The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

Full-time Handyman, part-time savior.

The following review talks about the various powers you’ll wield, many of the locations on which you’ll visit, and a great deal of what is available to do in the game. Apart from discussing the game’s opening story moments, I will not be detailing the story moments that follow at all. If you wish to be 100% surprised by any and all moments in the game, then just know that Tears of the Kingdom is 100% worth the purchase. That said, let’s continue.

With Breath of the Wild releasing back in 2017, fans have waited for years to return back to Hyrule to once again pick up the Master Sword and vanquish evil. And, to much surprise, Tears of the Kingdom is a direct continuation to Breath of the Wild, making it one of the few entries in the series to take over from a prior game. While the lands that make up Hyrule certainly are familiar, Link will traverse not only high atop the clouds in the sky islands, but also down below the surface in the depths, making for the biggest world the franchise has ever seen.

To say Tears of the Kingdom is wildly intimidating is absolutely underselling it. The vast openness to explore here is staggering. This is to say nothing of the countless caves, shrines, temples, Koroks, and more as you look to conquer each and every corner of this greatly expanded Hyrule. From gliding down to the depths below to fashioning mechanical devices to allow you to reach the clouds and beyond, Tears of the Kingdom is absolutely massive in scale, certainly providing an adventure worth every bit of its $70 USD purchase price. Yes, Tears of the Kingdom is Nintendo's first $70 USD title, joining other consoles in the now defacto AAA standard.

Taking place years after the events of Breath of the Wild, Link and Zelda are exploring newly discovered ruins under Hyrule, those that contain a dark and ancient secret. Within moments, a decayed body comes to life, shattering the Master Sword, and leaves Link wounded and Zelda cast into the abyss below. Shortly after, as Link regains consciousness, he discovers that Zelda is missing and that his arm has been retrofitted with an ancient technology provided by a previous individual of Hyrule's past, a figure that will become central to the game's lore and story going forward.

This new arm grants Link incredible power. Much like the Sheikah Slate, you'll have powers to manipulate the world around you, but in far more diverse and vast ways. Previously, the Sheikah Slate allowed you to magnetically pull at metal objects, pull a frozen pillar out of the water, pull bombs out of thin air, as well as hold items in stasis, letting attack after attack give an object directional momentum. These abilities certainly served their purpose in Link's adventure, but it was the chaos you could inflict upon mixing those powers where Nintendo has doubled down on allowing you to have far more creative freedom in forming that chaos. 

Link's new powers allow for incredible freedom in exploring its world, during combat, or how you engage with many of the game's puzzles. The most versatile feature that you'll gain in the game's opening moments is called Ultrahand. This allows you to grab any and all objects and then fuse them together. This includes fusing logs or steel platforms together alongside fans or rockets to create anything from simple rafts, and experimental vehicles, to full-blown mechs that can hover and fire off volleys of missiles and lasers. 

You can also fuse objects or items to your own weapons, shields, or arrows, customizing your available arsenal in wildly unexpected ways, such as fusing monster eyes to your arrows to make them seek out their target or cold-infused items that can make ice platforms atop the water's surface. The variety here is incredible and each item has variable effects when used. The results are often diverse enough that no two players will approach combat, exploration, or puzzle-solving in exactly the same way. 

Ultrahand allows you to manipulate objects, rotating them and then pulling other objects toward them, rotating them as well to fuse them together via a mysterious green glue. While you can create wagons, motorized cars, and flying hovercrafts, or even just help someone to hold a wooden sign up, you can also forgo vast technological methods and solve most of your issues by simply constructing a long bridge to solve most of your problems. 

The advanced contraptions you make require battery power, a finite resource you can upgrade as you collect the Zonai charge currency to do so. Much like your stamina and vitality which you'll upgrade as your journey unfolds, increasing your battery power to control these devices is a must if you plan on exploiting this power to its fullest potential. While there are items you can consume to refill those batteries in the short term, having an increased battery meter can make for a more reliable outing.

Your additional powers then are made up of Recall, Ascend, and a few more I'll talk about soon. Recall allows you to target an object and reverse its course in time. Should enemies throw boulders at you, you can return them with ease, causing the object to smash back into them. You can also manipulate objects with Ultrahand and then use Recall to rewind their path, making traversal or combat a breeze. It's a wondrous power that can often break the game and one you'll have to rethink how previous games worked so that you can take advantage of whole new concepts, ideas, and planning. 

However, when it comes to indeed breaking the game, Ascend might just take the bokoblin-flavored cake. Ascend allows you to pass through the ceiling of nearly any surface. From inside of caves to the very platforms you can hold up with Ultrahand or Recall, you can pass through them to come out on top. While there are some limitations, such as ceilings that block this gift, this power is a masterclass in an ability most games wouldn't dare give you. The ways in which this game was constructed in order to not have it fundamentally break entire areas must have been exhausting to prevent excessive tampering. 

There are times where I would assume I was stuck, trapped in a cave or basement with seemingly no way out, but then remembering that I had an ace up my sleeve and using Ascend to get me out of that tight spot. It's an ability that can also be used in combat as you can use it to get to the top of the large lumbering boulder enemies where you normally had to strike the crystal on their back to have them come crashing down to the ground. Here, it's as easy as taking an elevator through their body to the top floor. And if you don't want to contend with the enemies that accompany this monster, you can toss out a muddle-bud at the Talos and it will then treat its once allies as enemies, confusingly shaking and tossing them away. 

Now, the mixing and matching of these powers is where Tears of the Kingdom excels in giving you a playground with largely one rule: get where you're going on your own terms. The vastness I have seen across social media in regard to mechs, vehicles complete with their own suspension, to floating and flying constructs that continue to blow my mind is a constant occurrence. The sheer creativity here is astounding and can often see you busy with these creation tools than keeping to the main story path itself. Hearing that people are around 80 to 100 hours in and maybe one or two temples deep isn't unheard of and seems to be how most people are taking on this adventure. Hell, I know someone personally who is well over a hundred hours in and has only completed a single temple. 

Now, this freedom and creative flexibility has also seen duplication methods appear, allowing you to take almost any item or weapon, and produce more of them out of thin air. While many of these shortcuts have been patched as of this review, more continue to be discovered to this day. Still, taking advantage of those methods has allowed me to play through an unpatched game and duplicate to my heart's content, for now anyway. 

Exploring around Hyrule can still be done via your horse if you are feeling a bit old school or have built up a bond with many of the available steeds to add to your stable. However, to be honest, I used my horse for all of an hour before I preferred to use my new found powers to find creative ways to get to my destination instead. From fusing a minecart to my shield for a bit of shield surfing to a simple two-fan and control stick bike among other varied constructs. Another method is simply using your glider to fly your way there. Newly constructed towers litter the land and using them allows you to catapult far into the sky, granting you freedom to glide your way back down or to reach some of the sky islands that accompany the clouds above you.

These sky islands range in height with additional work needed to reach some of them. While a few will have diving challenges, mazes, or shrines to attend to, as well as many other secrets, these areas are spaced out and plentiful, filling the vast sky above Hyrule and offering you a lot to explore as you look down at the land of Hyrule far down below. The scale of this game is staggering, especially given that most of the game's world is visible from any location.

While you'll find a variety of Zonai devices scattered across the Kingdom, including construction resources provided by the Kingdom to address issues across the land, a great deal of your on-the-fly creativity comes from Zonai consumables that you hold onto in your inventory. Many of these are available at Zonai machines found largely high atop the Sky Islands, although I did find one on the surface that is indicated as to have fallen from high above. These resemble a gumball machine, requiring Zonai currency in order to grant you your reward; Zonai devices are trapped in small little marble-like spheres. As you collect them, they are consumables, so that makes them a finite resource you take with you should you need a fan, portable pot, flamethrower, mounted laser, or floating platform at the ready.

Now, having all these materials to use to create a wealth of vehicles is one thing, but entering into shrines can result in your creation disappearing upon your leave, requiring you to expend resources or track down materials that are left all over the map in order to once again craft your ride. Thankfully, you'll earn an ability called Auto-Build that can save your creation for quick assembly when you truly need it. You can either spend Zonai currency if you can afford it or lay down the materials and then watch it self-construct in front of you. It's a very welcome time saver that you'll want to unlock earlier as it often becomes a truly great quality-of-life feature for the long adventure you have ahead of you.

Alongside the Auto-Build feature, you'll also unlock the camera, allowing you to take pictures just for fun, or to add to the Hyrule Compendium, a feature that you can certainly lose dozens of hours in attempting to track down every single thing needed to complete it. There are also a few quality-of-life upgrades that were present in Breath of the Wild that you'll also unlock here, but I'll keep those for you to discover on your own hero's path.

While Hyrule and its sky Islands could have been enough here to keep you busy, a complete underground cavern exists below all of Hyrule. This open and dark environment will see you exploring and discovering areas of the map that grant light to your nearby surroundings. You can also use brightbloom seeds to aid in uncovering the darkness on the go, although large lightroots you'll find are the means to bathe the depths in their light. And you'll need that light especially as you'll need to navigate around a toxic substance called gloom, which is constantly existing across much of the depths. This gloom can remove hearts from your supply should you make contact with it or its enemies and you can only replenish them at lightroots or through various food recipes or special gloom-proof armor you can find. You can also build vehicles or shield-surf over the Gloom, so there are creative options to navigate around it. 

The depths offer a ton to explore with its whole space running underneath all of the Hyrule Kingdom above. And, should you discover special maps high atop the sky islands, you can navigate the depths to receive those rewards. While I'll remain vague on one fascinating secret about the depths, your exploration within Hyrule and the sky islands above will make navigating to certain locations in the depths that much easier, that's all I'll say. 

With all of Hyrule and the sky islands above, you'll track down shrines that offer the same concept of puzzle or combat mechanics found in Breath of the Wild. These range from using your newfound powers to solve a series of puzzles such as one mimicking a pinball machine, to having to use water to create platforms across a lake of lava. Nearly all of these types of shrines offer a fair bit of creative freedom in how to solve them with a few that are a bit too straightforward and can come off as feeling like basic tutorials for your gifts. Other shrines exist where Link will be stripped of his gear and have to work with what the shrine provides as he has to defeat a set number of the game's new construct enemies, robotic threats that feel as if they are bite-sized guardians with a few different forms and abilities. 

Personally, I found these shrines far more engaging than what Breath of the Wild offered, largely due to the capabilities of your new powers and the Zonai devices you have nearby. As you use those powers to fuse objects together, recall items to manipulate them to your needs, or even those that have you creating objects to perform a series of platforming or rail grinding sections, very few of these shrines disappointed, making for well over a hundred of them that were impressively engaging distractions as you solve them to earn a wealth of rewards, such as the items used to increase your health or stamina.

One of my biggest disappointments with Breath of the Wild was its complete lack of temples. The divine beasts were fine for what they were, but themed temples were noticeably absent during the game. Temples thankfully return here in somewhat of a bitesize form, but each temple also has an enjoyable journey to reach them that never disappointed. I also enjoyed the open nature of most of them, that they each felt unique in their design and offered very enjoyable boss fights, especially that of the wind and water temples, providing two of my favorite encounters in the game by far. 

You'll take on each temple with its respective champion, a companion from each of the game's notable races. Each of these heroes will provide a power unique to them, from Riju's electrical pulses to Tulin's gust of wind when you truly need it. You'll earn these powers to then use at any point after, although I won't spoil how that comes to be. This reliance on having those gifts at any point after can make combat or exploration far easier, especially when you can rely on Yonobo's destructive power to slam into boulders and not have to worry about breaking your weapon as you hack at them or consuming a bomb from your inventory. 

That said, the method by which you access these powers could have used some work. As you explore Hyrule after completing each temple, you'll have each companion then accompany you, allowing you to call upon them for their gifts or engage in combat alongside you. While having the extra help with you is extremely worthwhile, having to run to each party member to be able to use their power can be exhausting, especially during combat when you are simply trying to find them amid the chaos. While it would have added more button-use to the already packed controls, an issue I'll dive into more shortly, I would have preferred a way to use their power where I stood, instead of having to chase them down across the battlefield each time I needed to use their power. 

Apart from the temples and their rewards for doing so, Hyrule offers up a ton to lose yourself into. From seeking out the Great Fairies to a ton of engaging side quests, you'll have a great deal to revisit and see how many of the same villages or stables have been over the years, especially as you can import your save towards those stables to collect the horses you gathered in Breath of the Wild. Seeing the changes made to Hyrule over the years is impressive, although it's a bit odd how distant Link appears to have been to many of these locations since Breath of the Wild.

And in case you couldn't get enough of them last time, the lovable Koroks are back and while you'll still find them in a lot of the same ways; moving rocks, shooting particular things with your bow, etc, some Koroks are attempting to track down their friends and need you to take them to them. While many people are torturing these poor Korok campers, each Korok will point out where their friend is and you'll simply need to construct some sort of vehicle or transport object to get them from A to B. These are, for the most part, fun distractions, and are additional challenges present in the game that allows you complete freedom in how you get the job done. From hot air balloons to spring-powered launchers, how you reunite these two Koroks is completely left up to your own imagination.

With Tears of the Kingdom being a direct sequel, it brings with it many gameplay elements that either will see its audience happy to see them return or those who were hoping for some improvement, refinement, or hoping for an entire refresh to make this new experience stand apart from what came before. Personally, I sat in both camps when awaiting the game's release, or even when checking out any glimpse of gameplay, largely wanting combat to be changed just enough to not only feel fresh but to feel more impressive than it was in Breath of the Wild. 

Link returns with all the same combat mechanics he had before; parrying, dodging, charged attacks, and the ability to fire arrows in slow motion as you are airborne. The only new additions are through his use of fusing items or additional weapons to his arsenal. From adding a pitchfork or slab of meat to the end of a sword, the creativity here is phenomenal, even if the combat itself is almost entirely unchanged. Personally, I would have loved to see improvements to the dodge, maybe having it as a roll instead, modernizing it just a bit. Still, if you were completely on board for more of Breath of the Wild's combat, then you'll feel right at home here. 

Coming back from Breath of the Wild is weapon durability, a mechanic that has created a divide between players. Personally, I never liked it, but having slightly more durability to fused weapons depending on the item you've chosen to fuse to it does lessen the blow of having your weapon shatter after only a few strong strikes. And, once you've found it, the Master Sword returns and is pretty much the same as it was before, having its energy depleted for a short cooldown before you can wield it again. 

Now, getting the Master Sword is an engaging affair, once you understand how and why you're able to get it back. This is done through a series of missions where you track down large glyphs that have appeared all over the kingdom. While the act of finding these is decent fun and the rewards for doing so is immensely intriguing, the story cutscenes that make up those rewards can be found out of order and could ruin the impact and surprise of those scenes. Thankfully, I used a spoiler-free guide to find them in their proper order, but a friend of mine found the second to last one early on, revealing a very crucial plot point that hurt the overall effect that moment should have had. 

Now, while I won't be diving into the story itself, I'll make a few points. The narrative here is far better than Breath of the Wild, both in the quality of the story, the voice acting, and that of how the story is told, out-of-order cutscenes aside. The presentation and focus on where the story goes, the way we are introduced to Ganon and what he means to the story is superb. Now, that said, I found the conclusion and its final encounter to simply not hold up, resulting in very few risks the game took to pay off. The final series of battles just failed to keep me interested and I simply didn't care for them, pushing through them solely as a means to an end. 

Apart from the story's presentation and execution, I am rather impressed at how well this game runs on the Switch. It can dip below 30 fps occasionally, but the scope and depth to what is here, especially with the stunning physics systems at play, make this game a technological feat on hardware that shouldn't be able to pull this off. Would Tears of the Kingdom benefit from more powerful hardware? Of course, but what the team here has done, with development support by Monolith Soft, is nothing short of a miracle. 

My last complaint is something that not only affected my time with the game but a lot of other players that I’ve talked to or heard from various Youtube videos, Twitch streams, or podcasts, and that is the game’s controls. While Nintendo certainly did the best they could as I am not sure I could see another way to properly optimize them, the variety of attacks, features, systems, and mechanics, all packed onto the controller is immense, resulting in a lot of controller-gymnastics that often had me accidentally throwing weapons off cliffs to performing the wrong commands and getting myself killed. While much of it is me simply not pressing the correct buttons, this has appeared to be a fairly widespread problem, so I know it’s not all on my end. How this affects you will certainly vary. 

Breath of the Wild was certainly a game that captivated players the world over, but it was a game that didn't fully give me the Legend of Zelda experience I personally wanted. I certainly found a lot to love and do consider it to be a truly fantastic game, but certain design choices held the game back for me, such as its combat and the lack of traditional temples. Tears of the Kingdom does a lot to improve on nearly every issue I personally had, creating a very sandbox-heavy experience that often results in a very satisfying game that does the best it can to offer the experience I had hoped for. I'm still not sold on its combat and one particular encounter, but Nintendo took a game that many consider to be the best ever made and somehow topped it on hardware that has no business running it as good as it does, and that is certainly impressive. 

Developer - Nintendo Entertainment and Planning. Publisher - Nintendo. Released - May 12th, 2023. Available On - Nintendo Switch. Rated - (E 10+) Fantasy Violence, Mild Suggestive Themes. Platform Reviewed - Nintendo Switch. Review Access - The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom was purchased for review.