2023-05-26 07:13:53
Quite a few people consider “Breath of the Wild” to be the best game ever made or at least in the current generation of consoles. Creating a sequel to such a game is quite a challenge. Nintendo chose to follow the same path as they followed in the generation of the N64 console and created a direct sequel to their successful game “Ocarina of time” – which was also considered by many to be one of the most successful games of all time, instead of creating a completely new game – as they usually do.
The game starts almost immediately after the end of “Breath of the Wild”. We will try not to spoil the ending of the plot here, in case you haven’t played it yet, but we have no choice but to mention it. After the victory of Link, the star of the game, and Princess Zelda, they continue to explore the castle they liberated and accidentally release a new evil force into Hyrule – the kingdom where the game series takes place. The malevolent force changes the entire world and creates a kind of floating islands in the sky.
Nintendo uses the existing world of the previous game, and changed it enough to make it feel new and interesting. Some of the places you will visit from the previous game are now ruined cities: some are left as they were and some are floating in the sky. Zelda disappears, Link has to save her and along the way also the world. The less we say about the sequel, the better, so that we don’t reveal some of the plot moves.
This time, unlike the previous game, Link has many more tasks to complete and the game contains much more plot. One of the criticisms leveled at the previous game is the lack of a clear storyline: in the eyes of many, the world is too open, directionless, quite a few players simply got lost in it and didn’t know what to do.
The game is still a huge open world, even more so than before, but at almost any given moment you have a goal or several goals. It’s hard to get lost or not know what you need to do next to advance the plot.
Like the game world, the gameplay of “Tears of the Kingdom” also builds on everything that worked in the previous game, and expands it wisely. Link can still climb almost anything and get anywhere, cook food, upgrade weapons and armor, and fight a variety of monsters. Every such aspect of the gameplay has been upgraded somehow.
The main addition to the game is the new arm that Link gets (we won’t say how), with which he can use all the powers he gained in the previous game, such as telekinesis, but on top of all of these is a new power that gives him the possibility to assemble and connect almost any possible object. It starts small, like adding a poisonous mushroom to the arrows he shoots to make them poisonous, and continues to assembling really complicated installations: vehicles, cranes, and more. This new ability changes the entire gameplay. Link can go more places, fly higher, fight better, and basically almost every aspect of the game changes in some way.
Assembling objects and vehicles using game controllers can sound terribly complicated, but somehow, as always with Nintendo, everything feels natural and intuitive: in a few hours, everyone becomes a great inventor who creates complex systems that will help him progress in the game.
This system is truly a pretty amazing feat, one with almost infinite creative possibilities, and it’s a huge wonder that the game doesn’t collapse under the sheer wealth of possibilities. Unfortunately, the Switch itself sometimes has trouble running this entire huge world, and more than once during the game there were stutters, frame rate drops, and freezes for half a second or more. It’s not something that ruins the experience or deeply impairs it, but you can definitely feel the years of the aging Switch hardware.
Whole books can be written about the complexity of the game systems in “Tears of the Kingdom”, and how using the existing world from the previous game allowed Nintendo to come up with such a complex system. We can talk about the new characters, the most significant plot in the series for a long time, or the new underground tunnels, which were created as a result of the change that took place in Hyrule’s world.
The tunnels are almost a new game world, in addition to the existing one, created by the rise of the floating islands, and it almost doubles the size of the original game, which was huge anyway. This is a kind of darker version of the world above, and the game uses this new area not only to enlarge the world, and does some great tricks of transitions between the world above and the world below, and the connections between them, which are fun to discover on your own without spoilers.
In general, “Tears of the Kingdom” is a game that is better to know as little as possible about, and discover everything that happens in it by yourself. Good luck with clearing the next two months for him, at least.
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