The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom has been
given the near-impossible task of following of one of the greatest games ever made. The Legend of
Zelda: Breath of the Wild. A game designed around seeing something in the distance and saying, Wow.
Then riding, climbing, gliding, launching, and falling your way over to it while being constantly
distracted along the way. Ooh, piece of candy. Ooh, piece of candy. Ooh, a piece of candy.
This gameplay loop results in one of the most liberating open-world experiences I've ever
played, set on a map that is nothing less than a masterclass in level design. I couldn't
even imagine how this formula could have been taken any farther, but then Tears of the
Kingdom comes along and makes Breath of the Wild feel like a prototype to what's likely
the greatest sandbox ever made in video games. But the more I played Tears of the Kingdom, the more I started to realize that it wasn't
giving me the same feeling that Breath of the Wild did. And I think tears of the kingdom's
greatest feature may have come at the cost of what made the first game so special. And
I am very conflicted, to say the least. So I wanted to take some time and talk about
it. I'm not here to review Tears of the Kingdom. I'm just here to give some of my thoughts and
experiences on one of the greatest games I’ve ever played. So sit back, relax, and let a guy alone
in his bedroom tell you about The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Across five years, two
playthroughs, one of them being on master mode. I spent over 400 hours playing Breath of
the Wild, exploring every corner of the map, completing the main game and all of the DLC.
It's my favorite game, causing me to get art on my wall and the collector's book, which
comes to the little glass spirit orb. But even though I hold the game in such high regard, I can
still acknowledge that the game wasn't perfect. The weapon durability system divided fans
the most, with players either hating it or loving it. The inventory system
could be super clunky, and it's most apparent when you're cooking something,
and you're scrolling through inventory, trying to find all the items, and then you find
them all, and then you miss the cooking pot, just for you to then pick them all up
off the floor and then do it again. These things and others sucked, but
despite its flaws, exploring Breath of the Wild was incredible. It is one of
the most beautiful games I've ever played, from its visuals to its music. And no game
for me has been able to recreate the genuine sense of getting lost in a world where you're so
excited to find out what's around every corner. Until I played Elden Ring, which pretty much
nailed it, but that's a totally different conversation. So surprising nobody, I was very
excited one night, alone in the dark, illuminated by the light of my screen, watching Nintendo
Direct when they ended the show on one more thing. This teaser officially kicked off the four-year
hype train, where Nintendo, little by little, gave us more information on the true scope of the
game. But despite what the trailers were showing, none of us could have ever anticipated
what we were about to be able to do with these creative tools. Fuse allows us
to combine any two items and make our own weapons like putting a cannon on a
shield, a flamethrower on your sword, or putting an electric eyeball on
your arrow to track down an enemy. Recall is allowing us to reverse time
on all the objects around us. Ascend is letting us go through any ceiling above
us. And Ultrahand and lets you build any vehicle your mind can imagine. From cars to
planes to boats to whatever this thing is. And what do you think the Internet does as
soon as they get their hands on these tools, they make giant stick figures with
flamethrowers and Korok rotisserie machines. With great power comes great responsibility.
Ok, in fairness. That's just what they did in the first few days. But if you go on now, you're
going to see so many insane builds coming out of this game. I'm seeing mechs of all shapes and
sizes. I'm watching people recreate Star Wars vehicles like pod racers, x-wings, and tie
fighters that let you go in first person, I'm seeing mono wheels, tanks, multi-stage rockets,
three-axis gimbals, spinning death machines. I can keep going, but there is so many
insane things coming out of this game. It took me tens of hours for me to even
realize the capabilities of the tools in my hands. In the tutorial, the most
I use Ultrahand for was putting fans on the back of minecarts and building
longer and longer bridges out of logs. But then one day, I was building a vehicle,
and I dropped it, and I was like, Oh, maybe I could. Oh, and then I grabbed
it out of the air with Ultrahand, and I was like, Oh my God, it clicked.
I can take all these tools around me, and I can combine them together. And then
all sorts of things started to click for me. I could take platforms and then move them
around and then use reverse time on it to make my own custom elevators. I could
just build contraptions specifically to help me use Ascend to get to ceilings I
can't reach. It is not an understatement for me to say that these are some of the most
impressive creative mechanics I've ever seen in a video game. We've seen building your own
weapons and building your own vehicles before. But that's typically found in sandbox-first games
like Kerbal Space Program or Garry's Mod. So when you think about it in the context of an open world
with the story, combat, dungeons, and puzzles, it is a true testament to the master craftsman
at Nintendo that this game can hold any semblance of narrative and level structure and not just
crumble under the weight of its own possibilities. But for better or worse, the game also doubles
down on many of the core features that were in Breath of the Wild. The combat system makes a
return and functions in the exact same way now, including all the enhancements from Fuse and
Ultrahand. Weapon durability is back without any noticeable changes. The inventory has
been given some small quality life updates, like a quick access menu, and now you don't
have to close the chest to reopen it every time your inventory is full. A lot of people
just dropped the first game entirely because they were just bored or overwhelmed as
soon as they left the tutorial area, And Tears of the Kingdom functions the exact same way to the point where, for example,
when you get to the first town, there's a questline you can start that
unlocks many of the core abilities for your main piece of equipment. You can leave
the town never to return, play the whole game, and never even realize you're missing these
abilities. I can see why that's annoying, and it could turn a lot of people off, but at the
same time, this is why I find the game so amazing. It creates these stories that you then get
to go tell your friends where you're like, Oh, I did this thing, and I found this other
thing after. And then your friends like, Oh, I didn't do that thing, but I went over here,
and I found nothing and yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, because odds are your friends are on
a completely different path than you are. And it creates these stories to tell
each other versus just being like, aye bro, how far are you in the game? This
all means, if you like the first game, you're going to love the sequel. And if you
didn't like the first game, you're probably not going to like this one either. And the
same can be said about the story in this game. Just like the first game, the story is told
through flashbacks, text boxes, and shortcut cutscenes. By the nature of the game's design,
not pushing you in any direction and letting you do what you want to do, it does take away from
all the urgency to any of the stakes in the story. It's incredibly hard to push a story forward
and let a player do whatever they want to do. And I don't think I can ask for more
outside of what Nintendo's already done to balance between the two. With
that said, Tears of the Kingdom’s story is way more compelling than Breath of the
Wild. Each area that the main story takes you to feels much more impacted by the
events that are taking place. And after completing each area, your actions have
a very visible effect on the landscape. The game also does a much better job of immersing
you because it has traveling with companions and fighting alongside groups of NPCs. Just
these few things did a lot for attaching me to the world where the last game made me feel
much more disconnected. There's also multiple moments in the story that are just gorgeous, or
really fun to play and just like had me going, but I understand this won't be for everybody,
but we don't play these games for the story. We play these games to explore the world
and play in the sandbox. And this brings us to the part where I feel the most
conflicted. In Breath of the Wild, traversing the environment required a different
strategy depending on where you were. Each region subtly encouraged and limited certain modes of
travel. When you're in Hyrule Field, your horse is the best way to get around because it limits
your paraglider with nothing to jump off of. But then you get to the Elden region, and you
can’t bring in your horse. So now running and paragliding is the best way to get around. Once
you get into the desert, now you can’t jump off of anything, and you can bring your horse in, so
shield surfing becomes a fast way to get around. The game carefully balances what you can and can't
do in each environment to keep the gameplay fresh. The game ensured that no single form of
movement would dominate in all scenarios. By tastefully limiting the methods of
travel, it forced you to engage with each environment's challenges uniquely.
And then it created a variety of gameplay experiences throughout the game. But Tears
of the Kingdom works a little differently. I haven't been the most creative when
it came to building vehicles so far. Most of the time, my vehicles are
just consisting of a few parts, or I'm just using whatever the game's prompting me
to use in front of me. And after I saw this thing, it became my go-to vehicle in most
situations. But I enjoyed making boats to travel around the coast or making
cars to go up mountains or go off-roading. It just kept the game fresh, changing up
what vehicles. I was getting around it, but it quickly became apparent to me that nine
out of ten times, the fastest way to get around was flying, and the game doesn't really make it
that hard to do. Let me explain where I'm going with this by giving you a few experiences I had, I
first started having these thoughts when the game asked me to climb Death Mountain.
I get to the base of the mountain, and my first instinct is to build a little flying
machine to start going up the side. It takes me about 20 seconds to get halfway up the mountain,
and I realize that there's a minecart track that's snaking around the mountain that takes you up. I
think to myself, okay, well, that might be cool. So I hop back to the bottom, get on the track, and
it starts this whole five-minute sequence where I'm riding up and using my new sage power to fight
off enemies that are fighting me on the track. I thought to myself, Wow, that was pretty sick.
I'm really glad I did that. But then I get there, and I'm like, Oh, is there other times that
I might have missed something like that? I then find myself in the Fire Temple, and
the fire temple has this really impressive minecart system in it. The dungeon has you solving
puzzles to get higher and higher up the track. And it took me about 30 minutes to get halfway,
and I got a little stuck. I'm sitting there for about 10 minutes or so, weighing through
my options, trying to figure out what to do. And then I realize, Oh, I can
just build a flying machine and skip over the entire minecart track.
I build one real quick, and I hop in, and it takes me only 15 minutes from that point
forward to finish the entire rest of the dungeon, including the boss fight. Then later, I'm in
the desert, traveling through the sandstorm. It's supposed to be this part of the
game where your map doesn't work, and you're stumbling through the storm trying
to find your way. They put these little gusts of wind throughout the whole thing, and
then you can pick up and then see where you're at and get a sense of direction
and then go back in and get lost again. As I was traveling through the storm the whole
time, I'm sitting there thinking to myself, Well, I want to experience this. This
is a unique part of the game. I want to see what the developers have made. This is
pretty cool. But I also know at any point, I could just build a flying machine and skip
this entire thing, and it would be faster. I decided, You know what, I'm just
going to make a little sand sled and zoom around. I get to the part
where I need to find the sand temple, I'm zooming around on my sand sled, and I'm
about a third of the way in the puzzle. I see something out in the distance.
I think that's where I need to go. So I head that way, and I got lost. I'm
thinking to myself, Oh, this could be this whole cool experience where I'm lost in
the sandstorm, trying to find my way back, you know, kind of the whole point
of the sandstorm. Need to peak over, get your bearings, get back in, you know?
But I'm like, this is taking too long. I build a flying machine, I get above the storm,
and it takes me 3 minutes to finish the rest of the puzzle. So this is where I'm conflicted. I
understand what makes Tears of the Kingdom amazing is its ability to allow you to approach any of
these scenarios in any way you want. And as I said earlier, these are some of the most impressive
creative tools I've ever seen in a video game. I felt like these tools really hit their
stride for me while I was in the shrines. Most of these shrines are just giving me a
bunch of Lego pieces and letting me figure out how I wanted to finish the shrine. And
it was always super satisfying for me to find these solutions in my own way. And I enjoyed
it way more than I did In Breath of the Wild. And I really like the way these tools
work for the open world puzzles, like when you have to make the stands
for the Hudson Construction Company, or every time you have to get the stable
trotters to the fairies by making a vehicle out of their carriage, it was really satisfying
for all these puzzles and the shrines when your answer was the right answer, and it
obviously wasn't the intended answer. And I feel like this is a lot of the charm of the
game where you feel like you're cheating in a lot of these puzzles, and the game's just letting
you do it, and it works. And in that context, cheating is fine. But the thing is, I
don't want to feel like I'm cheating myself out of an experience in the
open world. In Breath of the Wild, I loved coming across all these different
handcrafted experiences. They forced me to change my playstyle and offer different
gameplay opportunities that the whole game, the game will put these creative restraints
on me. And then the path of least resistance would often force me to try something new.
But in Tears of the Kingdom, a game of far less restraints, way too often the path of least
resistance was the same thing flying over it. The game asks you to build vehicles all
the time, and every time I decided not to build a flying machine, it felt like I
was intentionally making the game harder on myself instead of actually being put
in a scenario that requires a different approach. With all that being said, I still
love this game. I still took the boat rides, drove off-road, and rode my shield
in all the appropriate places. And every time I decided to take one of these
approaches, I really felt the magic that this game was trying to give by giving us so many
other ways to explore the world. And I haven't even mentioned how amazing the depths in the sky
islands were to explore, and it's really worth noting that I didn't feel the same way exploring
these two areas as I did on the base map. And it has to be because these two areas
were built with these new tools in mind. While the base map, aside for a few tweaks
here and there, definitely wasn't designed with the same intentions. I don't think in
any way that the experiences I've had with the game take away from how amazing this game
is and how incredible these mechanics are. I just really wish I didn't have such an easy
way to skip so much of this great content that the developers have made for me to experience.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is a true achievement. Very few games have ever
gotten me this excited about games as a medium. The level of creative expression
that this game gives players to explore. One of the best-made open worlds is unheard of,
and I don't think we're going to be able to see any game do anything like this for years, if
not a decade, to come. In a gaming landscape, we've become so accustomed to buggy and unfinished
AAA releases. It feels like a true miracle that a game of this quality and this scope is releasing
on a Nintendo Switch. The distance that Nintendo has put themselves ahead of the competition can
only be met by very few players in the industry. Only true masters of their craft could
have ever pulled off a game like this, and I think everybody owes it to
themselves to go out of their way and try, what's my new favorite game, The
Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Well, if you're still here, thank you so much for watching. This video took me
a few weeks to put together. I've never done something like this before, but
it was a lot of fun doin. If you like the video, please leave a like, if you want to see more, consider subscribing. If you agreed or
if you disagreed with what I had to say, please leave a comment down below. And
yeah, that's about it. Thank you. Bye.
