Breath Of The Wild
Tears of the Kingdom is out, and it’s incredible. I played it all weekend, and can’t stop thinking about it when I’m supposed to be working (which actually is not that big a problem in this line of work). There are so many quests I want to do, chasms and floating islands I want to explore, vehicles I want to build, shrines I want to solve, and temples I need to visit that I'm having a hard time imagining ever being done. It’s a great game, and while it isn’t quite giving me the same feeling of discovery I got from Breath of the Wild — that seems basically impossible for a direct sequel — it’s not for lack of quality. In every way I can think of, it’s an improvement on its predecessor.
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Which is making me feel weirdly sad. Breath of the Wild quickly became my favorite game of all time when I first played it. It captured a feeling of adventure unlike anything else I’d ever played or have played since. It had the same effect on many of my peers, too; just before Tears of the Kingdom released, GQ published a list of the 100 best games of all time voted on by games media, streamers, and industry professionals, and Breath of the Wild topped the list. It’s not a flawed but interesting first entry like Assassin’s Creed or Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune - until now, I and many other players, thought of it as the definitive open-world game, the best Zelda game, and a whole bunch of other superlatives.
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But now, by just about every metric, it has been surpassed. Tears of the Kingdom takes so many of the things that made Breath of the Wild great and expands them tenfold. If you liked playing with Breath of the Wild’s systems to see what cool things you could build or accomplish, Tears of the Kingdom supplements your toolset so significantly that it makes Breath of the Wild seem slight by comparison. In TOTK, your creations are only limited by your creativity.
I liked Breath of the Wild’s toolkit a lot. I didn’t feel like I was lacking for options as I approached a fight. I knew I could push a boulder down a hill and take out some bokoblins, use Cryonis on an exploding barrel and send it flying at unsuspecting enemies, or use Magnesis to drop a crate on their heads. There were tons of tactics afforded by the game’s systems. By the standards of every Zelda that had come before, its fights were ridiculously open-ended. Tears of the Kingdom is just even more open.
Nintendo appears to have taken all criticism of the first game to heart, and fixed each of BOTW's issues in Tears of the Kingdom. Didn’t like the Divine Beasts? Now there are more traditional dungeons that eschew the map manipulation of Breath of the Wild's Beasts in favor of more classical exploration and puzzles. Wished there was more variety in the way Koroks were hidden? Now they give you tasks that challenge your ingenuity. Hated breakable weapons? Tears of the Kingdom keeps them, but now you can fuse any object onto a melee weapon, shield, or arrow, creating a seemingly endless variety of tools at your disposal and endless chances to experiment, rather than just waiting for your tools to inevitably crumble.
It seems silly to be sad because a good video game came out, but it feels like an era has ended. In a post-TOTK world, what reason will players have to return to Breath of the Wild? Will I still want to play my favorite game? Do I have a new favorite game now by default? I don’t know, and mostly I’m having fun finding out. But, as in Breath of the Wild, there’s more than a little melancholy beneath the surface.
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Source: TheGamer
