The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom – Review

For me, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is the game of 2023!

As I write this, I’ve spent 130 hours with it, hours packed with spectacle and mystery. I’ve roamed the plains, explored the caves, conquered every tower, saved every ancient guardian spirit, built and driven rocket-propelled wheeled vehicles, risen to the skies to explore the floating islands, plunged into surface craters that lead down to the depths of Hyrule, tamed wild horses and hitched them to carts, solved puzzles inside the Shrines, caught falling stars, combined weapons of every kind for tactical advantages, saved an entire village from a pirate invasion, climbed snowy mountains and snowboarded back down on my shield, slain the giant desert worm and turned its innards into an elixir, picked bananas on exotic islands, glided down from dizzying heights to hunt mythical dragons, found huge fairies who upgraded my armour, helped brigades of warriors reclaim their territory, found hidden Koroks (forest creatures) and led others back to the friends they’d lost, debunked urban myths alongside a winged journalist, reconstructed a cheese recipe a family needs to relaunch their farm business, spied at night on a fashion designer and a village mayor, faced evil forces of every shape and, most importantly, wandered aimlessly wherever my eyes took me… and then, in the end, I gathered the tears of the kingdom of Hyrule and found Princess Zelda.

The list is selective, random and by no means exhaustive: I could go on, working through the hundreds of screenshots I took along the way to remind myself of the moments that impressed me. But, honestly, I put that list together from whatever memories came to mind first. Even as I write these lines, it’s occurred to me that I should say something about mining rubies, sapphires and diamonds, about exploring wells, about hunting white rabbits, about the beatings I took from three-headed dragons, about the fights against the Yiga Clan and… I could go on, but you get the idea.

Because of this game, GRIND issue 3 was delayed by about a month. I should have started editing earlier, but I spent the time trying to settle my accounts with the kingdom of Hyrule. This article, in the form you’re reading it, was deleted and rewritten several times. The reason is simple: Tears of the Kingdom is so good that it’s hard to put into words. What could you possibly write, in an original way, to string together such a mass of events? Hundreds, perhaps thousands of articles have already been published about this masterpiece of our time! On top of that, I found it hard to part with the game. Over the past months it became a part of my life, and the only game I fire up on my breaks. To start writing about it, I first had to treat it as a closed chapter.

Let’s start with the context: Tears of the Kingdom was originally meant to be an expansion for Breath of the Wild, inspired in particular by the ingenious ways players combined objects to fly, to jump higher, to launch deadlier attacks and to defy the laws of physics in general. But almost six years later, thanks to the sheer amount of content, it was released as a standalone game. The new Zelda uses the same graphics engine (with minor improvements to lighting), the same sounds, the same fundamental mechanics, the same base map and the same main characters. Tears of the Kingdom thus pulls off the feat of feeling both familiar and somehow completely different from the previous experience.

Technically, this is genuine wizardry in data compression. If “old” Breath of the Wild weighed in at around 14 GB, its sequel (a world roughly twice as vast, plus dozens of extra activities and quests) fits on a 16 GB card. Don’t ask me how the folks at Nintendo pulled it off… because, honestly, I haven’t the faintest idea! But on a system like the Switch, with just 4 GB of RAM, optimisation is essential: whole stretches of the map and the game world are loaded into volatile memory to deliver a smooth experience, with no loading times at all when crossing the surface map. By contrast, entering Shrines and teleporting to certain checkpoints are what bring up a loading screen. You can also spot a masked load when you use the “Ascend” ability to teleport through a ceiling, or plunge underground – there, a transition is clearly taking place while another sector of memory is loaded.

Once upon a time, optimising software to run on weaker hardware was part of a programmer’s job. Today, far too many studios ship updates of dozens of gigabytes that fill up your storage as if theirs were the only games on the system. And far too many games demand cutting-edge processors and graphics cards. Fortunately, the folks at Nintendo are masters of this seemingly forgotten art of compression and optimisation – which should be good news for anyone planning to emulate their games on PC, too.

In the story of Tears of the Kingdom, another 100 years have passed since the previous adventure. Princess Zelda, ever the tireless researcher, has decided to explore the underground beneath Hyrule Castle to uncover the origins of the calamity that destroyed the kingdom in Breath of the Wild. With her is Link, the trusty guard who usually fails miserably to protect her from kidnappings… but always manages to rescue her in the end. Naturally, this little underground jaunt ends disastrously for our heroes. And Link wakes up once again in a healing bath. This time he’s been given an arm transplant and has mysterious powers. And once he steps out of the cave, he finds himself on an island above the clouds.

This is where the disguised tutorial begins – the stretch of the game where your freedom of movement is restricted, and objects and enemies are placed to introduce new challenges in as safe an environment as possible. The little robots that hit Link don’t do much damage, and the chasms are shallower than in the rest of the adventure. Once three small tasks are done, our hero receives his last abilities and is invited to take a dive that will surely go down in video game history: a spectacular jump from a great height that lets you take in the entire horizon of Hyrule. Here you’ll realise just how vast the world really is, and how many places are waiting to be explored. I think I repeated this sequence about ten times, and every time it took my breath away!

Landing in the main map section comes with a nudge to visit certain NPCs and start the search for Princess Zelda. But absolutely nothing forces you to follow the main story. You can head in any direction you like and do whatever your heart desires – though you'll bump into a few limits: your health bar (only 3 hearts), your stamina bar (a single circle), and the money, armour and weapons you completely lack. Still, nobody can stop you from visiting every Shrine to solve the puzzles that award orbs for boosting your health or stamina. Nobody forbids you from going deer hunting or launching a crusade against the monsters guarding various treasure chests. You might just as well pick blackberries from bushes and apples from trees – with a bit of luck, you'll find golden apples, which have extra healing powers when cooked! You might just as well turn trader, buying goods from travelling merchants and selling them in far-off towns. Or perhaps it would be better to head underground, or up to the sky islands, first?

Tears of the Kingdom is a proper feast for explorers with attention deficit and/or trouble concentrating. You gaze at the horizon and set yourself a goal, but along the way all sorts of things pull your attention away: a shooting star appears in the area, a wolf decides to follow you, a lightning storm kicks off and you have to shelter in caves, you find a tunnel to the underground world, a Korok asks you to help him reach his friend on the other side of the mountain, a herd of horses is waiting to be tamed, an NPC crosses your path and asks for a small favour, a zealous employee called Addison is trying to put up a sign with a portrait of Hudson Construction's president, a skeleton bursts out of the ground and attacks you… I could go on for another two pages.

What I'm getting at, though, is that it's often hard to stay focused on reaching the objective you've set. Not because getting around in the game is clunky, but precisely because the world around you is alive and full of charm. Wherever you look there's something to do, an event or a view to take in, a side quest to finish. It happened to me more than once that I completed tasks tied to a quest, only to find out later that I'd tackled things the wrong way round – luckily, the game is generous and rewrites the dialogue so you can still enjoy the fruits of your accidental labour.

And since I've mentioned dialogue, I should own up to one of the game's minor problems: not every line is voiced. Most characters communicate in a universal gibberish that reminds me of The Sims. The story-critical moments and the characters attached to them get proper voices – but the ordinary NPCs who hand out side quests or offer cooking tips make do with a string of onomatopoeia. Which isn't necessarily bad, but it may disappoint players who expect every character to be voiced in 2023. Well, when you want to squeeze a game this vast onto a 16 GB cartridge, you have to make certain compromises.

Another shortcoming I noticed is the variety of enemies. Most of the time I was fighting Bokoblins, Moblins, Keeses and Chuchus. I have to admit, though: compared with Breath of the Wild, the variety of beasts is much greater. There are now more variants of every enemy type, with new challenges on top. Not to mention the Zonai Constructs (the little robots on the sky islands), Gibdos (desert mummies) and Horriblins (cave dwellers) – all new additions since Breath of the Wild.

And that's about where my gripes and grumbles about Tears of the Kingdom end. I really was splitting hairs, because otherwise my time with the game was close to perfect. The most technically impressive thing about this new Zelda is how stable it stays in every situation. You can use the Ultrahand ability to stick together a chain of up to 21 objects – the game won't fall over and keeps a steady frame rate. YouTube is full of adventurers who have built structures that are absurd in both scale and function. So the only limit is your imagination and your knack for combining different objects.

Just as Breath of the Wild inspired inferior clones such as Genshin Impact, Assassin's Creed: Valhalla, Immortals Fenyx Rising and the entire Horizon series, I expect Tears of the Kingdom to become the mould that various less inspired studios copy. So keep an eye out for new industry trends built around building, climbing and/or rewinding time on nearby objects.

At the same time, I have to point out that Tears of the Kingdom is an easier game than the first. My first impression of Breath of the Wild is that it throws you into the thick of it with very little preparation and forces you to survive in a hostile environment where resources are scarce and consumable. By comparison, the new Zelda is a bit friendlier to newcomers: fewer enemies kill you in a single hit in the opening hours, the mountain rock faces have been sculpted to make them easier to climb, and the ability to combine weapons and objects saves you from frustrating situations where your only way out would have been to run. With a little imagination and some skill at combining abilities, you can turn your surroundings into a weapon or a shield.

The two games are clearly complementary and should be seen as a series. But once you've played Tears of the Kingdom and grasped its scale, it's hard to see its predecessor as anything more than a warm-up tutorial. Everything that was good in Breath of the Wild has been improved and refined, while the frustrating parts have been noticeably toned down in the name of maximum fun. The new Zelda is better in almost every respect – and the six-year wait is justified by the quality of the finished product.

No, the graphics in Tears of the Kingdom aren't spectacular at the micro level – look closely at the textures of the grass and rocks, or at the shadows, and you'll wonder why a game from 2023 can't look better than this. But once you start exploring the world and take in the overwhelming vistas at every level of the kingdom of Hyrule, you'll forget the flaws entirely and focus on the big picture.

The music is another important companion on the adventure. When you’re trying to uncover every last patch of the map, you’ll be treated to ambient sounds that underline the character of your surroundings. Desert landscapes and snowy mountains, lush forests and gloomy caves, the islands in the sky and the depths below… all get their own acoustic treatment to help you take in the atmosphere. And during the big battles, the music turns as urgent as it needs to be to make your palms sweat on the controller.

Another area where Nintendo doesn’t get nearly enough praise is the balancing of rewards. Apart from a few stretches of desert that were left empty on purpose to make you feel lost, absolutely every patch of the map matters and can lead to some kind of treasure. Every mountain peak has something interesting to offer (most often a useful vantage point and a few Koroks waiting to be found). Every cave holds deposits of more or less precious stones, waiting to be mined. Every forest has fruit trees and assorted plants you can use to cook dishes or brew potions. Every effort to do more and go further ends up rewarded. And beyond that, everything you collect in your inventory ends up serving a purpose. When you think you have too many monster guts, you’ll find they’re useful for armour upgrades, and that you don’t actually have enough of them. When you think you’ve found enough Koroks, you’ll realise you want to expand your inventory even further to fit more weapons and shields. And when you think you have too much money, you’ll get the chance to invest in a home of your own. The game’s economy is superbly balanced, so that every momentary surplus gets converted into another resource you need. You’ll never end up with absurd quantities of anything. After more than 100 hours, you won’t be any richer – but you’ll have weapons, armour, hearts and stamina, dishes and potions to help you face whatever challenge is thrown your way.

One more point about the story: the way the main mission (finding Princess Zelda, who has vanished mysteriously) becomes the concern of most of the kingdom’s NPCs turns side quests into chances to learn more about the history of the land and the context of events. You’re not just dealing with villagers and travelling merchants whose needs have nothing whatsoever to do with the plot. Most of the supporting characters share their own troubles and try to help by offering scraps of information in exchange for you completing tasks. So the weight of your rescue mission grows with every side quest, and you never forget the main objective. But again: the story is entirely optional, and nobody can force you to go anywhere at any particular moment. You are completely free to create and define your own adventure, by your own rules.

In 2022, the game I spent the most time with was Octopath Traveler. I got attached to the characters and was determined to help every single NPC. In 2023, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom outdid it on every front. On the one hand, I feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of content waiting to be discovered. On the other, I’m never disappointed by what I find, and I always fall for the invitation to see a little more of the kingdom of Hyrule. I even bought the Collector’s Edition, which I rarely do because of my limited storage space.

And yes, I’m aware that while I was stuck in Tears of the Kingdom, Diablo 4, Resident Evil 4 Remake, Final Fantasy XVI, Street Fighter 6, Baldur’s Gate 3, Sea of Stars, Super Mario Bros. Wonder, Alan Wake 2, Dead Space Remake and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 all came out. I’ve even bought some of them, and I hope I’ll get the chance to finish them and write about them in future. But even now, I’d happily go back to Hyrule and try a different approach. Maybe a speed run. Maybe an attempt to finish the game without any heart or stamina upgrades. Maybe a go at using only the bow and arrows for most fights. Or maybe I’d just tackle the main story beats in a different order.

Tears of the Kingdom is THAT good. It’s been talked about for months this year, it has a huge community of fans, modders and speedrunners behind it, it’s a serious contender for game of the year 2023, it has raised the bar for exploration and interactivity in open worlds, it has earned its place in the history of interactive digital entertainment, and it will surely spawn a whole wave of clones. Nintendo have always been, and remain, the ones who set the industry’s trends in every decade.

What’s more, the Zelda series has a pedigree all of its own: in the ranking of the highest-scoring games on Metacritic, The Legend of Zelda has 12 entries in the top 100. It takes first place with Ocarina of Time (score: 99) and 97th place with Skyward Sword (score: 93). The most recent release, Tears of the Kingdom, sits in 36th position with 96 points – on a par with Resident Evil 4, Baldur’s Gate 3, Elden Ring, Skyrim, GoldenEye 007, Half-Life, Metal Gear Solid 2 and Gran Turismo. It carries the “Must Play” label, like most games in the series. So if I haven’t managed to convince you to give it a chance, I hope the aggregated opinions of the critics and its place in the rankings will at least help you understand why you absolutely have to get your hands on a Nintendo Switch with Tears of the Kingdom.

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Played on: Nintendo Switch
Release date: 12 May 2023
Developer: Nintendo EPD
Publisher: Nintendo