The Nintendo Switch first launched over six years ago, and it launched with what many consider one of the best games ever in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Now, six years later the direct sequel to that game in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is out. Though I was never the biggest fan of Breath of the Wild, Tears of the Kingdom has improved upon the foundation its predecessor laid in almost every way. After spending near 100 hours with the game, it is easily one of the best games on the Nintendo Switch.
Starting off, the gameplay of Tears of the Kingdom is basically the same as Breath of the Wild with breakable weapons, cooking, shrines, and the freedom to tackle the world and quests in whatever way you want. However, all that has been enhanced thanks to Link’s new abilities. The new abilities have far more of creative uses compared to his previous ones. Ultrahand allows Link to attach most things together to build objects such as vehicles which vastly help traversal. Fuse basically cancels out the need to conserve your better weapons for fear of breaking them as you can take a lesser weapon and fuse it with an item which will give it a power boost and sometimes making it far stronger than your other weapons depending on what you fuse it with.
Ascend lets Link traverse upwards through most objects to get to greater heights easily. This definitely helps getting out of places you may be stuck in such as caves or will let you get to areas you didn’t know you could get to. Finally, there’s Rewind which returns a moved object to its previous position which is handy in puzzles or when an enemy throws something at you. The one downside of the abilities is that they can trivialize the puzzles, especially shrines. A shrine could have a specific puzzle, but there would be times I could just move a board with Ultrahand and the Rewind it to get to an area without doing the puzzle. Though it’s nice there’s a variety of ways to tackle the shrine puzzles, shrines feel far less interesting because of it.
The biggest improvement overall to Tears of the Kingdom is the story and quests. The story isn’t nearly as sparse as Breath of the Wild. There are still memories you have to find around the world to get the full story, however these are much easier to find in Tears of the Kingdom and connect to the story happening in the present in a bigger way. The memories build a lot of intrigue, but so much is also glossed over or you never see things, so I felt left wanting more details. It made me wish there was more actual story as the cutscenes are wonderfully done, but they are so few and far between. The new characters are also interesting and good additions, especially Ganondorf, and it is nice to see Zelda have more importance instead of just being kidnapped and having no influence on the story aside from needing to be rescued. It does feel strange that there isn’t really a connection to the story of Breath of the Wild when this is a direct sequel to it.
Quests are also improved as there are far more main quests with each helping build to the finale. Side Adventures are side quests that have more of a story line to them or multiple steps that usually result in getting something good such as a powerful weapon or set of armor. Then, there’s a wide swath of regular side quests for you to find and complete as well.
You would think the reuse of the same map as Breath of the Wild would be a detriment to Tears of the Kingdom, however the developers have changed it up just enough to make it feel different enough as time has noticeably passed since the first game. There’s also extra areas above and below the main map which allow for much more exploration than just retreading all the same areas again throughout the entire game. It is also incredible that the Switch doesn’t struggle with the ability to dive from the sky islands to the bottom areas of the map without loading or frame drops.
My biggest complaint with Tears of the Kingdom would be the game’s version of dungeons. The dungeons feel just as bare bones as they did in Breath of the Wild with needing to activate a certain number of objects around the dungeon, though I still ended up preferring the ones in Breath of the Wild as the new ones didn’t feel as unique as the previous ones. The biggest improvements to the dungeons though are the boss fights as each one is unique to the dungeon and will be tackled differently instead of just a different version of the same boss. Speaking of bosses, the final boss of the game is absolutely fantastic and is such a vast improvement of a final boss that it’s not even funny.
Overall, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is easily one of the best games on the Nintendo Switch and the 6 years of development really shines on hardware that feels so old when other titles come to it nowadays. Despite some flaws, the sheer freedom, abilities, and a better story makes Tears of the Kingdom a wonderful experience and one of the best games in the long history of the franchise.
Score: 9 out of 10
Reviewed on Nintendo Switch