Crossing a deep chasm with Ultrahand: A thrilling moment in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
There’s a moment early in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, in one of the very first shrines, when I felt a shiver of pure thrill run through me. I had been presented with a simple task: get to the other side of a fall-to-your-death deep chasm using the new Ultrahand ability and an assortment of wooden boards, stone hooks, and a single fixed rail. I decided on Ultrahand because it has the ability to super glue anything to anything else and pieces together a square board for Link to stand on. I then hooked my crude contraption on the rail and climbed aboard. It all worked out perfectly and I was able to easily cross the chasm. The act of seeing the problem, literally building the plan and executing it was so satisfying that I broke out into a smile when I crossed the chasm.
I would never smile the same way again, and that initial thrill would slowly be replaced with a gentle and familiar pleasantness.
Tears of the Kingdom: A Game About the Lost Legend of Zel’da and Link’s Search for the Legend of Zelda
Tears of the Kingdom is the follow-up to the game that defined the Nintendo Switch and reinvigorated the 30-year-old Zelda franchise, Breath of the Wild. The game ends near the end of Breath of the Wild. A sleepig Ganon is feeling the effects of missing his nighttime skincare routine when Princess Zelda and Link go to investigate the ruins beneath Hyrule Castle. A prisoner wakes, shaking free his arm that was holding him, and Link throws himself into darkness. After some time, Link was given a new arm, but he was still tasked with his old quest to find the original Legend of Zelda.
Link has a whole new set of powers as a result of his new Purah Pad. He can stick things together to create all kinds of items, including weapons, he can rewind time for a specific object, and he can teleport through matter directly above him. Though these are relatively simple powers, taken together, they create infinite possibilities for how Link fights, flies, and puzzle-solves his way through Hyrule and the sky islands above it.
I’m the kind of person that needs structure. It is the main reason I avoid open-world games. I get paralyzed when I’m given the mandate to do anything, which frequently results in me doing nothing. I decided that I would rush through Tears like I do Breath of the Wild, before I abandoned it.
Whatever problem you choose to solve, the game will allow you to scrounge or bring with you whatever you want. Tears will explicitly show you, through the materials it liberally scatters about for you to use, that 1 + 1 = 2. But it will equally reward you if, somehow, you come up with 1 + 1 = banana.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/23718926/zelda-tears-of-the-kingdom-review-nintendo-switch
Zelda tears of the kingdom-review-nintendo-switch: Is this a glider for me?
Me: Yes, that glider over there with the fans I have here makes the most sense if I wanna get off this sky island. But it’s too slow to walk over there, grab the glider, and assemble everything. Will I be standing on this platform as well? Oh! What if I use a rocket? Will it make me go faster?
Source: https://www.theverge.com/23718926/zelda-tears-of-the-kingdom-review-nintendo-switch
Tears, Breath of the Wild, and Link’s Last Laughter: Revisiting the Secret Weapons of Hyrule
The combat from Breath of the Wild is almost the same as from Tears. Weapon degradation is still going on, but there is a reason why everything breaks so easily now. Though somewhat ironic, I really enjoy using my weapons, even though I don’t particularly care for fighting. Every enemy drops something you can use to turn into a new weapon. Horns, toenails, and rib cages become the bladed edge for swords or arrows, while dropped enemy clubs, spears, and, in some cases, severed arms function as handles. Like with puzzle solving, Tears lets you get creative with how you craft your arsenal. Or, if that’s not your thing, each component has its own attack power allowing you to simply mash together the two most powerful components. But above all else, I prefer ranged combat. There are so many things you can stick on the end of an arrow to suit your needs while staying relatively safe. If you have a white chu chu jelly, you can hit an enemy solid with it. When you get an arrow, you can sneak in and steal items from the camp. And of course, there’s nothing that tastes as great together as bomb + arrow.
But messy controls are only a minor gripe. The movie attempts to evoke the same emotions it inspired by Breath of the Wild, but has nothing particularly emotional to say. When Link left the Shrine of Awakening in Breath of the Wild, he saw everything of Hyrule before him. The game-defining moment was a special one, and Tears couldn’t duplicate it. I had a lot of times where I was pleased that my creation did work, but there was nothing I could point to in my hours of tears that inspired that same gasp.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/23718926/zelda-tears-of-the-kingdom-review-nintendo-switch
Tears of the Kingdom: The First Five Years of Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda: How Much Do We Really Need to Know?
Controls are difficult to figure out for puzzlesolving. A lot of the dungeon and shrine puzzles were designed to be timed. Fortunately, if you make an error, the Recall ability can usually reset you with minimal time loss. You can hit the wrong button if you want to select the Ultrahand ability. I am not speaking from experience.
None of these things are bad, nor do they diminish how enjoyable Tears is. It just seems like Nintendo wants you to feel what you felt in 2017 and keeps pointing at moments throughout the game like a friend trying to impress you with something you don’t have the heart to reveal that you’ve seen before.
Five years ago, Nintendo released The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and took a huge risk. Forgoing the series’ well-trodden linear formula, the game transformed Hyrule into an open world, transfiguring a style of play made popular by studios like Bethesda, Rockstar, and Mojang. Breath of the Wild sold 29 million copies, more than every other 3D Zelda game combined. It received perfect scores from every critic it was critiqued by. Streamers are still finding new ways to play.
It is impossible with a piece of art of this size and potentiality to say anything completely definitive, but after nearly 50 hours of gameplay, I can say this: Tears of the Kingdom is not as viscerally astonishing as Breath of the Wild, but it refines the first game’s systems to the point that they now feel antiquated.
Link loses Zelda in Hyrule, but he does not lose his heart. The Gloomy abyss turns Link into the Past
They disturb a skeleton with long red hair that is livelier than normal skeletons as they go deeper into the cave. After a cataclysm, Hyrule Castle explodes skyward, and Link, inevitably, loses Zelda and all but three of his 20 hearts. He wakes up and finds that someone has replaced his hand with a claw and that he is high up among the stone islands.
Whereas Breath offers players the surface of the world to play in, Tears adds the sky. The end of the training island has clouds clearing and Link leaps and soars. Like previous Zelda games, the influence of filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki runs deep, this time his love of flight. The previous game had players climbing the map towers. Link will use his old Nintendo Switch to look for landmarks during his bungee plunge.
Link’s descent does not stop with the ground. Across Hyrule, pits have belched out of the earth, oozing pink and black sludge, known as Gloom. They look bottomless, but they are instead gateways to TOTK’s wildest addition, “the depths,” an inhospitable abyss, a pitch black Link to the Past-esque dark world. The deep shadow initially worried me (visual obscurity often indicates a barren space—snow levels, I’m looking at you), but Link must drive out the darkness with Brightbloom Seeds, which burst into light-giving flowers when planted, and Lightroots, checkpoints that permanently illuminate the surrounding area. They reveal a land—steeped in eerie navies and heather-purple—of mines, mountains and monsters, almost the same size as Hyrule.