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hex-flareheart · 11 months

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Hex Reviews The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

I really hope that last trailer's back's okay, because it fucking carried this game.

Genre: Open-World Sandbox/Action Adventure Platform: Nintendo Switch Price: $70 for some fucking reason Length: 4-200+ hours Do I recommend it? Yes, but not for $70.

This game had a LOT to live up to. In the pipeline for six years after the last one, and the last one basically hard carried the Switch off its success. You literally could not have asked for a better launch title for a console. Breath of the Wild is one hell of a predecessor to follow up.

Tears of the Kingdom wound up having a bit of a rocky road to release, from an initial teaser in 2019 that in retrospect was all custom footage, another in 2021 that showed actual gameplay footage, but no actual name for the game yet, and then finally an actual trailer declaring the game's name in 2022, and a pushed-back release to 2023. 2023 itself was a bit rough for the game, with an unpopular price tag increase (more on that later) and an underwhelming gameplay showcase, which together did the game little favors, especially since it was just looking like Breath of the Wild with extra stuff taped on top of it. Which, not unreasonable for a direct sequel, but with such a dev time and a price hike... yeah, there's a reason people were making jokes at the game's expense.

But the game would ultimately have a couple more trailers released, with the mid-April trailer being by a country mile the best the game received, and I strongly suspect playing a non-insignificant factor in reviving interest (hence the subtitle above- which, yes, I'm planning on doing that more in the future). And I don't think I have to tell you how it was received on launch; I'm pretty sure the entire Internet knows the answer to that question.

And to Nintendo's credit, having played the game extensively (currently in excess of 70 hours), I very much understand now why it took so long. Adding functionally two entire new layers to the world (1 1/2 if you feel like being petty) takes a lot of time, but the big thing lies in the new systems; adding a building mechanic as freeform as Tears of the Kingdom's into a game is a very involved process, and from my understanding the game was basically feature-complete a full year before release, and they spent that entire time polishing everything. Time that was clearly well-spent, because these systems are astonishingly well-integrated.

Before I really get into singing this game's praises, though, I really need to re-touch on one key point, and the single biggest caveat with this game: No game should cost $70. I hated it when Sony started doing it, I hate it here. To preempt the obvious argument, no. Nintendo does not need that extra $10. With the numbers these games pull they could easily sell it for $10 and still make all of the money. The decision wasn't made because Nintendo needed the extra money to justify continuing to make games, the decision was made because Nintendo's executives and shareholders wanted to pad their already-obscene bottom line. Also their wallets. None of that money is going to the people who actually did the work!

I am very much of the general opinion that pirating Nintendo games is morally okay; this goes for ANY supermassive video game company, but especially Nintendo, given how much of fucks they can be. And that especially goes for Tears of the Kingdom.

That point out of the way: frankly, Tears of the Kingdom makes its predecessor look like a feature-length tech demo, and that is not to disparage Breath of the Wild. That game did what it did well, Tears of the Kingdom does it better, on nearly every level. One of the most unpopular aspects, disposable weapons, becomes almost a plus in this game because of the Fuse system, as it encourages you to fuck around and find out, and boy can you really do both. Ultrahand is Magnesis if you put it on some seriously wacko steroids and handed it gorilla glue and duct tape. Cryonis kinda sucked and is accordingly gone. Stasis was overpowered and has been replaced with Recall, less powerful but with more opportunities for hilarity. Remote bombs were... also, probably a little too powerful, and are also gone, but bomb flowers are back!

Tears of the Kingdom's tone is notably less immediately dire compared to Breath of the Wild, and this is reflected in both gameplay and story. The world is even more alive than before, and it feels less like surviving in the wilderness after an apocalypse and more like exporing the wilderness with a toolbox continuously strapped to you. Accordingly, gameplay is even more prone to slapstick than Breath of the Wild was. That game already had a tendency towards slapstick, but having the ability to build shit and strap all sorts of random things onto your weapons just amplifies it. You can glue a bomb to your sword! Is it a good idea? Probably not! Can you do it? Absofuckinglutely! The shrines are also notably a bit more consistently better, and there's NO APPARATUS SHRINES, THANK FUCKING GOD.

There's also notably more... well, story to the game's story. Again, this isn't to disparage Breath of the Wild, but its story was by nature a bit barebones. Tears of the Kingdom's is a fair bit more fleshed out, though this does come with the caveat of making the timeline significantly more confusing. I'm at this point on the side of "BotW and TotK are their own continuity after SS" simply because it makes things vastly simpler.

To get more into the specifics, though, we'll need to get into spoilers, so you know the drill.

Champion abilities are no longer around, as the spirits of the champions moved on 6 years ago. (In-universe, not just a joke.) In their place are, a), ACTUAL DUNGEONS, FUCK YES, and b) sages, who both provide an ability to be used in-world, as well as providing phantoms of themselves that help you in combat. They're generally less powerful than the champions were, and their abilities can be very awkward to use (as outside of certain situations for 2 out of 5, you have to walk over to their phantom to use the ability), but having up to 5 extra characters helping you in combat is immensely useful, and makes even poor Sidon, whose ability kind of sucks, still actively very helpful.

Regarding the extra layers to the world, there's the sky islands of course, which were very heavily-advertised, but the layer less advertised is the Depths, a massive, very dark underground layer spanning the entirety of Hyrule. From corner-to-corner. It can be a bit annoying to navigate, and does have generally less to do than the surface, but it certainly has its purposes, and has a crucial role in making the dragons a bit more interesting.

There's four now, with the original three from Breath of the Wild still being around, and a fourth that now hangs out high in the sky. Unlike in Breath of the Wild, the dragons are always on the map, following a continuous loop; Farosh loops the southern part of the map, Naydra loops the eastern part of the map, Dinraal loops the northeast, and the mysterious new Light Dragon does a full loop of Hyrule high in the sky. Crucially, a) you can now land on and ride the dragons, with conditions around them corresponding to their respective element, and b) besides the Light Dragon, each of them spends roughly half their route underground, passing through one chasm on the surface, travelling through the Depths, and emerging elsewhere later. You can ride them the entire time, and getting materials is now on a 10-minute cooldown rather than being per-appearance. (I personally feel like this cooldown should be significantly shorter, but I digress.)

As for building and Fuse, there's a ton of options on both fronts, and in exploring the Depths you can unlock Autobuild, which lets you save things you've built and automatically build them on-demand, either from parts-on-hand or using Zonaite ore gathered in the Depths. Fuse, meanwhile, can be used with arrows, shields, and weapons- for arrows, it's just attaching things to the arrowhead, which can do things as simple as adding special properties like elements, to things as wacky as placing floating platforms for you to use. With weapons and shields, though, we need to go a little more in-depth.

You can attach a lot of different materials to both; with shields, they'll mostly just increase defense power and durability a bit, and often add a damage component if you feel like swatting enemies with it. With weapons, you can essentially attach a single material to make a custom weapon; depending on the material, you could end up with a thing impaled on the end, which is kind of comical, or as is the case with some of the horns in particular, replacing large parts of the weapon with the material, resulting in some VERY cool-looking hybrid weapons. The real wacky shit though, that comes with Zonai devices.

Zonai devices are, of course, devices built by the Zonai. Mostly these are meant for use with Ultrahand for building contraptions, but they can also be glued to your shield and sword. (Also arrows, but they're less notable there.) And this is no small part of why I understand why the game took so long, because there's a lot of unique attractions here, particularly with shields. Attaching a device to a weapon will typically cause it to activate briefly when swung, with generally very predictable results, but with shields, they'll behave differently between guarding with the shield and shield surfing. Three good examples of this.

One, the Zonai Cannon. Strap it to your shield and you have, well, a portable cannon. Guard with your shield, blast your enemies. Two, the Zonai Cart; a big flat platform with integrated wheels. Strap it to your shield, and it's now a fucking skateboard when you shield surf with it. No, I'm not joking. It'll even let you grind on rails! And three, the Zonai Rocket. Strap it to your shield and you have two options. Guard, and you'll rocket upward for a couple seconds, giving you a mini-Revali's Gale. Shield surf? You can fucking fly.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg here. You can do some wacky shit with Fuse! Try fusing a bomb to your shield and shield surfing sometime, you'll see what I mean.

All told, this game's combat sandbox is absolutely apeshit on a level Breath of the Wild wishes it could reach. If you've seen clips of this game, you've almost certainly seen some of the hilarity you can get up to with Ultrahand, and I just described what you can expect from Fuse. Combat is even more diverse than ever before- albeit just as likely to kill you repeatedly early on. That never went away! And compared to Breath of the Wild, the rest of Tears of the Kingdom is also just generally more refined than even its already famously-polished predecessor.

I think the price tag's bullshit, but I'm not going to pretend Tears of the Kingdom isn't a really good game.

Hex Rates This: 9/10

#hex posts things #hex reviews things #hex reviews games #this game is basically like if you took botw #and strapped some minecraft shit on top of it #and frankly that's always something I kinda thought botw needed so like #fuck it it works

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