Breath of the Wild to Tears of the Kingdom
~ Opinion ~
Full disclosure: I played Breath of the Wild wrong.
The game that recently topped Edge's 100 Greatest Games of the Last 30 Years. A defining game of the last generation, built on the shoulders of giants and casting a long shadow over all other open-world games. Arguably the shiniest jewel in Nintendo's crown. Inspiring. Influential. Nigh on impossible to imitate.
Its wealth, depth and breadth of ambition speaks to an intention: that this world was meant to be savoured, investigated, explored. It isn't just an adventure, it's a life of adventuring. It asks you to spend time in its world, learn its ways and watch its stories unfold.
I'm sure that playing Breath of the Wild in this way - savouring its timeless art design, investigating its wealth of secrets, exploring the limits of its systems - was a beautiful experience that could stretch for eight years right up until the sequel landed this May. But that wasn't my experience.
I finally committed to finishing Breath of the Wild in January this year, in time for Tears of the Kingdom's release. Which put me in a certain mindset: I shall reach the end. I shall focus on the critical path and I shall not lose momentum. I shall not explore every inch nor master every mechanic. Playing the game with this determined forward march brought out a distinctive quality.
Hyrule is a hostile place.
Setting forth on my first proper quest (the first of four main 'sections' of the game), I was almost immediately trapped behind a vast river, at which point I scratched my head and assumed I'd missed something in a rush to progress. Surely the main path would be, if not easy, at least straightforward? Later, in Eldin, I burst into flame. I died of thirst in Gerudo Desert. Or shrivelled up like a prune, I'm not sure which. Wherever I went, there were hard boundaries without clear ways across.
I know, I know. There are signposts - characters who gossip, revealing methods of passage into treacherous zones - but I wasn't taking the main road through town. Why would I, when I could just head in straight line to the next objective?
Anyway, the greatest magic lies out in the wild. Only, I didn't so much explore Hyrule as traverse it. Over short distances, this basically meant fannying about lots, climbing wet rocks, slipping down wet rocks, refusing to give up. Over long distances (and in Breath of the Wild, there are some long distances) this meant fixing my gaze on a map marker and running for minutes on end. It's not that the landscape is bare, but let's say... naturally expansive. It's meant to pique curiosity (as in, "Oo, what's that over there?") but the way I was playing, my cross-country runs were instead spent scoping out the terrain, dreading the mountains on the horizon and managing exhaustion. I mean stamina.
Horses, you say? Horses.
As much as the image of Link galloping gracefully across the fields holds a certain amount of truth, it hardly represents the bulk of my experience with horses here. Half of my photo album would be me startling horses and getting immediately stroppy. The other half would be me sailing through the air, face slapped with the realisation that my stamina meter was far too meagre for the requisite bucking bronco bonding session. Being completely honest, these experiences were by-products of my impatient playstyle. I rode some horses, yes, and they sure made some journeys quicker. But more often than not, I had no idea where to find the nearest stables and continued stubbornly on foot.
Countless things do draw the eye if you take only a moment to glance around. Often, when I hear people talking about Breath of the Wild, they will mention things that mean nothing to me. The Lord of the Mountain, you say? Part of me does wish I'd taken the time to discover all of Hyrule's hidden secrets. But part of me considers that those I did find, often killed me. Whether you get lost in a terrifying forest, trapped in a humungous labyrinth or eaten by something in the desert, there are plenty of things in Hyrule that seem hidden for a reason.
Over time, I begin to realise how even the towers can be devious little challenges in themselves. Heavily guarded or with concealed ascents, not a few left me unexpectedly stumped. But I never gave in! Which in a way, is another part of why life in Hyrule is so gruelling: stumbling upon difficult areas time and again makes me think, "Surely, I can do this!" So like any Dark Souls player worth their repetitive strain injury, I proceed to bang my head against towers, field bosses and shrines, determined to win. Determination becomes salt in the wounds.
This characterised my play throughout Breath of the Wild. Despite my intentions to stay on the critical path, whenever I spotted a Lynel, I locked it in my sights like I'm the Predator and so help me god I would take it down. When I finally reach the castle at the end of the game, the proliferation of Guardians I take as a personal parrying challenge, which eats hours of my time even as I tell myself: I just want to get to the end of the story.
Gritted teeth and sweated brow. Beaten armour and broken blades. Exhaustion and determination. Besting Breath of the Wild was to overcome a hostile landscape.
And then comes Tears of the Kingdom.
A bold decision, when videogame sequels face so much pressure to expand their worlds, to reuse the same Hyrule for such a hotly anticipated game. But like so many of Nintendo's bold decisions, in hindsight it feels like the only choice. The trepidation we all felt knowing we would return to spaces already so thoroughly explored was all part of Tears of the Kingdom's playful allure.
Letting us begin in the sky before taking us back down to earth ensures that, wherever we are, we can always glance up and decide, 'Now let's go there.' Whereas before, such a determination might have been met by an obstacle laden trek, in this case your destination is instantly, starkly out of reach. On the one hand, there is an implicit challenge to the vast skies that you must cross. On the other hand, there are your new superpowers. Superpowers, including the towers.
Few towers in Tears of the Kingdom are as difficult as their predecessors and every single one is exciting in a way that leaves me wondering how any forthcoming game can possibly repeat the towers-to-reveal-map trope without disappointing. Enter a tower in Tears of the Kingdom and Link will plug in his Purah Pad, get grabbed by robot tentacles and flung up into the sky. It never stops feeling thrilling.
Up in the sky, islands are still separated by huge distances and many are a challenge to reach, but when the game gives you such big and effective tools as the towers' rocket propulsion, this Hyrule starts to feel less hostile. And of course, the towers are only the beginning.
Tears of the Kingdom introduces craftable technology into The Legend of Zelda. Link can use his Ultrahand ability to fuse objects together, and holds batteries that can power said objects when activated. Just as in Breath of the Wild, we're doing a lot of traversal here but now we have the ability to build vehicles, including gliders, which become planes when you attach engines and a steering stick. And then why not add rockets? Suddenly, those huge distances that once felt like such epic journeys can be bounded across in giant leaps. It makes the older Hyrule seem even more unforgiving in retrospect. You mean I used to have to travel on land?!
It cannot be overstated how the skydiving and flight options in Tears of the Kingdom transform the experience of moving through the world, and what this means for the tone of the game in action. As well as land and sky, there is a huge underground map that dares you to investigate its gloomy depths. The fact that you can swoop seamlessly from the highest floating island to the deepest caverns - and at frightening speed - gives you a sense of power that you never knew was missing. Even without the vertical layers, it makes you wonder how much Nintendo foresaw the future of Link's traversal abilities when they were designing the original Hyrule map. The place that was once out to get me has become my plaything.
(One of the simplest innovations in Tears of the Kingdom is 'Hero's Path Mode', which shows where you've been in Hyrule over the last 200 hours. It is a miraculous change, to transform an overwhelming, epic environment into a charted map, allowing you to instantly see where you've been - and where you haven't.)
Just like Breath of the Wild, countless things draw the eye. It is equally difficult to stick to the critical path because of endless distractions. But here, it feels different. In the earlier game, my discoveries would usually involve tensing into my fighting stance, putting on my fighting trousers and eating some fighting food for good measure. In the world of Tears of the Kingdom, I feel spoiled for choice - comfortable in my skills and awash in options. Even when diving into large-scale battles I can be playful, taking advantage of my bow's bullet-time, firing muddle buds to make enemies attack each other, throwing yellow chu chu jelly to shock them, using Ultrahand to drop explosive barrels on them and another ability, Ascend, to get quickly out of harm's way. Whenever I did succumb to a difficult foe, I feel eager to try a new method. There was scope for variety in Breath of the Wild, but my lasting memory is returning from death to re-engage Lynels with grit and conviction, resolved to perfect my dodges and use flurry rushes to take them down. Parrying the Guardians' death ray? Just try and tell me that Breath of the Wild is not a game that encourages aggressive play. My comparisons to FromSoft's soulsborne games are tongue-in-cheek, but there is no doubt that the Zelda crew are taking heed of that most dominating contemporary sub-genre.
Beyond battles, in typical Zelda style the game prompts you to use Link's abilities in a variety of ways to solve puzzles. As in Breath of the Wild, the puzzles in Tears of the Kingdom are found in Shrines (stripped-back and highly focused dungeons) and out in the environment (most commonly asking you to transport a Korok or help Addison construct a support for his wobbly signs). Ultrahand, Ascend, as well as other new abilities Fuse and Recall are all widely applicable and deceptively straightforward - its like being handed a box of magic crayons. Solutions abound, both obvious and arcane, efficient and convoluted, elegant and messy.
When games present you with puzzles there is usually an intended solution; like a jigsaw puzzle, there is an immutable state of completion. Some games' USP is their ability to construct puzzles for which there are multiple solutions, like Hitman or Dishonored. Some of these games are known as immersive sims. Immersing oneself in the simulation of Tears of the Kingdom gives one a toolset that, whilst often less delineated than (for example) 'aggression vs. stealth', sustains a wide variety of approaches. Crucially, the arcane, convoluted and messy approaches are completely valid. If you have seen any Tears of the Kingdom content on social media, chances are you've seen an ridiculously long bridge being used to reach a destination that probably could've have been reached much more cleanly by other methods. That is true creativity. Creating the perfect, elegant completion (or refining creativity into art) is only a fraction of the process. Any artist or creative person will spend the majority of their time fannying about with crayons, stringing together long oddities before finally landing somewhere close to the perfect solution.
Hyrule used to be a hard-shelled nut, full of texture and seams. As a creation, it was endlessly fascinating to explore, but it was hostile. No matter how expressive you could be, the world did not bend to your will. It was absolute. It was resolute. It brooked no quarter. For Tears of the Kingdom, Nintendo cracked open that nut and opened its hand to you, letting you play with the pieces of this once-solid kingdom. Tools so flexible they feel like developer cheats (Ascend is basically 'noclip', which traditionally allows developers to ignore impenetrable surfaces) and a world so reactive it feels like an arts and craft session. Breath of the Wild had emergent systems and it was possible to exploit them. But now Link is an architect of systems. The first game walked so the sequel could run - Breath of the Wild sprawled out so Tears of the Kingdom could burst open. Thanks in part to that iteration, the player bursts out along with the game. There is no experience like it. Except maybe Elden Ring. But that's another story.
