Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom – nothing’s perfect (Picture: Nintendo)
A reader explains why he doesn’t like Tears Of The Kingdom and why he thinks it’s inferior to Breath Of The Wild and other Zelda games.
The problem with gamers is that saying that you don’t like a particular game will immediately have everyone accusing you of being a fan boy and biased. If you don’t like Starfield you hate Xbox and have a vendetta against Microsoft. If you don’t like Spider-Man 2 you’re just lying and you’re an Xbot troll. If you don’t like Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom then you’re an immature edgelord, too insecure to admit Nintendo games are good.
I am not an edgelord, I don’t think, and I certainly don’t hate Nintendo, as I have a Switch and enjoy the majority of their games. However, I do not like Tears Of The Kingdom and I’m convinced it’s not even a good game.
Obviously, it’s not a badly made game – it’s probably one of the best made ever in terms of the features and the complete lack of bugs – but I think Nintendo was so obsessed with everything they could jam into the game that they lost sight of the bigger picture and the idea that it should be fun and accessible.
I think straight off that the idea of reusing the same map was a mistake. It’s good in that it allows them to concentrate on other things, but the problem is that the have this massive world ready-made and the they spent all their time adding to it. Because they didn’t have to spend the first three years, or whatever, making the game world they spent it all adding features on top of features, but it all ends up in a shapeless mess of a game.
The physics engine is great, right? I mean, it’s absolutely astounding how well it works in the game. Except… you never really have to use it. There’re a few times when you absolutely do, but in those cases what you have to build is made very clear. Everything else is up to you and that means the whole of this amazing system is just wasted. You could through the whole game and barely use the Ultrahand and yet a more focused game would have made it the main mechanic.
Or take the Sky Islands and Depths. Again, they’re barely part of the game. You have to go into each a couple of times by playing the story but that’s it. Otherwise, it’s just whether you can be bothered to explore or not. You can just ignore it all and, frankly, you will have missed nothing – especially in the very boring and empty Depths.
By making it so you don’t have to do these things that ensures that there can be nothing in those parts of the game that are necessary. By design they have to be inconsequential.
People complain about bloat in Ubisoft games, and they’re right, but Tears Of The Kingdom is just as bad, if not worse. There’s something to do everywhere but none of it is of any substance. The solution to every problem is always simpler than you think, and the rewards are often laughably bad.
Despite all the work and effort that’s gone into the game the combat is almost exactly the same as Breath Of The Wild, when it could really have benefited from becoming deeper and more varied. The AI companions are almost completely useless and another waste of time in terms of putting them in the game in the first place, since they neither do what you tell them or work things out on their own.
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And why does the game pretend to be a sequel when there’s almost no references to Breath Of The Wild? People in the game that should recognise you never do and there’s almost no story links (no pun intended) to the original. It’s just: ‘Ganon is out again, go kill him.’ That is literally the story.
You don’t get a playable Zelda, again, despite fans asking for it for years; you just get a flabby, less focused version of Breath Of The Wild. That wasn’t my favourite Zelda, but it was more enjoyable than this, which is just the same game but with endless layers of unwanted junk stacked on top of it.
By reader Stanholp
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A reader explains why he doesn’t like Tears Of The Kingdom and why he thinks it’s inferior to Breath Of The Wild and other Zelda games.