Why Some Can't Get Over BOTW For TOTK

2023 has been both a terrible year for gaming, but also an amazing year. We saw the brutal dismantlement of Overwatch as it transitioned to Overwatch 2 and the patch that caused half the player base of Diablo 4 to give up the game they loved at launch. We also saw what happens when game dev’s can put time and passion into the products they put out. The outpouring of support that backed Baldur’s Gate 3 when it released showed that studios CAN in fact put out a full game that you buy once and you never have to glance over at your wallet again. Pikmin 4 was loved by all fans of small creatures and management style gameplay, this game topped charts in Japan for months due the game building on the concepts introduced in the first three games. And of course, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom was one of Nintendo’s most anticipated game releases. With the delay to May 2023, the game promised to become the next Greatest Game On Switch and take the torch from it’s predecessor Breath of the Wild.

Tears of the Kingdom saw massive success at launch. Fans where given a revamped Hyrule to explore once again, along with not one but two new areas. Before release, Nintendo made a big show of the exploration you could do in the sky, the new creatures you could find and the new materials you could collect. This was the primary new addition they would promote, so when players finally got ahold of the game and discovered that there was an entire darker replication of the land of Hyrule underground, the game became even more than previously thought.

The game expanded on so many things that the players of Breath of the Wild begged for. The inclusion of the new abilities allowed for players to fuse their weapons and create new, more powerful ones. Ultrahand quickly became a fan favorite as it allowed you to build constructions of your wildest dreams. This single inclusion has allowed for the most deadly creations, from mowing down enemies that want to cause you harm, to torturing Koroks who just want to reconnect with their friends.

Not only were players given new tools to explore, the land that they left in Breath of the Wild was also revamped. There is more to do in the overworld, there are constant mini-missions of help a Korok get from one place to another, typically with a vehicle you construct out of conveniently placed materials, there’s also sign guy who you’ll find scattered all over Hyrule trying to get his precious sign to stay standing, the joy of his missions is the way you can either go super minimalistic and stick two boards together or you can spend twenty minutes constructing the best architectural masterpiece Hyrule has ever seen.

I want to break down what makes this game so great, and also different from Breath of the Wild. Many people assumed that this game would be a one to one copy of Breath of the Wild and were even saying Tears of the Kingdom was just $70 DLC.

In Breath of the Wild I hated when I would get a weapon from a chest and it would kick me out because I didn’t have room for it. Being able to select which item to drop when you open a chest is such a great quality of life improvement, I really wish it was implemented everywhere. Seeing that Tears of the Kingdom removed the items from the Sheika Slate was a sad moment, remote bombs were my main choice of weapon for my playthrough, but the options that open up with the fuse ability is simply better. Instead of having gather up arrows of a certain type, Tears of the Kingdom lets you fuse anything you find on your journey to your arrows. My playthrough also had arrows scattered all over so I had more normal arrows in Tears of the Kingdom that I could turn into anything than I had total arrows in Breath of the Wild. Fusing minerals to certain weapons can also turn you into a fire bender, meaning that hoarding everything you pass by can actually be a good thing.

I am very glad that I have been seeing a lot of people who agree that this game is a lot harder right out the gate in terms of enemies. I feel like even the easy enemies will one-shot me and that can be really annoying and sometimes feel unfair. After finding out the proper way to use fuse weapons, using the monster parts instead of two weapons, Link does end up feeling a lot stronger.

The tutorial was a bit longer than I would have preferred, it does let players have a bite sized experience to prepare for the huge open-world they are gonna drop into. Since the tutorial was so long, I hate the inclusion of shrines that show you basic tutorial stuff like throwing weapons, deflecting with a shield, or sneaking around enemies. This would have been fine if this was done in the tutorial section, but I was still running into these shrines 30 hours into the game. Luckily not all of them are boring walk-throughs. I really enjoyed the shrines in Tears of the Kingdom. The short puzzles were a nice bite-sized adventure in between exploring Hyrule again.

Even though the sky isles were the big point that Nintendo was making on why Tears of the Kingdom was going to be a great game, I didn’t find a whole lot to do in the areas. There were a handful of Koroks to find, some chests to kick, and a few diving trials to get some gear. With such a fuss stirred up before release, I thought there was going to be so many things trying to keep us up in the clouds, but this was not the main time sink that was added.

Going into the underground, I have no idea what to really expect, I figured I would see some common enemies, I was not ready for the Lynels and rock talus. I was certainly not prepared to find skeleton horses! When I learned that you can ride the skeleton horses over gloom and be fine, it was like a whole new part of the map was unlocked for me. They made the underground super creepy and I love that they weren’t afraid to just throw us into pitch darkness. I knew going into it that I would need to get brightbloom seeds to light up the darkness, but when I came across the first way down, I didn’t have any and I wanted to see it for myself. I was so lost until I found the tree that lights up the area around me. Luckily I was like right next to it. My second time going down there went a lot smoother because I had plenty of brightbloom seeds.

When going through the regional phenomena questline, I was expecting something similar to Breath of the Wild, you would do a short mission followed by a complex set of puzzles. And in a way, yes, that is what you end up doing, but I felt a lot more in control with these missions. I enjoyed the more in depth connection Link gains with the people of the region, he makes more of an impact while doing multiple shorter missions to help out instead of just popping in and destroying some danger. The regional phenomenon were a bit easy in terms of puzzles. I wish that they were a bit more tricky. My Zelda-loving roommate says that older Zelda games had puzzles that really made you think. These puzzles were mainly just little brain teasers.

I finally started doing the Tears questline after about 40 hours of playing the game. The reason I kept putting it off was because I was worried it would be something tedious and boring, but it was actually simple. After I started the quest and took a picture of the “map” of the locations, I went to what should be the nearest tower and searched for the large markings on the ground. I enjoyed the short snippets we see of where Zelda is and what is happening. My only complaint with this is that I, like most player, found the tears out of order so the reveal of the story was choppy and it would have been more impactful if there was somehow to make the cutscenes more streamlines.

So if the game is this great, why do you find so many people dropping it with one simple Google search?

Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom might be very different when you break down the game, but at the core, you are still exploring Hyrule, searching for Zelda, and taking on 4 regional challenges. With so many people going back and re-playing Breath of the Wild right before the release of Tears of the Kingdom, the similarities came out a bit too strong after the new paint smell faded. At the end of the day, we are still looking at the same Hyrule. We may have some new toys to play with, but the core of the game is still the same.

Having such a big game that is so similar to one you’ve already sunk a couple hundred hours into can make it less impactful once you start to get into the game. Even though there are more things to do in the world, even those start to repeat. You can go and help sign guy but after 20 signs, you are just gonna build the easiest structure to keep the sign up. When you pass a backpack Korok, you are just gonna start launching them or just leave them behind all together.

After asking the people in my life who have not finished Tears of the Kingdom, the main two answers were, (1) “I didn’t want the story to end, so I stopped playing all together.” or (2) “It felt too similar to Breath of the Wild, and I put too many hours into the first game. It just ended up feeling like DLC.”

It seems that even though this was such a well received game upon release, the candle burned out faster than anyone expected. No one has said that the game is not a good game, the only way that I’ve heard the game be described as bad is when referring to it being a poor sequel to a Zelda game. So, what do you think about the sequel to the “greatest game on Switch?” A lot of people still hold strong to Tears of the Kingdom being their Game of the Year. So did the game live up to the hype, or did the excessive amount of hype add to the disappointment in some fans?