garbagio. "Go do the dungeons in whatever order" was a highlight of Breath, and while it's still possible here, it's a right pain when the grand open world of "go where the heart desires" turns right around to say "but you REALLY should go to the Rito village first."

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In both Tears and Breath I find myself dreading the major dungeons, because it means I'm going to be cut off from my favorite part of the game (Applied Geography) and stuck with annoying companion characters. The experience is never as bad as I fear, and thankfully the dungeons are visually different this time around, but I'd rather not have the annoying companion characters.

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This series is in love with remixing elements of prior games but never the ones I personally want. How dare they not cater to my whims /s

For real though where's Midna. And the Minish. Bring back Kinstones you cowards. Stick the Twili in the underworld regions, they'd fit right in.

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I actually do like exploring the underworld, despite how it is objectively pretty open and barren - those poe souls are all the excuse I need to keep exploring, because the easiest way to get someone playing a video game to engage with the video game is the means to acquire cool outfits. I like it more than the sky islands.

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The tip of Rauru's nose looks like a little smile from some angles and it instantly voids any gravitas he might have had (he didn't have much to begin with, I don't like the design, the queen's is better)

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I know that Japanese media really loves super advanced ancient civilizations, but we've literally already got one.

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A tear-shaped stone possessed by someone who goes back in time to set up events that will have a cascading effect in the future is certainly not a Wolfe reference but I am having a hilarious time imagining that it is. Link as the alternate Severian, a man possessing no internal monologue whatsoever who also gallavants around the world with no thought to his own personal safety.

 

Damn. We'll never get that game.

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Ah, my favorite character type; the intentionally-hideous, screeching, "funny" character. A bane upon them. But he gives me gear so I will endure it.

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All my complaints taken into account, I am still playing the game, and I am still having fun. Not as much fun as with Breath, and not as much fun as a lot of other games that are not limited to Elden Ring. I have grown to tolerate many of the poor design choices, as I suspect I did back when I played Breath of the Wild. The luster has certainly worn off, even if Applied Geography is a gameplay loop you can't really get anywhere else.

I just wish it was attached to a better game.