A potential GOTY for 2023 | Full Review - The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

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The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is an action-adventure game and the much awaited sequel to 2017’s award-winning game The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, boasting the same core gameplay mechanics including open world exploration and a non-linear story.

🟩Pros

+Sheer scale of the game world

+Sense of freedom and exploration

+Creative limitless sandbox mechanics

+Masterful non-linear storytelling

+Hundreds of hours of content

🟥Cons

-We really need a Switch 2 or Switch Pro to further enjoy this at higher resolution and frame rates

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is an extraordinary game that once again, redefines the open-world adventure genre and what’s possible for the rather aging Nintendo Switch hardware. Developed by Nintendo themselves, this game takes players on an jaw-dropping journey through the vast kingdom of Hyrule, now with a much needed verticality, essentially more than doubling the play area.

The art style is stunning as always, featuring vibrant landscapes, lush forests, towering mountains, and serene lakes that we are all familiar with, as well as bringing in new locations that Zelda fans have never seen before. The dynamic weather system and day-night cycle further enhance the immersive experience, as rain showers and sunsets add life to the already enchanting world.

The soundtrack deserves special praise as well, as it perfectly complements the game's atmosphere. The relaxing melodies that play in quiet explorative moments, the triumphant scores during intense battles, the eerie background music for exploring deep dark caverns, the music elevates the emotional impact of every scene.

From the moment you set foot in the game's expansive world, you are immediately captivated by its breathtaking scale and attention to detail. The game is set in Hyrule again, with the same core map featuring familiar locations, but the world has evolved so much since we’ve last seen it. Both from a gameplay and story standpoint.

Aside from the surface world, we now have the floating sky islands to explore, and a pitch black underground cave network as big as Hyrule itself, all of them holding many secrets for the players to uncover. Aside from the traditional surface world traversal, the sky above and the depths below both have widely differing mechanics in play. For example, The Depths are mostly in pitch black, which will require lighting them up in various ways to see around, although there is a permanent way of lighting areas up.

This sheer scale gives players unparalleled agency over their adventures. You can go to nearly any surface, sky high, or deep below; launch yourself through the air and glide downwards like a battle royale game, explore anywhere really, and this is done all seamlessly, without loading screens. The scale of the world is mind-boggling — especially coming from the already impressive Breath of the Wild — offering countless secrets, hidden treasures, and surprises around every corner.

The story is set years after Breath of the Wild, seeing many changes to the game’s world. Including evolved and affected locations by the game’s story. The same core premise is here once again, which is about finding or saving Princess Zelda yet again. It sounds repetitive, but really it’s not. The story mostly serves as background flavor to the game’s underlying exploration gameplay which will take up the majority of the players’ time, but for how the story is presented, saying it is just a background flavor is a huge understatement as it is a stellar experience nonetheless.

While Link was undoubtedly already powerful in his previous adventure, Tears of the Kingdom cleverly incorporates an in-lore reason to reset his abilities and bring him back to his base form. The start of the game focuses on Link relearning his power while also learning newfound game changing abilities that are the highlight of the game. By introducing fresh abilities, Tears of the Kingdom successfully avoids feeling like a rehash of its predecessor while still providing a familiar experience for fans.

Just like the open world, the story is openly structured and non-linear, meaning there is no definite way to progress through it. You can go wherever you want in the game world, and do missions at your own volition. The game features an evolving narrative that is well designed around the exploratory gameplay, with various narrative elements beautifully and slowly unravelling itself to the player — in no specific order — as you play the game.

As a result of this openness, the gameplay itself is also emerging in nature, not really providing a clear cut path to the player on what to do. You can start off randomly exploring the world, stumbling upon a side quest, and before you realise it, you’re battling a big boss underground. The game puts emphasis on not overly relying on pre-determined quest markers and letting the player do them on their own.

Speaking of openness, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is the most open Zelda game to date, and it’s not anymore just an open-world game. It is now effectively an open-world sandbox — As the game features two major additions to the game: The abilities Ultrahand and Fuse that literally change how the game is played. They allow the player to stitch around world objects in various ways — mostly to solve platforming puzzles, traverse the world, or outright channel the player’s inner creativity.

In traversing the world and solving puzzles. you may some times need to build contraptions that can greatly aid you; attach fans at the back, wings at the side of a cart to build a makeshift plane. Strap rockets to platforms to build literal rocket ships. It unexpectedly brought me flashbacks of playing Garry’s Mod and Kerbal Space Program, of all games. As with the traversal, creativity is also encouraged to tackle environmental obstacles and challenges in a way that also unexpectedly reminded me of another unrelated game — Death Stranding.

Players can also fuse basically any world element as well to any weapon or shield that you have, or fuse any item to your arrows. Effectively providing a rewarding element that improves upon the predecessor’s weakest link, which is the weapon durability. Now here, the game rewards experimentation, and things breaking up isn’t as frustrating as before, because you can now break and fuse stuff together and constantly try new things.

Combat as usual requires strategy and skill, with the varied enemies possessing unique attack patterns, weaknesses, and mechanics. The arsenal of weapons at your disposal infinitely increased by the Fuse system, offers a limitless number of ways to approach encounters.

The game massively rewards creativity, encouraging players to experiment with their surroundings and combine tools to overcome obstacles and foes, while still catering those who wouldn’t want that experience and would prefer to settle for the fundamental basics.

As for the technical performance, it performed rather well for the intended 30 FPS target, only occasionally dropping in busy fights and some highly demanding scenes. Despite the game being built as a sandbox experience, I’ve also had a bug free experience so far which is super impressive.

Considering the game is running on a Nintendo Switch, it simply puts other newest-gen AAA titles to shame when it comes to optimization and polish. Still, It’s unfortunate that there is currently no way to play this masterpiece on higher resolutions and frame rates. On a Switch successor perhaps in a few years?

Conclusion:

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is another masterpiece that sets an even higher standard for open-world gaming. With its boundless exploration, creative gameplay mechanics, and a masterful emergent storytelling, it is an experience that will leave players in awe for years to come. Whether you're a longtime fan of the franchise or a newcomer to the series, this game is an absolute must-play for the Switch and a testament to the magic of video games. A potential GOTY for 2023.