IT’S tough to make out details on ground level when you’re exploring the Sky Islands.
So as my stamina flickers out while cruising through the clouds, I know it isn’t going to end well.
Tears of the Kingdom’s is not only vast horizontally, but vertically too.
Link can dive and maneuver himself in the air nimbly, but he won’t get far if he’s tired.
Of course, there’s always a back up: as long as you hit the water, you’ll always survive long falls.
I see a round, dark pool below and dive straight for it, knowing the water will save me.
There’s only one problem: there’s no water.
The round pool is actually a hole, spewing with gloom.
I drop straight through and continue to fall. I fall, through the ground of Hyrule, for just as long as I was falling through the sky.
At the last possible moment, the game graces me with enough stamina for a single second of my Paraglider, breaking my fall.
It’s too dark so I throw a Brightbloom Seed, and on contact with the ground, it lights up the surroundings – there’s an eye looking right at me.
Moments later, I’m dead.
It’s incredible.
Breath of the Wild was a game about making your own story.
Yes, there was a century-old war that sent Hyrule into turmoil, but the actual story was how you climbed mountains, camped out from the rain, went to war with Bokoblins in a canyon, or discovered a rare horse accidentally.
These anecdotes are the Breath of the Wild experience, not a carefully laid out linear dungeon romp. The freedom Breath of the Wild gives you, not just in which direction to choose, but how to traverse each field and mountain, is what allows you to craft stories.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom takes that concept and runs wild.
Instead of seeing a mountain and wondering which angle to start climbing it from, there’s so much more to factor into that seemingly simple decision.
A ground-level ascent is always on the cards, but how about dropping down on the mountain peak from a sky island, possibly ascending up from the Depths of the land, or even using a few single-use Zonai devices to help out?
Zonai devices can either come in single-use capsules that you can carry around with you, or be found littering the world – usually in the locations you need them most.
Instead of opting to run around and waste stamina climbing a hill, you can now craft a vehicle.
For example, you can use the Ultrahand ability to strap Fans to a Glider – perhaps a Cart with wheels to the bottom in order to gain speed on the ground, or maybe you want to go all the way and strap on rockets for an instant liftoff.
It fundamentally changes how you explore the world on land, in the air, or even sailing on the water, giving you more options than ever.
Breath of the Wild was an excellent open world base, and now you’re being given the tools to feel as creative as all of those absurdly choreographed Twitter clips we’ve all seen.
Zonai devices are powered by your Energy Well, which is another resource you can seek to upgrade and expand, if you really love building vehicles.
Tears of the Kingdom is more of a sequel than any other Zelda game before it.
Games like Link’s Awakening and Majora’s Mask may have included the same hero we know from past games, but Tears of the Kingdom reintroduces us to the same world.
Almost all of the characters we met previously have evolved over time, seeing their relationships and situations change.
The game routinely rewards you for remembering things that took place in the original, and they vary from these minor character moments, to substantial changes in layout and ways to navigate the world.
Case in point, you will be gliding and flying through the world more than ever before.
Nintendo doesn’t want you to simply soar over the toughest challenges in the game, mind.
You can fully kit out a Glider with as many Battery devices as you want, but eventually, it will give up the ghost, causing all of your attached devices to come crashing down to the ground.
Still, start from the right Sky Island and you can have some excellent success by traversing most of the world from up above, before diving through the clouds and Paragliding to your destination.
Ruins even fall from the sky, which you can use Recall on to float into the clouds with them, before either finding something unique, or diving closer to your target.
I had my doubts about retreading the old stomping grounds of Hyrule in a sequel and climbing the same mountains, following the same paths.
I didn’t want Tears of the Kingdom to simply be a repeat, and it’s not, thanks to the abundance of new options it tantalizingly dangles in front of your face.
But if you do want the same experience as Breath of the Wild, then it actually lurks deep below the ground, where you’ll even find a unique selection of tasks and quests.
When it comes to quests, Tears of the Kingdom takes a few more cues from conventional open world games.
There’s an Adventure Log and a surprising amount of Side Quests and Side Adventures, along with Shrine Quests.
Side Quests and Side Adventures usually involve talking to NPCs and accomplishing a variety of tasks – take out monsters in a camp to the West, collect some materials, complete a minigame, the usual selection – while Shrine Quests are tasks you complete in the overworld to be rewarded with a Shrine Blessing at the end.
Think BOTW’s Eventide Island, but more common. Many of these involve transporting a green gem from one sky island to another.
It might be hidden in a cave, or even be inside an overworld boss monster, but the real puzzle is in crafting a vehicle capable of taking it across the skies safely.
You’ll stock up on Side Quests and Adventures pretty much whenever you visit either a Stable or a main town, like Gerudo Town or Zora’s Domain.
Some of these will reward you with rupees or rare materials, but the best quests will give you fresh armor pieces which each have their own unique benefits – these are mostly similar to the first game, of course, but how you acquire them and what exactly they do has been changed up.
While you can mark Quests and Adventures to follow, the game never exactly waypoints each step of the way, more often leaving you to intuit clues from the Adventure Log quest descriptions – which are updated with each quest step.
I’ve barely even mentioned three of the four primary new abilities Tears of the Kingdom gives you.
Fuse literally fuses items to your weapons and shields, making them either more powerful, or intensely goofy.
Yes, you can attach a mechanical spring to your shield to bounce your enemies into oblivion, or you can simply attach a big rock to your rusty broadsword for a bit more damage, and the ability to smash through clusters of weaker rocks thanks to the blunt attachment – no more infinite bombs? No problem.
Recall rewinds time for a single object, reversing its trajectory and momentum, but you can get experimental with this.
Use Ultrahand to lift an object high into the air, put it down, climb aboard, and then use Recall to lift yourself up along with your chosen item.
Ascend, meanwhile, seems like the most limited ability of the bunch, but once you start experimenting, you realise its potential.
You can often enter buildings – or entirely new areas – from a cave below, using Ascend to pass through the ground and pop up above.
This is one of those techniques that seems very situational until you try to use it in a variety of locations.
That applies to everything you can do and see in Tears of the Kingdom.
With enough ingenuity – or Rockets attached to your glider – you can go anywhere, do anything.
The puzzles in Shrines are even loose enough with their rules to allow you to figure out your own solutions.
In one Shrine I was clearly tasked with bouncing a ball up a ramp to hit a target, but I just couldn’t figure out how to do it.
So I attached the ball to the end of a long pole I made from materials in the area, attached the ball to the end, and just jabbed at the target with it until it worked. And it did work – it almost always does.
Even something simple, like dragging a floating ball underwater, only for the water pressure to spit it back into the air at high speed, is replicated reasonably accurately here, and used as a method of puzzle solving.
It has flashes of Half-Life 2, when reasonably accurate physics were first used as an active game mechanic, only with the freedom that BOTW established in the first game.
The game does a wonderful job of “distracting” the player, too. Sure, there’s a main quest to pursue, but there are also more than 100 Shrines dotted about the landscape, leading your eye as you spot them in the distance.
Multiple times I was heading towards a Shrine, saw something in a forest or a ruin drop from the sky, take a quick detour, and hours later I was still taking detours, discovering new shrines, quests, items, enemies, and more.
Every time I turn Tears of the Kingdom on I think I’ve seen the bulk of the surprises it has in store, and every time I end up being completely wrong.
As a sequel, it represents one of the best direct follow-ups in all of gaming.
It constantly rewards a player with new surprises – and they are surprises precisely because you think you know what to expect from this incarnation of Hyrule at this point.
At each step, the game knows what you should expect and subverts it by taking you on an entirely new journey.
The routes are different, the world is different, and how you take it on is entirely different.
It’s telling that not a single Shiekah Slate ability from Breath of the Wild is still present – it sends the message that Tears of the Kingdom is a different beast, intended to be played in a new way.
It’s impossible to talk about some of those best surprises and moments without spoiling them entirely, but rest assured that Tears of the Kingdom’s dungeons and story have a bit more structure to them than before, and feel like a key part of the adventure, rather than functional-but-underwhelming Divine Beasts of BOTW.
Just sticking to Main Quests will still see you explore the world in some exciting new ways, but just as with BOTW, the best moments happen when you forge your own path around Hyrule.
It feels borderline impossible to sum up.
With Breath of the Wild’s unique open world approach, the ingenuity that made Half-Life 2 a classic, and some of the satisfying obscurity that made for some of Elden Ring’s best moments, Tears of the Kingdom is an absolute triumph.
It’s hard to put down, inventive, inspiring, and a whole bunch of other buzzwords too.
What it all boils down to is that Tears of the Kingdom is the best open world game of all time, and that would’ve been impossible without what came before.
Instead of being a disappointing retread of the same Hyrule, Tears of the Kingdom reinvents The Legend of Zelda and once again goes beyond what people expect from the series.
This is gold-standard game design and one of the best games Nintendo has ever released.
Score: 5/5
The new set of powers keep things feeling fresh.
Written by Dave Aubrey on behalf of GLHF.
