In ‘Tears of the Kingdom,’ the Depths Are Where the Action Is

In the years since The Legend of Zelda’s 1986 release, director, producer, and co-designer Shigeru Miyamoto has described the game as an attempt to replicate what he felt during childhood explorations of the countryside outside of Kyoto, Japan, where he was raised. In making the first installment of what would go on to become one of Nintendo’s most beloved series, his foundational memories of inspecting foreboding caves or happening upon unexpected lakes provided a framework for what would become a global sensation.

Three decades later, when a team at Nintendo sought to rethink Zelda’s design ethos after years of working within an increasingly calcified format, its members returned to that first game and its sense of free-spirited exploration for inspiration. The result was 2017’s The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which, more than any series entry before it, imparted a feeling that players were wandering an expansive fantasy world as awe-inspiring and invigoratingly dangerous as the mental landscape of a great childhood adventure.

Breath of the Wild tweaked the past games’ more confined environments and gauntlet of clockwork puzzle levels—dubbed “dungeons” by players—by offering a sprawling landscape dotted with smaller, discrete challenges broken up by long periods spent simply figuring out how to climb mountains or descend into far-off valleys. It replaced an unlockable, regularly expanding player tool set with ad hoc weapon collecting and the scrappy use of environmental dangers to defeat enemies. In short, it rethought what Zelda could be by returning to the spirit of its debut, tossing aside decades of design staples in favor of a more fluid, improvisational style of play that emphasized a sense of adventure over all else.  

The creation of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, the follow-up to Breath of the Wild, must have presented a significant challenge, then. How does a studio make a direct sequel to a game whose success comes, in large part, from the novelty of exploring an uncharted world?

Tears of the Kingdom solves this problem in familiar video game fashion. It offers more. More ways to interact with the virtual setting’s flora and fauna; more areas to explore across, above, and below the vast Kingdom of Hyrule; more side quests to discover when riding or jogging into a settlement populated with talkative, needy characters.

Link, the series’ mute elfin hero, is quickly granted a new suite of powers in Kingdom’s opening hours. He is able to pick up and manipulate objects with motions of his hand like a benign Carrie White, gluing them together to form a seemingly limitless number of contraptions and vehicles. He can also rewind time to, say, ride a recently descended meteor back up into the sky or reverse the direction of giant industrial gears to help him navigate labyrinths and puzzle-box “shrines.” He can fuse weapons and items together to make more deadly, elementally infused swords and arrows, and zip upward through solid surfaces to emerge again from a liquidy otherworld high above his starting point.

All of this works well in allowing players to enact staggeringly wide-ranging and creative methods of problem solving. It also makes journeying across Tears of the Kingdom’s Hyrule feel less like embarking on an adventure than engaging in a process of continuously stumbling upon the huge number of pieces required to complete an enormous, multifaceted puzzle.