Quick note, I expect you’ve played through most of the game, or are at least familiar with the characters, as I’m writing this. If you’re lost because you don’t know the game, oh well; if you’re lost because I’m a bad writer, then yell at me real loud and threaten me with a big fuck off sword.

When I first heard of it, I was really excited for the new Legend of Zelda game. Just the name alone—Tears of the Kingdom—is evocative to me, and has a sort of panache that other games in the series just don’t have; the name implies emotion—sadness, anger, happiness—and strife on a sort of scale not really seen before in a Zelda game. I was hoping for a good story, some new mechanics, and a version of Hyrule slightly different from Breath of the Wild—I wanted something I could sink my teeth into, a game that would dance on my proverbial palette.

When I booted Tears of the Kingdom up, I knew I was in for a proper sequel—something teetering delicately between stagnant and alien—saddled with all the expectations and hype of a billion unshowered convention attendees. I was shocked and delighted to see Zelda and Link, brains and brawn, together in the game’s first few minutes. When Tears’ main villain woke up from an indeterminately long slumber—as he shook and shivered—I was electrified; I was ready to see Link and Zelda come up with a way to stop him. Reality hit me like a truck, but I’ll talk about that later.

I like Tears of the Kingdom enough. I think it’s a solid game and a good bit of fun, but it’s flawed, yet it’s not good or interesting enough to call Tears a flawed masterpiece or a rough gem. Gameplay-wise, Tears is fantastic, and in most other places it’s just bland.

The game is fun

Remember Breath of the Wild? Well, Tears is that with extra steps. You don’t just find weapons in Tears—you find a weapon, then attach a monster part to it, which can either make your weapon look really cool or lame as hell. You don’t get a Hylian motorcycle in this game, instead you build your own.

There aren’t too many changes with moment to moment gameplay, or at least there aren’t many worth mentioning too much. You get some cool powers in Tears of the Kingdom—the ability to go through ceilings (which I used quite a bit); the ability to attach things to weapons, shields, and arrows (which, again, I used all the time); improved telekinesis; the ability to fuck with time itself; and the ability to build stuff. Compared to the powers in Breath of the Wild—which were often situational at best—the ones in Tears feel useful and fresh.

Outside of that, the combat is the same—it’s definitely Legend of Zelda combat with the extra flurry rush. Weapon durability returns from Breath of the Wild, which definitely pissed me off a bit—I don’t hate weapon durability as a concept, but Tears’ weapons, just like the last game, feel like they’re made of cardboard and scotch tape. I spent a lot of time avoiding combat so I could stock up on good weapons, and good weapons last a few fights at best. Combat in Tears is expensive, but not in a way that feels good a la STALKER. In short, I just don’t like the weapon durability system.

It does, however, feel pretty cool to put things on my weapons—in the early game I put bokoblin bones on a stick a few times, which worked great in a pinch. If I was in a rough spot, I could put bombs, monster wings (which make arrows fly like bullets), or monster eyes that turn arrows into homing projectiles onto an arrow; I could build autobuild a vehicle and drive away; I could put a spike or flamethrower on my shield. The building and fusing systems make Tears border an immersive sim—something Deus Ex, my favorite game of all time—on multiple occasions; instead of killing someone, you can build a huge fuck-off bridge. Tears is simple enough to get into, but getting good at it is definitely a challenge.

There are also a lot of tiny side objectives, like finding koroks, getting said koroks to their friends, and helping a (hopefully gay) man obsessed with his boss build signs across Hyrule. I did all that occasionally, but I mostly ignored all the little side objectives except when I knew they would benefit me—the fruity carpenter, for example, gives you food, money, and useful items every time you help him out, so I often helped him out. The koroks I’d help out maybe 50% of the time, if that.

On a raw gameplay level, most of the other quests are standard Zelda faire—I don’t feel like they’re worth talking about in any meaningful capacity in that regard. You get things for people, kill monsters, take pictures of monsters, build stuff, and give things to people.

Hyrule changed like your dickhead older cousin

Tears’ Hyrule is basically the same as Breath of the Wild, except now there are sky islands, a sprawling underground, and caves. I could tell the game really wants you to give a shit about the sky and underground portions, but I didn’t really do anything in them outside of the bare minimum. Unlike the overworld, there aren’t any characters for you to meet in the sky or underground, only ancient robots—it makes both portions of the game feel barren.

I like the world well enough, though—it’s always fun to see how villages change, for example. Hateno village now is famous for farming and fashion, Kakiriko has a bunch of archaeologists inspecting giant ruins fallen from the sky—all the other villages inhabited by other races, like the gerudo and zora, never really changed at all. You can enter Goron city without burning to death all the time, but that’s about it.

The one thing I did in the sky was do a few challenges to get the glider armor because it looks cool.

Hell is real, and it is this game’s plot

There’s a lot I have to say about this game’s writing, most notably that it fucking sucks. This game’s “story” was written with nothing but utter contempt for the player.

The actual player-facing story—the story you the player experience—is a basic series of objectives: go here, do this, and nothing else. I really couldn’t tell you any of the main story beats in this game, because there are basically none. Anything interesting or fun about the game’s main story is taken out with plot convolutions, and any sort of character development is out the window—this game has less story than the original Breath of the Wild.

What’s character development?

Tears’ main plot does everything in its goddamn power to make sure its characters have had no development since the previous game. Let me give you an example: When you go to goron city and meet Yunobo, the goron champion, you can see that he’s become a total dickhead. In the last game, Yunobo was timid, shy, and a bit of a wimp—the opposite of most gorons—and in this game, when you first meet him again, he’s brash, angry, and mean, the other total opposite end of the spectrum from the last game; he wears a luchador mask, and feeds all the other gorons mind-altering rocks.

This is a textbook example of negative character development—Yunobo has become worse since the last game. When I first saw this, I was actually pretty excited—I could see a story about Yunobo learning his lesson, and then repenting. In this game, he could have been like a drug dealer, keeping goron city addicted to marbled rock roast to line his own pockets. I kept thinking how interesting that story could be for a Zelda game, but it all came crashing down.

It turns out that Yunobo isn’t a dick because he became a worse person, but because he was tricked to put on a mask by something that looked like Princess Zelda. I actually sighed when that was first revealed to me in the game. I could have been playing an interesting, compelling story, and instead I got the complete opposite—a non-story, with a narrative so easily resolved it might as well not have happened at all.

The other guardians are back from Breath of the Wild, and none of them have changed at all. Hell, none of the people supporting the guardians regressed after Breath of the Wild: the zora king’s advisor hates your guts again (even after he decided to stop hating you in the previous game), and you’re still not allowed in gerudo town without a bunch of people agreeing you don’t have cooties. I don’t know how to say this, but all of Breath of the Wild felt completely pointless while playing this game—the world is back to the exact same state as it was, just with some extra bonuses. Characters are denied all semblance of agency for nothing, and it makes everything feel hollow.

Of course, it’s not like Link gets much of anything either. In previous games, like Twilight Princess, we see Link have interpersonal struggles and all that boring nerd shit—there’s nothing like that in Tears. Link is a non-character that does things for people and kills monsters. Of course, Link is hot, so I suppose he gets a bit of a pass.¹

Zelda, the character

I don’t know why I played as Link in this game. Sure, he has the cool arm, but Zelda gets the cool story. When you go and find geoglyphs—basically this game’s version of memories from Breath of the Wild—you get to see all the cool shit Zelda got up to, like fighting Ganon, meeting Hyrule’s first king and queen, and doing actual plot things. Sure, you might be fighting gigantic monsters and cooking tasty food, but Zelda gets to be involved in politics, and there’s this whole war going on—it all makes me feel so disappointed.

Sadly, though, Zelda is a damsel in distress again—it’s not even organic like Breath of the Wild, either. She got sent back in time during the opening part of the game, because she’s the sage of time but she doesn’t know how to control her powers? But also Queen Sonia has time powers? Why wasn’t Zelda taken to a sky island as well? Why did her time powers activate just now?

These are all questions that don’t get answered, because despite the whole series being named after her, Zelda doesn’t get to be a character most of the time—Nintendo really needs to just get that bitch in a crystal or some shit as soon as possible. In this game, she became an immortal dragon—something that’s shown to be agonizing—specifically to get the master sword, and then she suddenly comes back from being a dragon during the final boss fight, because she just needed to be saved. Zelda’s actions could never have long-term consequences—she needs to be saved in the next game.

At one point in the game, during the Penn sidequests, the Yiga clan say that they’ve kidnapped Princess Zelda, and you need to save her—of course, if you know literally anything about the Yiga clan, you know it’s a ruse—perhaps the Yiga clan were going to do an ISIS beheading video with her or something. When I found the Zelda imposter, I just felt frustrated—Zelda could be an actual character, and instead I’m here doing whatever this shit is. It all feels so forced and contrived.

Of course, there’s also all of the quest lines that are just “well there’s a Zelda imposter going around tricking people” thing, like with Yunobo, or the ring ruins in Kakiriko village, or basically any other part of the game’s main “plot.” The only time I saw the Ganon-controlled Zelda imposter used to any good effect was at that one stable where a survey team are all in their underwear—that was a pretty decent joke.

Of course, the reason why the evil Ganon-Zelda has so much power is because people trust the actual Zelda. Throughout the whole game you can see all the good stuff she’s done—research into ancient technologies and the upheaval, start a school, take care of endangered animals—but you never see her do it. Zelda had agency and character until you booted up the game; all the other characters had agency until you booted up the game. It just makes me wonder whether it’s worth starting the game at all.

Racism!

Yeah, racism. I won’t say too much about it here, as I feel like I lack the proper vocabulary, but some parts of the game just feel super racist to me. Most notably the gerudo. Yeah, the gerudo. They’re heavily coded as Middle- Eastern people, all the way down to their language sounding vaguely semitic. I believe you’d call whatever Nintendo’s doing with the gerudo orientalism, but, again, I lack the vocabulary to express what I’m trying to get at—hopefully you get what I’m trying to say.

There’s also lurelin village, the only predominately Black hylian village in the entire game.² Lurelin, unlike the other villages, is treated almost exclusively as a resort, a spot for tourism like Jamaica or the Bahamas. In Tears, lurelin was destroyed by pirates, and there’s a whole questline about killing all the pirates and rebuilding their village with Bolson.³ Once you finish building everything in the village—because somehow the villagers that built the whole thing can’t do it themselves—they declare link the “savior of the village.” I don’t see how you can get a more explicit white savior story than that.

Voice acting

This section will be pretty short, but I don’t like the voice acting in this game very much. It’s just kinda bad, but not in a funny way like some of the side-characters in Deus Ex, or Devil May Cry 2, or Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, or some game like that—this game’s voice acting is just meh. It’s not that the voice actors suck, but they were probably given shit direction and a script written by a tiny little baby—almost everything that the voice acted characters say reminds me of Kingdom Hearts dialogue.⁴

Closing thoughts

Well, I’ve put about 85 hours into my first run of the game—a bit longer than my first run of Fallout: New Vegas—another one of my all-time favorites—so obviously I at least enjoyed my time with Tears. Ultimately, I think it’s a good game with plenty to do—Tears is a great time-sink—it’s not worth 70 fucking dollars. Luckily, a friend bought the game for me as a gift, so I don’t really feel much buyer’s remorse or anything.

I really enjoyed a lot of the side characters—like the lady with that big flower garden, or all the people from the Yiga clan—along with a lot of the new lore, like the strange, Ancient Aliens direction the Zonai might be taking the series in. In general, there’s a lot to like about Tears of the Kingdom, but the godawful writing makes the game hard to recommend to anyone. The game would have been infinitely better if Zelda was a character, and not just a plot device; the game would have been better if the main plot wasn’t just a series of objectives; the game would have been better if characters could actually develop.

I like The Legend of Zelda quite a bit—ever since I played Skyward Sword (which I will defend with my goddamn life), I thought the series was pretty cool—but both the Breath of the Wild games feel like a step in the wrong direction. The whole Zelda series would be better off with more competent writers.