Not A Review of TOTK
Contributed by DJMMT
I am not going to write a review of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (TOTK). For starters, I’ve only played it for about eight hours, at the time of writing this, and honestly, I’ve barely scratched the surface of it. I don’t even have all the special abilities yet. But more importantly, there’s no value in reviewing a game that already has 10’s across the board that’s a sequel to a game that also got 10’s across the board and won GOTY. What could I possibly say about this game that would convince you to change your decision about whether or not to buy it that hasn’t already been said? All I’ll say is that it’s an excellent game, I do genuinely believe that it will win GOTY, and the graphics are fine. What I actually want to talk about in this post is how this game has one of the best introductions I’ve seen in a long time.
SPOILERS AHEAD
TOTK starts off with a pretty epic opening that connects directly to the ending of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (BOTW). While it starts of with a cinematic, the game quickly lets you take control of Link at full power. You have the Master Sword, Link’s clothing from the previous game, and a ton of hearts. You get to use this in a single battle. Not too long after, you realize that this is the only battle you’ll get to use all this stuff in, but while experiencing the opening, you don’t know that. Link and Zelda proceed to find the big bad of the game and then you lose everything, including Link’s right arm. Shout out to the extremely well-done Princess Mononoke reference in that sequence.
A game having you seemingly start out with a bunch of stuff, especially when tied to a previous game, and then quickly taking it all away isn’t particularly original. We’ve seen it many times. It’s irritating, cliché, and frankly unnecessary in a majority of games at this point. What TOTK gets right is that after this happens you basically don’t care about any of the things you’ve lost, save for the hearts. I absolutely miss having all those hearts.
After the villain introduction sequence, Link wakes up with a new arm, because magic, and nothing except for a broken Master Sword and his underwear. I really appreciate how they actually justified the new arm narratively and weaved the new powers into the story pretty well. But let’s not discuss writing too much. Let’s focus on the effectiveness of the game’s intro from a strictly gameplay standpoint.
Right after you get that new arm, the first thing the game does is have you jump from a great height. It’s a beautiful sequence that’s reminiscent of the jumping scene in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018). They were smart to throw the game logo up at that moment. Immediately, you understand both the scale and freedom that this game is trying to sell you on. This is not going to be BOTW. This is going to be something different. BOTW was a game about the freedom of horizontal space. This is a game about the freedom of vertical space on top of the vast horizontal space you’ve already enjoyed.
Once you land, you think to yourself, “Man, I don’t have any of that stuff I had just 10 minutes ago.” All your hearts, your gear, and your weapon are gone. But rather than the game telling you it’s time to go re-collect all that stuff, it immediately goes the opposite direction and tells you to forget all that stuff you lost, because it doesn’t matter anymore. Note that I’m speaking metaphorically here. The game doesn’t actually tell you not to care about that lost stuff. What it does do is introduce you to the first of a number of amazing, and fun, new gameplay mechanics which essentially make you not care about that old stuff, save for the hearts, that you lost from the previous game. This starts with the introduction of the Ultrahand power.
Ultrahand is one of the best game mechanics I’ve experienced in a long time. It’s not that the concept is new. It’s really just the ability to pick things up and put them together. That’s Minecraft, Roblox, crafting in games like Horizon Zero Dawn, and a host of other examples. What TOTK does better than all those previous examples is a combination of three things. The first is that the mechanic is extremely easy to use. It’s the most convenient, intuitive, and quick-to-learn real time DIY mechanic I’ve ever seen in an action game. I can’t even adequately explain how much more accessible and fluid it is compared to other games. You just need to try it yourself. It’s a travesty that there’s no demo for this game. Because 15 minutes with Ultrahand will sell the game to basically any person who has ever tried to build a working object in a video game.
The second is an environment that actively encourages you to use Ultrahand to solve your problems. We see lots of games where you have crafting/building mechanics in them, but often those mechanics are surface level or casual in their usefulness. When you look at a game like Horizon Zero Dawn, crafting is mostly a story mechanic that moves Aloy along by giving you new weapons and upgrades for them. But in practice, you pretty much only use crafting and the free creativity it allows in that game to make more arrows and occasionally set intricate traps for harder fights. But if you’re good enough you don’t need to do any of that. You can absolutely just fight the machines in that game with your bow and spear. Crafting is a crutch to make things easier; but it’s not actually what the game is about. In TOTK, crafting/building is what the game is about. It’s shaped around the idea of using Ultrahand and other related powers to solve your problems. And this is made clear as soon as it’s available. The map, the objects lying around the map, and the problems needed to be solved are all built around the idea that the player will want to use Ultrahand.
You don’t actually have to use Ultrahand in a lot of cases, but you want to; and Nintendo knows that. The first thing I did when I landed on the actual ground (the introduction starts on a sky island) in Hyrule was build a “car.” I didn’t have to. I was going to the next main objective. It was far, but not that far. I could have easily walked there. And it probably would have been faster and more efficient to walk there. My car was trash. The resources I had so early in the game were limited. I couldn’t steer it. I couldn’t move that fast. It couldn’t go very far continuously, due to a lack of “fuel.” Nevertheless, I wanted to build a car. And literally seconds after landing, I found wood and wheels. The game gave me wood and wheels, because the developers knew that when I landed and saw the vast fields of Hyrule before me that I was going to want to build a car. They even justified it in the writing. I won’t go into detail, but when you first land there is a reason that you just find conveniently shaped and placed objects lying around Hyrule. When I first landed, I genuinely thought I was going to have to use rocks to make the wheels on my car. I was so happy to find actual wheels. The fact that the game justified them being there via the writing was just icing on the cake. Even if they hadn’t justified it, I still would have been happy. Because I just wanted to build a car.
The whole game is built this way. You want to build things. You want to use this power to accomplish your goals. I would be shocked to hear that a single person first landed in Hyrule, saw those wheels, and then decided to walk to the next objective. I’m sure many tried to build a car, weren’t happy with how inefficient it was to “drive” at that point in the game, and then ultimately decided that walking was the better option. But I can’t believe that a single person saw those wheels and went “No thanks, I’ll walk.”
Finally, and this is quite possibly the most important of the three things that make Ultrahand superior to building mechanics in other games, there is no single solution to how you solve a problem in TOTK with Ultrahand. Remember that feeling you got when Super Mario Maker (2015) was first released? You’d see all these people posting levels they created. It was so interesting to see how different people used the same tools to approach something differently. The problem was that you didn’t have a clear objective. Making levels was just something you did if you wanted to. That’s not really a great motivator for a lot of gamers. It’s a great tool for people who actually want to create. But for people who just want to play, it gets old fast. Now apply that freedom of creativity to an open world action RPG with clearly defined objectives. Not from the level designer’s perspective, but from the player’s perspective. That’s what TOTK offers with Ultrahand.
One of the first puzzles TOTK threw at me was a shrine puzzle during the introduction portion of the game. Basically, I had to get across a large gap. I solved that puzzle by attaching two hooks to a wooden board and putting my contraption on a metal line that was stretching across the gap. I don’t know if that was the only way to solve the puzzle. I don’t know if it was the best way to solve the puzzle. But it was the way I decided to solve the puzzle. It felt personal and gratifying. Like I had accomplished something that the game didn’t hold my hand to figure out. My immediate thought after solving that puzzle was “Did everyone do it that way?” I literally tweeted it out right after doing it, asking if other players used a different method. And that’s one of the best things about the game. When you figure something out, you immediately feel accomplished while also knowing that other players probably did it differently. But in this case you actually care to see other approaches. Like if there was a PS5 style function where you could upload puzzle solutions and instantly watch other players’ uploads, I could see people using that all throughout this game. Not for assistance, but out of curiosity.
For example, here was a puzzle that you have to solve during the game’s introduction sequence. For me, the solution I went with was obvious. I solved it on my first try using methods that I had already used to solve previous puzzles. I knew there were other methods to get across this gap, but none of them came to mind when I was playing. Yet here’s the same puzzle being solved by another player in a completely different way that I never would have even considered. My solution is simpler, easier, and more elegant. His solution is way more epic and hilarious. I honestly didn’t even realize you could do what he did. And that’s awesome! We both feel accomplished and intelligent, yet we brought our own backgrounds and thought processes into solving the problem. Most importantly, we both arrived at the correct solution. We made it across the gap.
What TOTK’s introduction does perfectly is motivate the player to want to do more and then quickly show you that you haven’t even scratched the surface of what you can actually do in the game. You don’t feel like you’re playing the game and the numbers are just going to keep getting bigger with little change from start to finish. Every step of the way forward, you feel like you want to do something and eventually will be able to. But the truly impressive part is that the game then quickly confirms it for you soon after you have the thought. Like I said, I wanted to build a car. I figured I could but didn’t have proof. Literally seconds later, the game gave me the tools to build a car. Not a good car, but a car none the less. After that, I thought to myself that I wish there were better wheels for off-roading and a better propulsion system. Not even an hour later, I found a shrine that allowed me to use automatic propulsion wheels with heavy duty tires for off-road terrain. No, I am not making that up. This is an item available in a Zelda game. Note that I wasn’t instantly given the ability to use those wheels freely. At that point they were only available to use in that shrine. But the game confirmed that they were available in the game, thus motivating me to keep going; because I know that eventually I’ll be able to build the car of my TOTK dreams.
I’m not even thinking much about the plot, which so far is pretty good for a Zelda story. But I don’t care about finding Zelda or defeating Ganondorf, at this point. I’m way more focused on all the cool stuff I want to build. I want to build a car, a plane, and a submarine. I don’t know if you can actually go under water or build an airtight vehicle that can be submerged; but you can damn sure bet that I’m going to try. Nintendo unironically made me care about Minecraft gameplay more than Minecraft ever managed to. And it accomplished that by the time I finished the game’s introduction. I’m not going to give The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom a review score, because this isn’t a review. But I highly recommend it for players of all types and ages. Even my wife, who has never played an open world game, is interested in giving it a try.
Also, you can build Gundams!
