There is an evolution of the Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
Reaching the Other Side of a Fall-to-Your-Death Chasm in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
There’s a moment early in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, in one of the very first shrines, when I felt a shiver of pure thrill run through me. I had been presented with a simple task: get to the other side of a fall-to-your-death deep chasm using the new Ultrahand ability and an assortment of wooden boards, stone hooks, and a single fixed rail. The solution was clear and I used Ultrahand to glue the square board together and connect the stone hook to the rail. I then hooked my crude contraption on the rail and climbed aboard. I was able to easily cross the chasm because everything worked exactly as I expected. Yet this simple act of seeing the problem, literally building the plan, and executing the solution felt so satisfying that by the time I had crossed the chasm, I had broken out into a face-swallowing smile.
Though there were many similarly satisfying moments after, I would never smile like that again, and that initial thrill would be slowly replaced with a gentle and familiar pleasantness
Tears of the Kingdom: How Do You Get Around Hyrule, and How to Pair It With Zonai Devices?
When the first gameplay showcase for Tears was released, I wrote that the game, because of its sheer depth, was going to ruin lives. Clear your social calendar, because I still feel confident in that assessment. But if you’re like me and were hoping for this game to, like Breath of the Wild, inspire a sorely needed feeling of wonder in our increasingly grim world, then the kingdom won’t be the only one shedding tears.
And all because Link’s new powers are leagues better — and more interesting — than his old ones. They inspired me to try and figure out how to get to interesting places on the map and solve a difficult shrine or dungeon puzzle that set my brain on fire. Hyrule is littered with caches of wooden planks, beams, and wheels and a variety of neon-green machines called Zonai devices to pair with them. The devices range from the practical, like a portable pot to cook on the road, to the martial, like a fire emitter to stick on the end of a sword, to the esoteric, like the stabilizer that I have only used exactly once to great effect.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/23718926/zelda-tears-of-the-kingdom-review-nintendo-switch
Tears of the Kingdom: How much do you want to get off a sky island? How much are you? What are you going to do?
The sheer size is a lovely part of Tears of the Kingdom. I’ve spent over a hundred hours in this game. I’ve fully upgraded my Purah Pad, completed over 90 shrines, unlocked each Skyview tower on the mainland, and mapped out every point in the sky islands. I have met every Great Faerie, completed every labyrinth journey and have found over 50-plus korok seeds. I’ve saved a village from pirates, assisted in uncovering the valuable archeological history of Hyrule, cured a sweet old woman’s sickness with my stellar culinary skills, and fought against deadly misinformation with the power of local journalism. There are some parts of the game that have not been touched. I do not like completing games, like the one in Tears. I have no patience. And I certainly didn’t feel obligated to do all the things I did simply for this review. But Tears compelled me, like stewed oxtail, to strip off the meat, crack open the bone, and suck out the marrow.
The game lets you solve any problem you want, with whatever you can scrounge or carry with you. Tears will explicitly show you, through the materials it liberally scatters about for you to use, that 1 + 1 = 2. But it will equally reward you if, somehow, you come up with 1 + 1 = banana.
If I ever want to get off this sky island, I need that glider over there with the fans. It takes too long to walk over there, grab the glider, and assemble everything. Will the fans and the platform I was standing on be the same? Oh! What if I use a rocket? Will it make me go faster?
Source: https://www.theverge.com/23718926/zelda-tears-of-the-kingdom-review-nintendo-switch
Tears of the Wild vs. It: a review of the knots in the next-to-nintendo-switch
Breath of the Wild did not have any differences in combat between tears and it. Weapon degradation is still a thing, although I do appreciate that there’s an in-game reason now for why everything breaks so easily. I didn’t particularly care for fighting and avoided most encounters when possible — though somewhat contradictory, I really enjoyed fusing weapons. Every enemy has a weapon that you can turn into a new weapon with. The horn, toenails, and rib cages become the bladed edge of swords or arrows, while enemy clubs, spears, and severed arms are used as handles. Like with puzzle solving, Tears lets you get creative with how you craft your arsenal. Each component has its own attack power, allowing you to combine two of the most powerful components. I like ranged combat the most. There are many things that you can stick on an arrow to fit your needs while not being overly risky. A glob of white chu chu jelly will freeze an enemy solid allowing you to get in free melee hits. A steak arrow can lure enemies away so that you can steal stuff from an area. And of course, there’s nothing that tastes as great together as bomb + arrow.
There is only a minor gripe with the messy controls. There is nothing particularly emotional to talk of in Tears, which tries to evoke the same emotions as Breath of the Wild. I audibly gasped when Link broke out of the Shrine of Awakening to see the whole of Hyrule. That was a special, game-defining moment, and though Tears tried, it could not replicate it. While I had plenty of moments where I was pleased that some ticky-tack, there-is-no-way-this-will-work creation of mine actually did work — there’s nothing I could point to in my many hours of Tears that inspired that same gasp.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/23718926/zelda-tears-of-the-kingdom-review-nintendo-switch
Tears Of The Kingdom: A Game in the Wild, Not a Place For The Jungles Of Hyrule On The Nintendo Stage
Controls are unwieldy for puzzle solving. A lot of shrine and dungeon puzzles are based on time and location. Fortunately, if you make an error, the Recall ability can usually reset you with minimal time loss. But there are moments when you hit the wrong button and end up pitching your prized 60 attack power gibdo club into an abyss when you meant to select the Ultrahand ability. I’m not speaking from experience.
None of these things are bad, nor do they diminish how enjoyable Tears is. It just seems like Nintendo wants you to feel what you felt in 2017 and keeps pointing at moments throughout the game like a friend trying to impress you with something you don’t have the heart to reveal that you’ve seen before.
Five years ago, Nintendo took a huge risk by releasing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Forgoing the series’ well-trodden linear formula, the game transformed Hyrule into an open world, transfiguring a style of play made popular by studios like Bethesda, Rockstar, and Mojang. Breath of the Wild sold 29 million copies, more than all but one of the other 3D Zelda games. Every critic gave it perfect scores. Streamers are still finding new ways to play.
It is not possible to say anything definitive about the piece of art after nearly 50 hours of playtime, but Tears of the Kingdom is still better than Breath of the Wild.
Skydiving with Hayao and Link: A Journey to the Heavens through the Dust and the Shadows of the Past-esque Dark World
There is a long red haired skeleton that is much livelier than typical skeletons, which is why they disturb it deeper into the cave. After a cataclysm, Hyrule Castle explodes skyward, and Link, inevitably, loses Zelda and all but three of his 20 hearts. He wakes to find that someone has performed some ramshackle surgery, replacing his hand with a black claw, and that he is high high up, among stone islands speckling the sky.
Breath offers a surface of the world to play in, while Tears adds a sky. At the end of the training island, the clouds clear and Link leaps and soars: You can truly skydive (and fall) anywhere. Hayao Miyazaki has a passion for flight and his influence is evident in the new game. In the previous game, players climbed the map towers. Now they bungee to the heavens, Link scanning the area for landmarks with his ancient Nintendo Switch (we mean Sheikah Slate, obviously).
Link’s descent does not stop with the ground. Across Hyrule, pits have belched out of the earth, oozing pink and black sludge, known as Gloom. They look bottomless, but they are instead gateways to TOTK’s wildest addition, “the depths,” an inhospitable abyss, a pitch black Link to the Past-esque dark world. Link must drive out the darkness with Brightbloom Seeds and Lightroots, which permanently illuminate the surrounding area, since the deep shadow initially worried me. A land that’s pretty much the same size as the one in Hyrule has been revealed.
