Tears of the Kingdom

Standing on a floating island suspended in the cloudless sky, I carefully position an ancient metallic block large enough to carry eight clones of my character just right above a ledge. I then whip out a few techno-magical devices from my backpack — four fans, a steering stick, a couple of extra battery packs, two wheeled carts, and a rocket. I grab each one and meticulously attach them to the metallic block on the sides, underneath, and around it angled in just the right way to provide the type of lift and speed I’m theoretically shooting for. The whole vehicle looks like a wrongly MacGyver’d version of a premade Lego contraption where a child didn’t follow the instructions correctly and used mismatched parts from different construction kits. Nevertheless, I prepare for takeoff and take control of the vehicle.

It accelerates, veers off the edge of the floating island and begins nosediving immediately. The fans underneath weren’t providing enough lift, and the rocket meant to provide forward thrust was providing too much of it to the point that the vehicle starts doing forward-flips in mid-air and knocks me out of it entirely. The vehicle and I are both free-falling from thousands of feet in the sky. I spot another small floating island underneath with a lake, towards which I start angling my descent as I watch in mixed emotions of bemused horror as the vehicle that was meant to take me on a skyward journey to islands far above now comes apart in spectacularly dramatic fashion, crashing into the edge of another island below and tumbling down towards the surface helplessly. I splash into the lake of the island I was targeting and get away relatively unscathed from the experience. I take in the quiet vista and the gentle breeze of the world around me, marveling that not a soul in the game world witnessed the tragic and hilarious ten-second lifespan of a silly skyfaring vehicle built entirely from my imagination.

This quiet loneliness and isolation plays into the biggest strengths of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. The game is unabashedly confident in letting you let your creativity run wild, and does absolutely nothing to acknowledge or reward you for it. You can build the craziest machines and mechs that do very impressive things or build the goofiest mechanisms that fall apart but still somehow accomplish their intended objective, or just plain fall apart entirely. The game accepts all of those things as completely equal and neutral. The fact that there’s no intrinsic rewards for creating these things serves as a self-fulfilling reinforcer of encouraging creative, wild ideas. So what if my insane idea to propel a flame-emitting spike cart with springs doesn’t work? There’s no-one around to see it, and I might as well try it.

These “Zonai devices” were a big part of the marketing for this game, promising to let you create your own vehicles and weapons for your adventure through Hyrule. And they worked better than anyone could’ve imagined. Any other game would have given you a few preset vehicles or options to choose from, but Tears of the Kingdom let you build whatever you wanted and save it as a blueprint. I truly think this whole concept has gone underappreciated by gamers in general, because it’s insane when you think about a bit more. Sure, there’s limitations on how many objects you can attach to a creation and some restrictions on how they all fit together at specific angles, but there’s no denying that it’s a technological marvel that the game even allows for it in the first place. No two players’ journeys will be the same in this game solely due to the existence of this game mechanic. In fact, if you re-loaded a previous save from a few minutes ago, your entire experience since that save is almost guaranteed to be different due to how wacky and complex the physics interactions with these objects can be.

Many players didn’t quite leverage this ability to create imaginative vehicles because, well, they don’t think of themselves as “creative” people. They would create the simplest things like a slab of stone with wheels to simulate a stone-age car or use rockets and fans for a quick speed boost to reach a high area, but not more. I truly went wild with this stuff though, and it’s likely why it took me nearly two-hundred hours to complete a game where the story could have in theory been completed in fifty to sixty hours. I spent most of my time trying various builds and ideas to see what crazy things I could do. There’s an argument to be made here that this mechanic only appeals to the types of people who like to build and try things, not so much those that just want to get on with the game. To a certain extent, that’s true. The game doesn’t do much to encourage you to truly imagine unique ways to utilize the tools it gives you (outside of a few specific story events). And I think it had to be that way, otherwise you’d get frustrated players looking up how to build things online instead of spending time being immersed in the game.

The biggest design achievement here, in my opinion, is how Nintendo made this game appeal to not just gamers and five-year olds, but also non-gamers and eighty-year olds. It’s actually unbelievable to think that a veteran gamer who has played over a thousand video games in their life and a non-gamer who has never touched a video game can pick up a Switch and start accomplishing things in the game almost immediately. This universal appeal has been a trademark feature of Nintendo’s games for years, but it’s really visible in Tears of the Kingdom. I have seen people who never play video games become enamored with the calm peacefulness of how the grass gently sways in the breeze or how meditative it is to gently glide down to the surface from a sky island. I have also seen professional speedrunners come up with truly insane ways to propel themselves using some combination of rocket-shields, shield-surfing, and a few extremely well-timed explosive jumps. And this is all in the same game.

What really makes the game stand out is the competition on the shelf. Almost every other big-budget adventure game is out to create bombastic Hollywood-style action moments, all of which end up diluted in the end because all players see the same thing. Tears of the Kingdom lets you have these highly personal moments of action that you created yourself, and nobody else witnessed. That in itself makes it so much more special than any scripted sequence in an action-adventure game. The game is also highly confident in letting you get lost and do your own thing. It gives you a quest marker on your map but does not nag you to go there and do it to move on with the story. It simply takes a step back and lets you breathe in its world. In a gaming space where every adventure game is afraid of the player getting lost or sidetracked (and consequently bored), it’s refreshing to see a game encouraging you to truly play it your own way. There aren’t a dozen quest markers or objectives littering the screen. Instead, it maximizes the breathing room given to the game world and its spectacular skybox to really make of the most out of its dazzling sunrises and sunsets.

I have had so many moments in Tears of the Kingdom that are difficult to imagine replicating in any other video game. I’ve fallen out of the sky and nosedived straight into the depths, a massive underground area as large as the surface of Hyrule itself. In those depths, I’ve created purpose-built exploration machines with rotating spike shields and homing lasers as well as speedy flying bikes with highly maneuverable controls. Every player is creating and personalizing their adventure through this world in a way that suits them the best, and it’s honestly wild that the game lets you do things like this.

The game director himself said that the mechanics of building items and attaching them to each other were inspired by his experiences as a child in the forest finding twigs or objects, sticking them to each other, and pretending that it was a sword or a shovel. The game absolutely nails the feeling of combining random objects together to create makeshift weapons, from a highly practical charged electric spear to a humorous spongey mushroom shield. I find it remarkable that the team at Nintendo is able to take something as silly and simple as this and create an extremely simplified game mechanic out of it that anyone and everyone can enjoy.

Above all, this game has really highlighted to the industry that innovation doesn’t only need to happen visually through iterative improvements to graphical fidelity. Every generation, every game is focused on slightly higher framerates or a barely noticeable improvement to ray tracing and shadow detail. The player benefit from these improvements is so marginal that it might as well not exist. Nintendo took a moonshot approach here with providing a full sandbox with unique tools and physics that could let players really unleash their imagination, and it worked brilliantly. There’s more fun to be had in Tears of the Kingdom running at thirty frames per second on a tiny handheld running on a decade-old hardware chip than there is playing the latest battle royale game running at sixty frames per second running on the latest high-end PC (this is purely my opinion, based on the kinds of games and gameplay I enjoy).

Tears of the Kingdom is a stunning technical achievement and a landmark video game that will be talked about and played for decades to come. I have no doubt that it will become an instant classic and will go down in Nintendo’s portfolio as one of their finest achievements. I’m doubly impressed that they pulled this off with a franchise that has been around for so many years. If anything, this Ultrahand mechanic with Zonai devices could have been spun off into an entirely new IP and warranted several games in its lineup, but Nintendo decided to implement it into a Zelda game, somehow raising the bar yet again for what an open-world game can be after many thought it would be impossible to top Breath of the Wild. Tears of the Kingdom makes Breath of the Wild feel like an early-access tech demo, which would have been a crazy statement to make just a few years ago.

I’m thrilled that such amazing single-player experiences are still being worked on by the talented folks at Nintendo. Every year, we’re inundated with the same rehashed formula for an action game or an adventure game by different studios, and it feels like the same game with minor changes here and there. But Tears of the Kingdom really feels novel, unique, and inventive in a way that nothing else I’ve played really captures. I already miss the vibe of being in the game world, standing atop a quiet sky island at sunrise looking at the surface world below, planning my dive and where I’d like to go next in my journey. I hope this franchise continues to evolve and grow in ways that surpass expectations every time. They keep raising the bar every time and keep redefining where the goalpost is with every iteration of a Zelda game, and I’m excited to see what comes next for this series.