The Legend of Zelda:
Tears of the kingdom nonchalantly rewrote the blueprint of open-world games by substituting a true sense of wonder and discovery for the monotonous objectives and box-ticking busywork that had been standard in previous open-world games. I spent virtually the entire year playing almost nothing but Breath of the Wild, but ever since Nintendo revealed that a sequel would be released in 2019, I’ve been feeling curiously unenthusiastic about the game. Outside the brief glances that were shown in the teaser trailer, we knew so very little about it. Will there be no significant changes to the status quo?
It’s true that more of the same wouldn’t be such a bad thing; after all, we are discussing one of the greatest games that have ever been created. But then the Zelda series creator Eiji Aonuma presented ten minutes worth of Tears of the Kingdom in a video presentation yesterday, and at that point, I was completely convinced. It is more of the same in the sense that it looks exactly the same as Breath of the Wild’s subdued watercolor art style, contains the same stirring symphonic exploration music, and is set in the same realm of Hyrule that Breath of the Wild was. Yet, the designers of Nintendo urge us to use our imaginations while playing this time around.
In Tears of the Kingdom, floating islands are suspended over the familiar landscape of Hyrule, and you have the ability to freely navigate between the sky kingdom above and the plains, rivers, and woods below.
Aonuma demonstrated that Link was able to find a piece of falling rock on the ground, then use a power that allowed him to reverse time and ride the boulder back up to the island above. When Link is knocked off the island during a battle, he falls into freefall with the entirety of Hyrule laid out beneath him. He then has the option to parachute down; this is analogous to jumping out of the Battle Bus in Fortnite.
The most significant change, however, is that Link may now fashion items out of virtually anything he finds in his environment, including wood, twigs, pebbles, wild mushrooms, and components from defunct machines. Are you at a loss for a weapon? Get a stick and a rock, and you can improvise a hammer in an instant. Do you need a pitchfork that is exceptionally long so you can poke goblins from a distance? The solution lies in a lengthy branch.
Link constructs a powered raft out of a number of logs and two fans in a scenario that uncomfortably reminds me of a corporate team-building activity I was once made to participate in. His goal is to go across a lake. That rideable drone thing that he was flying on in the teaser trailer that came before this one, what was it called? You are able to accomplish that. You even have the option of attaching a mushroom that explodes on your shield. The premise of this proposal seems to be, “what if making things was genuinely enjoyable?” What if you didn’t have to collect materials for recipes and then press a button at a workbench to magically create a new gun out of 3 pieces of scrap metal, 4 pieces of rusted nails, and 2 pieces of gunpowder? What if you could just pick anything up and bash it together to see what happens?
You can bestow homing capabilities upon arrows by affixing monster eyes to the tips of them. Players have already begun to speculate wildly about meat arrows, which is both hilarious and fascinating because of the possibilities. People did amazing and unexpected things with Link’s world-manipulating powers in Breath of the Wild, which resulted in hundreds of Reddit clips of Link skidding across the map on flying boulders or creating seesaws to catapult him up mountains.
Breath of the Wild is a video game developed by Nintendo and released in 2018. It would appear that the Zelda development team has taken this direction, providing Link with even more ridiculous superpowers for him to experiment with. (Interesting trivia: the name “Ultrahand” given to Link’s ability to manipulate objects in Tears of the Kingdom is a reference to a grabber toy released by Nintendo in the 1960s and invented by Gunpei Yokoi, who would go on to create the Game Boy.) Even rocks can’t stop him from swimming through them. Once, in order to get to the top of a hill, he dove into the roof of a cave that was underground. The designers of Tears of the Kingdom are encouraging players to use their imagination by eliminating the need for them to put effort into traversing the environment of the game.
Some fans have expressed their dissatisfaction with the fact that Tears of the Kingdom appears to be so similar to its predecessor. The technology of the Nintendo Switch wasn’t even state-of-the-art in 2017, and it is now really showing its age, especially when you compare it to games on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X now. Nonetheless, this is what we anticipate from Nintendo, and it is crucial to note that the fun factor is prioritized over performance. The sheer inventiveness of what was demonstrated the day before has given me a huge grin; I am looking forward to playing it in May,
