mZuzek

User Score
7.7

Presentation - 5.0
Gameplay - 8.0
Value - 10

I'll admit it straight away, I can see where people are seeing the unrivalled 10/10 masterpiece everyone seems to think this is. It takes a game that was already widely beloved and gives us more of it, way more. It builds on that game's fundamental idea of player agency and inventiveness by adding in new mechanics and systems that add a whole new level of creativity to the mix, allowing you to craft weapons and build structures out of like, absolutely anything? And that these innovative systems work as well as they do, in a time when far more basic games get away with barely running at all, is really impressive, especially considering that it's on underpowered hardware. Honestly I get it.

There are a lot of things this game does that "fix" the perceived issues of Breath of the Wild. The thing is, it's not about how many problems it fixed, it's about how many new problems it created. And holy hell there are a lot of them.

For starters, as impressive as it is that it runs nearly glitch-free on the Switch, this game has lots of performance hiccups its predecessor simply didn't. Something as basic as switching a weapon, instant in BotW, now has a little delay every time. If you're diving deep, the game will often freeze for loading. There's a severe input delay throughout, and occasionally even the controls get unresponsive during more intensive sections, which really hurts combat when you need precise timing for dodging or parrying. Sometimes you can't even pick up things off the ground too quickly because the game can't keep up. None of it is game-breaking or anything, but these little things are nuisances from the first moments of the game up until the final boss, and it boggles my mind that everyone treats this like it runs perfectly. It doesn't. Breath of the Wild ran better.

Anyways... You know in BotW when you walk out of the Shrine of Resurrection and see the beautiful world in front of you, waiting to be explored? That incredible feeling of wonder and adventure that you get, and how it continues throughout the whole game? Well in Tears of the Kingdom you also get that, for maybe the first couple hours, and then it's gone. Totally gone. The world you're exploring is the same world, but now you can just hop on a tower and fly wherever you want. So instead of marking a place on your map and then having to figure out how to get there, you mark a place on your map and fly to it without any difficulty. The game is telling you that its world doesn't matter. Traversal is trivial, so Hyrule is trivial too. It's no longer a place you believe in, it's just a videogame level for you to play around in.

Breath of the Wild felt like an adventure. Tears of the Kingdom feels like a sandbox.

...Or well, it feels like a sandbox for a little while, then it all starts to quickly feel like busywork. That's because the game tries to build on the "player innovation" factor of its predecessor by giving the player way more tools to get creative with - too many tools, that is. You don't feel creative when the solution to every puzzle is laid down right next to it as a bunch of pre-designed pieces you just need to stitch together for the 100th time. The whole idea of the Zonai devices is inherently flawed because it auto-solves problems the players would have to otherwise think about, so in trying to make Zelda as creative as possible, the developers made it anti-creative. Of course, there are still fun puzzles later into the game, but they are few and far between - most of them are the kind of puzzle you know the solution to in a matter of seconds, but then it takes a matter of minutes to execute that solution, thus it feels like busywork.

All that said, I wanna get into the meat of my problem with Tears of the Kingdom: the tears of the kingdom.

I mean the story.

"Was that the sword that seals the darkness? A blade that shatters so easily against my power cannot save you from me."
"The sword will continue to gain strength if bathed in sacred power. The stronger that power, the more powerful the sword becomes."
"After all, you possess more than power over time. You have a sacred power that can dispel evil."

Each of these lines are said by different characters within the span of half a minute. You can see the problem, right? They don't talk like people, they only talk in exposition. Even the voice acting is stiff and monotonous throughout (I'm sure the actors are better than this if given a decent script). Every character is replaceable because no one has a personality, no one talks or acts in a way that stands out, no one has any life outside of the main conflict and I have no reason to care. These aren't characters. They're just designs.

Gone are the days when Saria would become a sage because she was always there for you. When Groose played a crucial role in saving the world because he learned to be humble. In Tears of the Kingdom, you're only important if you have a special power you were born with. And to be fair, this was already a problem in Breath of the Wild, but at least that game cared enough to give its characters some semblance of personality. We all joke about the power of friendship, but I'll take that any day over this power of lineage bullshit.

The Legend of Zelda was always defined by its three main characters who each represented a different quality: Link, courage; Zelda, wisdom; Ganon, power. Apparently the writers thought the first two were boring so now the story is about power, evil power, sacred power, the power of the sword, power of light, power over time, eternal power, and power over all the people who eat this shit up. And maybe it's true that most people don't really come to a Zelda game for its story, but the least I expect is for it to have a Zelda story, not this Dragon Ball Z inspired embarassment.

Whew.

So, that's Tears of the Kingdom. A massive downgrade from Breath of the Wild on nearly every level. The gameplay tries to double down on the inventiveness of its predecessor, but fails at generating actual creativity. The dungeons which were already a weak point are even worse now, except for the boss battles. The soundtrack is nowhere near as good, I can only remember a single new track. The story is an absolute joke. The sense of adventure is completely gone. Most characters do not evolve in any significant way and neither does the worldbuilding. Instead of expanding on the mythos of the previous game, we instead get a completely redundant story that barely acknowledges its predecessor as it retraces its every step. This is everything a sequel shouldn't be: bigger, flashier, dumber. And so very "been there, done that". It adds almost nothing of value. It doesn't stand out in any way. It's just more. It's not art. It's content.

And I still can't believe they got rid of Kass. Like seriously, who gets rid of their best character when making a sequel?

...Anyhow.

The score I'm giving to this is unfitting with the overwhelmingly negative rant I went on, I know, but this is still built on Breath of the Wild at the end of the day, so it's fun by nature, it's a good game by nature. I just don't think it's anywhere near as great of a game as people are making it out to be, and that's why I focused on the negatives. And on one last note, after this I am seriously worried about the future of the Zelda series. But let's think of that some other time.

(converted to 7.7 out of 10)