Now Playing: Tears of the Kingdom

I stopped playing Tears of the Kingdom with about 120 hours on the clock. I say stopped, rather than finished, because I could have probably played for 200 hours and still not seen or done absolutely everything. Can a game be too big? I guess it’s a pointless argument to be made about a game like TOTK because like BOTW before it, this is a game where how much or how little of the content you engage with is entirely up to you.

Like BOTW, once you leave the initial tutorial area you’re free to run directly to the final boss and finish the game. I obviously didn’t do that. What I did do over my 120 hours of play was complete all of the main quests, cleared all 152 shrines (and all of the shrine related quests), completed about 62 of the 70 or so side adventures, and about 70 of the 130 or so side quests. I only found about 120 of the 1000 (?) korok seeds, but that was enough to increase my inventory to the size I needed so I wasn’t too fussed about hunting more down.

I fully explored the sky and the land, but probably only 40% or so of the depths for reasons I’ll get into later. TOTK is a game absolutely stuffed with content. I’d say it feels three times the size of BOTW. And the kind of incredible thing is that no matter what I was doing, it always felt worth my time. I can certainly say that some of the ‘rewards’ you receive for some of the more elaborate side quests are a little disappointing, but I still enjoyed doing them.

TOTK is a direct sequel to BOTW and that’s one of the aspects that I loved the most about it. I’ve seen some people disappointed that the game uses the same world map but for me, that’s actually a positive. I loved returning to a familiar world and familiar locations to see what had changed. And a lot has changed. I loved meeting up with characters from BOTW and seeing that they were now doing. A continuation like this of story, world and characters isn’t something we’ve typically seen in this series before and TOTK does a fantastic job of building upon the world of BOTW whilst also giving us something new.

The new abilities give you more freedom than ever in terms of how you fight, solve puzzles and traverse the world. Perhaps too much freedom given how easy it is to cheese your way through the puzzle shrines – one of the reasons why I’d have to say they’re not, overall, quite as good as those in BOTW. The ability to construct vehicles and all kinds of crazy contraptions is exceptionally impressive even if none of them are strictly necessary. Once again, it’s really up to you how much or little you want to engage with these systems.

The main quest, like in BOTW, takes you to the four diverse regions of Hyrule where you’ll find a unique Temple. These are, I would say, much better than the Divine Beasts of BOTW. They’re still not quite like a more traditional Zelda dungeon, but they strike a closer balance. They all offer a unique location, style, puzzles and boss. The story beats may feel a little repetitive as you go – because which Temples you do and the order in which you do them is entirely up to you, so the game has to structure itself and the story to allow for that.

And the story does strike a lot of the same beats as BOTW which I would say is both a good and a bad thing. Good, in the sense that it does allow this massive degree of freedom in terms of how you choose to progress, but bad in the sense of the aforementioned repetition of information (DEMON KING? SECRET STONE?) and predictability. I did enjoy it though, and the game does build to a suitably exciting conclusion and final boss fight. Better than BOTW? Overall, I would say yes.

The new sky islands are pretty fun but there’s not a great deal of variation between them. Travelling from one to another on your own custom built flying machine never gets old though. The sense of scale is truly impressive, particularly when you take a flying leap all the way from the sky, down through a chasm and into the murky depths below.

The depths is one of the strongest and weakest new aspects of TOTK. When you have an objective – a target – it’s great. But outside of those main or side quests that carry you through it, I didn’t feel particularly incentivised to keep exploring. There are no shrines. No koroks. Little in the way of unique enemies. Little to no terrain variation or landmarks which means navigation can be a pain.

As I said, when you’re progressing through it for a reason, it’s great, but I found just exploring the depths for the sake of exploring to not be very rewarding. Yes, there are lots of fun, unique and cool optional clothing items to find, but nothing that I would say is really worth collecting unless you want absolutely everything. Because you really don’t need any of it.

However, the way the depths, the land and sky connect is very clever – the shrines to the lightroots, the rivers above to the mountains below and, most importantly, the depths being the place where you’ll harvest the materials you’ll need to increase your battery capacity which then makes your exploration of the sky islands all the more easy.

TOTK is a game of systems built upon systems and all these systems connect in ways that kind of blows my mind. The fact that this all just . . . works, and works on a Switch is kind of nuts. The world, the physics, the Rewind ability – that alone would break most other games. And then we have Ascend. That’s even more crazy when you really stop to think about it.

And you’re free to use and combine all of these systems in incredibly creative or stupid ways but whatever you do, however you do it, it all just . . . works. If I was rating TOTK purely on the basis of its systems and mechanics it would be an easy 10/10. They’re f**king wizards.

I think I’ll wrap up this review here because I don’t really want to spoil anything about this game. It’s the kind of game that’s best experienced yourself, discovering things as you go. As a sequel to BOTW, TOTK is excellent. If you enjoyed that game then it’s safe to say you’ll enjoy this just as much if not more. I’d say I enjoyed it just about the same.

In some ways, it does feel a little too bloated compared to BOTW but once again, none of the content didn’t feel worth doing and it is all entirely optional. When you feel like you’ve done enough of any one thing, you can just stop. I loved returning to this world, seeing these characters again. The new abilities are all creative. The story, though somewhat predictable, is told well. The boss fights are all unique and fun.

TOTK isn’t quite the same revolution for the series that BOTW represented, more of an evolution. It’s familiar, but fresh. It looks lovely, and the fact it runs at all as well as it does on the Switch is an absolute miracle. It’s another easy contender for my GOTY. Not as strong, perhaps, as I was expecting, but a contender nonetheless. An easy recommendation, but you’ve probably already played it.

9/10