It should come as a surprise to exactly nobody that The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is going to be an absolutely massive video game with a staggering amount of things to do and see. After all, it’s the follow up to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, one of the biggest, deepest, and rewarding open world games ever made. But what truly caught me off guard with my time playing Tears of the Kingdom wasn’t just how much there was to do – and there was certainly tons – it was just how much creative freedom I had as I attempted to take on every corner of it so far. Breath of the Wild’s core philosophy was effectively “See that landmark in the distance? You can walk there!” In Tears of the Kingdom, it’s more like “See that landmark in the distance? Well, you have a hundred different ways to get there, and a lot of them might not work, but when one does, hoo boy, you’re gonna feel like a genius.”
Let’s step back for a sec, or should I say, soar above. Floating high above Hyrule are the Sky Islands, and that’s where the large majority of my preview of Tears of the Kingdom took place. If the Hyrule below is the updated open world from Breath of the Wild, the sky sections feel more akin to The Wind Waker, just minus the big red talking boat to get around. There are tons and tons of islands up there in disparate clusters and formations and it’s up to you to figure out exactly how you’re going to travel between them, take on their endless puzzles, conflicts, and caves, and move on to the next one. You can soar through the sky on your trusty paraglider, hoping you’ve got enough stamina to not only make the trip but to scale the side of whatever you’re trying to get on top of. If you’ve played Breath of the Wild, you’re already very familiar with that exercise. But this time around, you’ve got a lot more options, and that’s where things get really clever and occasionally, really funny. Using some parts lying around, I decided to make a goofy double decker bomber jet to fly through the skies in style. I couldn’t tell you why I decided to make it a double decker besides “I thought it looked cool at the moment” and really, sometimes that’s reason enough.
Link’s got a couple of great new abilities this time around, the most significant of which is Ultrahand, a remix of his Sheikah Slate rune powers from Breath of the Wild. Ultrahand basically works like The Force in Star Wars: you can use it to push and pull and rotate objects in your environment around you and then stick them to other objects. You won’t be able to use it on organic things like animals or enemies or anything bolted down to the ground like a tree stump or a rock structure, but there are some interesting exceptions to that rule. In one puzzle, a stranded Korok trying to reunite with another Korok on a different sky island needed help getting over there, and since he was wearing a large hiking backpack, I was able to use Ultrahand to pick him up, put him in a minecart, and get him back to his buddy, netting me two Korok seeds as a reward. So we’ll see how often these exceptions appear in the world at large. Hopefully there are enemies with decorative bags or accessories on them that we’re allowed to grab and throw around because chucking a kitted out Bokoblin into the clouds would be a fun alternative to just stabbing it. What? Don’t judge me.
Back to my goofy double decker bomber jet: using two large fans that were conveniently in the area, I stuck them to some ship parts using Ultrahand and then pulled a steering stick Zonai device out of my inventory to give my ship some maneuverability while flying the mostly friendly skies. Zonai devices are new this time around and you’ll be able to find them in giant capsule toy looking machines scattered around the world. The devices have a variety of looks and abilities and they can generally be used to manipulate or enhance objects around you or in your hands. One example I saw was a rocket shaped Zonai device that, when fused to Link’s shield, allowed him to rocket jump into the sky anywhere, similar to Revali’s Gale from Breath of the Wild, only this time it’s limited to your number of rockets on hand rather than being an ability that needs to recharge, which is definitely going to lead to some crazy and clever puzzle and combat solutions. The building process was slightly cumbersome at first, but I suspect it’s something that will come second nature after some extensive play time. Breath of the Wild controlled a bit untraditionally compared to your standard issue open world game, and Tears of the Kingdom throws in several more interactive systems, radial wheels, and object manipulations. You’ll probably still hit the horse whistle button by accident (which, sadly, didn’t summon Epona in the skies. Somebody get that pony a jetpack!). Luckily, you’ll be able to save the custom vehicles and contraptions you create and summon them when you need them if you have the right materials, so you won’t have to rebuild everything from scratch each time. You’ll also occasionally stick two objects together thinking it makes sense, only to instantly realize that was a very stupid idea, like this hot air balloon glued to a box fan, which created a normally functioning box fan with a decorative hot air balloon stuck to it. Good job, brain.
This trial and error, genius and idiot song and dance was exemplified best in my attempts to solve a big puzzle in the world where I had to return a glowing stone to a marker on the map with several gaps and a giant rotating sphere shape between it all. I had Ultrahand and Fuse at my disposal, plus Recall, a power that would reverse time on a performed action like I was rewinding a video file. Using gusts of wind, my hang glider, and my bare arms I made several valiant but ultimately inefficient attempts to get the stone across the sky before realizing that I could just Ultrahand the entire puzzle ball and rotate it to make a walkable path to the finish line. Again, good job, brain.
My puzzle attempts, my bomber jet, and pretty much everything else I assembled to get around the world had a distinctly Looney Tunes quality to them, particularly the parts of Looney Tunes where Wile E. Coyote is stubbornly building wobbly catapults, rocket skates, and wingsuits in his pursuit of the Road Runner, a plan that always seems like a good idea until it backfires or he looks down. There’s a lot of trial and error in Tears of the Kingdom, which means a lot of failing, falling, or just barely puttering to the finish line, but a new tool called the Travel Medallion – a blue circle symbol you can drop on most surfaces in the world – allows you to respawn at the location you placed it. If you’ve got a particularly tricky section ahead that could potentially involve a lot of falling to your death, well, just drop your Travel Medallion near you and start experimenting without worrying about having to backtrack. You can pick it back up off your map screen whenever you want and place it somewhere else later. Breath of the Wild was already fairly liberal with checkpoints, but Tears of the Kingdom lets you basically place one anywhere and that’s a wonderful new addition.
Speaking of placing stuff anywhere, another very fun new tool this time around is Fuse. Fuse lets you take objects and materials you find in the world or in your inventory and apply them to your shield, weapons, and bow and arrows. I was getting mobbed by an army of tough bad guys in a fort and saw a giant spiky ball in the world and instinctively used Ultrahand to try to smack it against the bad guys like I would have used Magnesis in Breath of the Wild…before realizing I could just fuse it with my weapon and turn my fairly crappy sword into a much, much stronger spiky ball sword. This was not only fun and cool but it also increased the durability of my weapon, which meant it wouldn’t break as easily. Theoretically you could keep fusing a thing to the same weapon over and over to keep it from shattering which feels like an interesting make-good for people who hated the whole weapon breaking thing in Breath of the Wild. It doesn’t totally overhaul or scrap that disputed design decision, but it does give you a ton of options on how to avoid it while simultaneously giving you a ton of new weapon combinations to play with. Some of the other Fuse combos I saw were a minecart fused shield, a horn fused broadsword, and ruby fused arrows that depleted a rare stone in my inventory to create elementally charged projectiles – which were fiery, awesome, and much stronger than your typical arrow.
On a technical level, everything I played ran at a consistent framerate – so far, at least. Breath of the Wild was a launch game for the Nintendo Switch and ran into occasional dips in framerate in dense outdoor areas like the Korok Forest. For years Nintendo fans have speculated that Tears of the Kingdom would launch alongside a more powerful Nintendo Switch Pro model so bigger, more resource intensive games wouldn’t run into framerate issues but unless Nintendo has been secretly hiding a next gen console for the Tears of the Kingdom launch day (spoilers: they’re not) then the six year old Nintendo Switch hardware will have to do. Most of the sections I’ve played of Tears of the Kingdom took place in the sky and ran fairly smoothly, so we’ll have to see how things fare once Link starts fighting a bunch of enemies in a thick forest in the vast Hyrule down below the clouds. Either way, if you didn’t personally have an issue with those things in Breath of the Wild, you’ll probably be fine here too.
All in all, from Ultrahand to Fuse and dozens of sky islands, these are just some of the things that make this game – the rare direct sequel to a previous Zelda game – feel the most fresh so far. That’s because lots of animations, objects, outfits, sounds, and more feel very similar to Breath of the Wild, which is admittedly a slight letdown based on how much of that game hinged around surprise and discovery. But Tears of the Kingdom is layered (or, uh, tiered) and the way you interact with nearly everything has evolved in creative and dramatic ways, so I have little doubt that there won’t be a million new things to do and see in the full game. For now, I’m giddy to not only experience it all myself but to also see how the surely massive player base will make and break this game in brilliant and silly ways. With every puzzle and conflict having such a ridiculous array of solutions, the results will likely be endlessly astonishing and entertaining, especially if you look at what hardcore Breath of the Wild players have already been doing for years in a game where it often feels like you weren’t supposed to do those things. Nintendo has taken that ideology and legalized it in Tears of the Kingdom and that’s immensely exciting, even if it means there will be lots of hilarious fumbling and falling along the way.
