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Apr 26, 2023

‘Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’ review: It makes you feel like a creative genius

I built a cart out of wood, wheels and portable fans to navigate through a

I built a cart out of wood, wheels and portable fans to navigate through a complex rail system and ferry the hero Link across an endless pit. It was like engineering a roller coaster with cardboard, duct tape and a prayer. It took me 45 minutes of failed inventions and a gradual understanding of the physics before I succeeded. When Link safely made it across, I cheered and proclaimed myself a genius. I felt like a NASA engineer celebrating a Mars landing. I create, therefore I progress.

In a modern media landscape dominated by the "creators," people communicating their ideas and desires in unique, singular methods, "The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom" fuses that philosophy of self-expression with the series’ classic formula. This is a game that encourages players to build their own solutions.

I overcame almost every challenge by devising some weird concoction of gears and tools. Sometimes a complex puzzle was solved with a simple solution. There were many times where my answer to a challenge was, "I’ll just build a really, really long bridge," and it almost always worked.

The experience is dense with the sense of accomplishment. Almost every puzzle gave me self-satisfaction and pride in how I tackled it.

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"Tears of the Kingdom" is a miracle of engineering and elegant artifice, especially because it runs on aging, decade-old technology inside the Nintendo Switch. It unlocks parts of your creativity, forcing you to use elementary knowledge of physics and chemistry to overcome challenges. "Minecraft" revolutionized gaming by introducing deep creative elements, but "Tears" combines them with the luxurious animations and polish of a complex narrative adventure. This game, which comes out Friday, has already been leaked to many players, and the inventions they’ve created defy anything you’d expect from a Zelda game. One video clip shows Link fending off hordes of monsters by building a giant robot armed with a seesawing, fire-breathing, dragon-shaped penis.

Because the solutions to these puzzles require understanding real-life concepts such as weight distribution and momentum, "Tears" could be a game family and friends solve together. My girlfriend, who doesn't play games, was instrumental in helping me solve several puzzles, and we both felt a sense of ownership.

But longtime Zelda fans need immediate answers. Yes, classic temple design has returned. Although each temple or dungeon follows the formula of the player finding and activating four or five switches, the set design as well as the means to navigate and solve them are unique to each region. In each temple, Link will find a companion with a unique skill necessary to solve that temple, and both stay with him throughout the rest of the game. Although 2017's "Breath of the Wild" gives you every tool needed to solve the game in its first hour, "Tears" reintroduces the traditional power creep. By the end of the game, you’ll be armed with abilities such as conjuring a gust of wind to glide faster or triggering a rolling attack to remove brittle walls and rocks to unveil secrets.

Each temple also comes with a warm-up adventure of sorts themed to that region, much like "Skyward Sword" on the Wii does. Approaching the Fire Temple requires an adventure in, under and around a volcano. One such quest involves climbing up the sky so high, I was as terrified of Link punching through the atmosphere into space as I was him plummeting to the earth.

The game is more than double the size of "Breath." Islands, caves and dungeons dot the sky, while an underground region rests below the land of Hyrule. (It's a pitch-black network of caves and ancient ruins that's also a dark mirror to the overworld.) By the end of my 60-hour run through the main quest, I hadn't even found half of the 199 side adventures available, let alone completed even a quarter of them. While "Breath" redefined what massive open-world games can be, it is relatively empty of scripted adventure. Not so with "Tears," where seemingly every character in the world has purpose, whether it's to add more context to a mystery or lead you to more adventure.

The most disappointing thing about "Tears": It retains the "Breath of the Wild" structure of having some 150 puzzle shrines all over the map. Players can visit each of the four main regions and find triggers that show cinematic depictions of past events. Although all of these details are significantly better, more detailed and more rewarding than in the last game, the experience won't feel as fresh and revolutionary as it did in 2017. And the exemplary music the series is known for (galloping heroic themes inspired by classic western film composers such as Elmer Bernstein of "The Magnificent Seven") is nowhere to be found, as "Tears" instead opts for atmospheric piano tinkles in the overworld.

"Tears" isn't just retreading stories and locations, though. "Breath" veterans will find new secrets and challenges in old, familiar places. Every revisit to every location of note from the last game will contain something shocking, frightening or wondrous. Plus, completing many stories will change the world around you in meaningful ways, oftentimes beautifying or restoring the land.

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It's also important to know that, unlike in "Breath," the story of "Tears" isn't mainly told through flashbacks. The residents and villains of Hyrule all take a direct, active role in your quests. In fact, it's almost as if every speaking creature in the land has some role to play in the narrative, whether providing interesting new history or having their own character arcs. The side quests aren't just "go here, fetch this." Instead, they are full stories with complicated relationships and are often drenched with consequence. These side stories include becoming a literal newspaper journalist and meddling in a small-town election. Some of these stories feed into the main questline, adding important context and often giving hints to solving the game's largest mysteries, including the location of the missing Princess Zelda.

Any concerns of retread content was forgotten when, after 50 hours, I began the game's final act, the most thrilling, expansive and epic climax in the series. The little said the better, but if you’re a longtime fan of the series and its characters, it's worth every second to push through to witness the final sequence of events and challenges. It will surprise, delight and plumb emotional depths the series has never before explored. Even the sleepy soundtrack wakes and begins to thunderously carry you to impending victory.

This is the fullest Zelda story to date, as it answers almost every nagging mystery from the last game. Who were the ancient race of Zonai? Which version of the series villain Ganondorf is threatening the land now? How does any of this fit into the convoluted timeline of the past 19 Zelda games? The answers may not be what you expect, but they’re all here.

Ultimately, the lore isn't the main attraction, and it isn't the reason the Zelda series has endured for almost half a century. What's more compelling is the game's nod to the collective story of how human imagination pushes us through our toughest challenges, and sometimes sends us soaring to heights unseen.