The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom — Two Years Later
Despite groundbreaking leaps forward, Nintendo’s sequel to their open world magnum opus struggles to leave the impact crater of the original
We’ve all had a bad math teacher. It’s true that some just aren’t efficient teachers. Far worse, though, are the pedagogues who demand everything be done in their way. There are those lecturers who won’t simply settle for a correct solution, but need to see that students have used all the standard routes and prescribed formulas in order to get there.
On the other side of the aisle, there are those teachers who don’t care what method we’ve used, just so long as we arrive at the answer somehow. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was that teacher. With an unlimited amount of solutions to each of the problems the game presented, it was a video game squarely unlike any that had come before it. If our idea worked, no matter how bizarre or convoluted, the game allowed it.
If that involved cutting down a tree, magically freezing time, bludgeoning the fallen log until it was bursting with enough potential energy to go soaring, climbing aboard it, and watching in cackling disbelief as your makeshift tree vessel launches over mountaintops, it was permissible.
This series’ first foray into the open-world RPG experience brought such a groundbreakingly open format for exploration that people are still unearthing discoveries about the game over half of a decade later. Upon its arrival onto the scene of gaming in 2017, it was a breath of fresh air. It wasn’t long before The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild began being hailed as a turning point in video game history.
It’s perhaps no surprise that its sequel, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, was one of the most eagerly anticipated video games of all time upon its May 12th, 2023 release.
Whether it could live up to the standard set by its previous iteration was something many doubted possible. Having been out for two years now, its legacy is one largely marked by mixed feelings among players. Where movies can often take years for their place in the history of cinema to become clear, the fast-moving world of video games is quick to decide each game’s fate.
For a new release to retain its player-base for a full four seasons is uncommon in our current ecosystem. New games come out and attention drifts toward the shiny new object. It’s not because The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom didn’t break new ground in the world of video games that it failed to live up to its predecessor. Because it’s set in an alternate and expanded version of the same Hyrule Kingdom from over half of a decade prior, even in its grandeur, it’s familiar.
The shock and reverence that the virtual world elicited back in 2017 was something no sequel could recreate, no matter what tweaks, expansions, and improvements were made. If it wasn’t reinventing the wheel from the ground up, people were poised to be disappointed.
But reinvention runs the risk of losing fans every bit as much as a rehash. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom strikes a balance between the two. There are few fans who loved the first who won’t find something to cherish in this second open-world Zelda entry. But in playing too much of the same hand from six years earlier, there’s a novelty that’s sadly lost.
Because video games are interactive experiences, the opinions that form around them are often more subjective and circumstantial than those that mold around movies. Nostalgia runs deeply in those games we most feverishly button-mashed our way through as children.
Even while I can acknowledge The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom as the superior game in almost every conceivable facet, it’s not a game whose memories come with the same feelings of warmth and awe that the original instilled in me. Even with a widened world and augmented array of tools, the sequel never quite amounted to that enchanting experience I had when first exploring a boundless Hyrule.
There’s no overstating what a staggering leap forward this 2023 follow-up represents. Where the original stood as something unbelievable when it was first released to the world, this latest iteration is something that many developers hailed as borderline sorcery.
Perhaps Paul Tassi explained it best in his Forbes article “No One Understands How Nintendo Made The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.”
“… there’s one consistent question that keeps coming up. How did Nintendo make this game? Not as in, how did Nintendo make a great game after a history of making great games. But as in, the actual development of it, because things that you can do within Tears of the Kingdom have baffled many game developers who simply do not understand how Nintendo could do everything they’ve done … and to do it on the [Nintendo] Switch of all places?”
One of the game’s most impressive feats is its ability to appear so mind-bogglingly endless while being confined to technical standards that were already dated by the time the Nintendo Switch hit store shelves back in 2017.
For a game this large in scope to be encased in a file size well under 20GB is an achievement that could have only been accomplished by Nintendo. “So while the Switch is still hard limited in terms of graphics, resolution and frame rate, what Nintendo has been able to execute in this engine on this hardware is nothing short of a miracle,” Tassi later stated.
It’s true that The Legend of Zelda has been wowing fans with its broad and mysterious worlds since as far back as the days of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). But The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was an undisputed series first.
The mechanics of the game were so flexible that they could be bent and abused in ways that have made developers sigh in disbelief. The navigation was so free in nature that it lent itself to manipulation in a way that likely no game before it ever had. But the opportunity to bypass the commonly taken roads was never something that made the game feel cheap or glitchy; it was part of its genius.
The ability to soar over mountains in self-made flying machines wasn’t something the developers intended people to do, but they created such an open system with such a diversity of tools available that it left the door open for just about anything players could dream of. It invited an unprecedented level of ingenuity.
What felt masterful back in 2017, though, has only been expanded upon with this newest release. The amount of liberties granted to gamers is something that feels borderline overwhelming. Where the previous Zelda entry allowed people to cleverly vault the obstacles in their path, this new one gives them the ability to leap maniacally over them with self-styled and shoddily MacGyver’d machines.
This latest version of Hyrule is likely the most sprawling and varied world that Nintendo has ever created. The world of its predecessor already felt as though it would take years to explore in its entirety, but this sequel has managed to grow intimidatingly more massive in nearly every regard.
The mountains in the distance can all be climbed, even if walking there in-game would take the better part of a day in the real world. And on that walk there, the player is likely to encounter enough happy distractions that they’ll forget what it was that they were even traveling toward to begin with.
Whether we’re clunkily traversing the world by assembling car-planes, leisurely strolling luscious fields of green, or catapulting ourselves through the sky like cannonballs is up to each user. If we want to reach those distant peaks, there’s a comical variety of ways we have of getting there.
So many games within the RPG genre create enormous, beautiful worlds and then leave us feeling restricted in our ability to explore them. Games can be massive in their size, but still leave gamers feeling as though they’re constantly working within the scope that developers have established.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is a world that is whatever players want to make of it. Whether that manifests as sprinting toward the goalpost, building unruly log bridges to scale chasms, gliding calmly through clouds, questionably crucifying loveable leaf creatures, attaching frozen steaks to shields in order to go careening through chasms, or bombarding bosses with avant-garde sculptures is up to individual players and their admirably varied whims.
Though The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom doesn’t revolutionize the world of video games with its graphical fidelity or frame rates, it’s important to remember that it’s an experience confined to a console leaps and bounds less strong than its competition.
The ability to provide all that the game does on the 2017 system stands as a crowning achievement of the ages. When so many of the most high-profile video games on the most powerful consoles in years past have been plagued by a menagerie of bugs and game-breaking glitches, what Nintendo has created here proves all the more shocking. While it may not achieve the same legacy status as the previous Zelda title, there’s little use denying that it’s one of the most whimsical, sprawling, impressive, and inventive games ever created.
This article was originally published on Medium.
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