King Charles tie in game is a heavier hitter than I expected!
Zelda is one of those franchises that has walked proudly throughout the rivers of time never truly sleeping from it's duties to excite, provoke and intrigue by being different. Dispel that idea of sequelisation established by Ubisoft, since practically it's inception 'The Legend of Zelda' refuses to fall into the rut of remaking the same basic title over and over. Just play the original Legend of Zelda as it's top down dungeon crawling exploration self and then follow it up with the random encounter strewn side scrolling platformer of it's immediate follow-up. Then fast forward to one of the most important entries in it's line-up and simultaneously one of the most important games of all time; Ocarina of Time and then the vastly thematically distinct and darkly twisted 'Majora's Mask'. And now we can throw onto that pile the open world exploration swan song of Breath of the Wild, and the robust creatively enriched current entry; Tears of the Kingdom.
When Breath of the Wild first dropped, it was clear that it was a title on a different level to what most had assumed when 'open world Zelda game' was first poised. Even back then the idea of open world design had become delineated down to rough-and-tumble 'clichés' devoid of the freeing passion of artistic exploration. Chief culprit of that being Ubisoft who would periodically turn their beautiful open worlds into limp collect-a-thons that shuttled players across uninspired gameplay pockets that ground away at their patience the more they endured. Breath of the Wild dispelled that malaise. It was vibrant, refreshing, designed to evoke mystery and wonder, brimming with life and peculiarity and love of design. It was a waterfall where before there were stillwaters. And fool that I am, I believed that the Zelda formula had reached it's pinnacle.
I mean don't get me wrong, there were still a few nagging issues with Breath of the Wild which I would have preferred if they weren't there. The story has that annoying "follow the footsteps of another story" structure which allows for a narrative to be freeform but also robs all immediate narrative stake to the proceedings. The major dungeons you explored felt a little bit more like giant puzzle boxes than grand adventure snippets to frame your entire journey around. Oh- and you couldn't make a giant space laser death machine which floated around the enemy firing rainy death on their heads. Not that I really expected anything like that at all when I played through Breath of the Wild, but recent experiences have shown me what I've been missing all this time.
As you can likely guess, I've delved my toes into the waters as of now and the temperature at this moment feels just right. The robustness of Tears of the Kingdom and how it handles the character's ability to weld and make anything they can think of just blows my little mind to pieces. Being able to attach practically anything to one another, be it woodplanks to metal hooks, wheels to jet engines, lasers to shields, rocks to swords- it recontextualized everything I thought I learnt from Breath of the Wild. In that game I was chuffed if I managed to beat a difficult fight against a big crowd by leading them into the path of a rolling boulder explosive trap I had laid in planning, now I can feasibly create a spinning fire cartwheel to demolish entire raiding parties before they even know I'm in the area. The step up in creative potential for the player to mess around with is like stepping up from Tetris to Minecraft- I'm just flabbergasted by how well everything works.
So many of Breath of the Wild's systems have been clever paired back and reworked into a more malleable gameplay system of mix and match. Elemental arrows are completely gone, in their place comes the ability to pick up certain effect-tied flowers and tie them to the end of your arrow to replicate the effect of a fire arrow, or a bomb arrow, or a poison smoke arrow. But whereas that in itself might be a cool idea to play around with as a sort of 'arrow customisation' garnish system, it's actually just the basis of the weapon play as a whole. Relatively early on you'll be introduced to the rather dizzying prospect that everything in your possession can be 'fused' with anything you find. You can stick a boulder on the end of your long sword to make it a slightly more powerful bludgeon, spike growths to the end of your shield to make it a bash weapon. You can attach a fire spouting proximity trap to the end of your sword and spin around as a fiery Catherine wheel of death- the possibilities are unexhaustive!
And that's just with the equipment! The 'Ultrahand' power allows the bit-by-bit construction of anything your creativity, and the game's spawn limit, can conjure- which actually leaves a dizzying amount of wiggle room. You'll be making skyhooks in the first hour and working vehicles out of timber and glue by the fifth hour. And simply browsing on Tiktok for a bit shows what mastery of this system can achieve. Flying drone strike weapon platforms, pilotable air bombers, reinforced turret tanks- this is the kind of robust mechanic you'd find an entire game designed and marketed around if this were any other series developed by any other studio, but for Zelda it's just another highly complex side of it's already comprehensively designed face. 'Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts' has finally had it's concept vindicated, albeit by a team who achieved more than the development studio of that game could have ever even dreamed of at the time.
Of course, there are still issues that I hold with the game in these early hours. As I've already stated, the dual divorced narrative structure never sits well with me, and it appears to be largely alive and well in this game too. I also wish that the game were a little less strict with it's despawn limit. I would like to build a car I can ride around in for a good bit, but TotK snatches it away from me whenever I leave the realm to go do a shrine- it's annoying, but the game is robust enough that you can whip up another without too much effort, to be fair. And I'm slightly annoyed by how this brand new ancient race, the Zonai, have been thrown into the narrative as though they've always been there, snatching the role of 'once super advanced but now fallen ancient civilisation' from the Sheikah- with the narrative simply pretending that the Sheikah didn't exist to begin with. They even renamed the 'Sheikah slate' into the 'Purah pad', replaced all the Sheikah towers with Purah brand derivatives and apparently scrubbed clean all the giant Sheikah Guardian robot wrecks from the face of the land in however long after the last game this one is supposed to be set. (Long enough for Purah to age from a child into a young woman, at least.)
At least I can celebrate a fact that finally I can confirm for myself that this is indeed, a sequel to Breath of the Wild and not to 'Age of Calamity'. And do you know why I can affirm that? Simple- because the stable of horses I built up in my several years playing Breath were seamlessly ported to this new game to my joy and surprise! Case closed- mystery solved: I can carry on knowing that the adventures we endured in the first game haven't been totally wiped from history like I feared. With only having dipped my toes, it's impossible to summarise everything about this title into a review, but I have a feeling I'm going to be plaything through this one for a while, so this brief overview of my early hours will have to do for now. But I will say for the moment that between this, RE4R and Dead Space- this is turning out to be a blinding year for games! Don't screw up the streak, Starfield!
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