I’ve spent the last two weeks playing The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. In that time, four words kept floating through my mind seeking connection: Echoes, silence, patience and grace. The aging millennial rockers among you will recognise this as the title of the Foo Fighters’ sixth studio album. It’s an album notable for its shifting tonal palette, moving from the noisy, bashy rock the Foos are known for to quiet, acoustic balladeering and back again. In this way, it shares a conceptual space with Tears of the Kingdom, a game that swells and shrinks with each passing moment. Dunk on me for that take all you like (I’m old, can take it), but, for whatever reason, my brain connected Tears of the Kingdom to that old Fooies record. The four pillars of the title — echoes, silence, patience, and grace — seem to be the elements that stitch the game together.
Because these words kept occurring to me as I played, I decided to build my review around them.
Echoes
I’ve seen it said by others already, but I think it bears repeating: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom rank among the greatest companion pieces in media history. Any other game would endure a hail of sticks and stones when it became clear Kingdom was taking players back to the same Hyrule map they’ve already combed in Breath of the Wild. Asset flip, they’d call it. Lazy devs, the socials would scream.
It’s true, Tears of the Kingdom re-uses a lot of what made Breath of the Wild a single, striking adventure. Despite this, Tears of the Kingdom veers off in new directions from the start and introduces a range of new mechanics and quests exciting enough to make traversing the same Hyrule feel entirely new. It echoes Breath of the Wild in its core mechanics — the game that changed Zelda for good is the blood coursing through its sequel’s veins — but Tears is interested in different things. They’re both games about discovery, but the approach is very different. Where BotW was about the spirit of adventure and discovery in a physical place and giving the player the tools to revel in that, TotK is about exploring possibility spaces and discovering unorthodox solutions to your problems. These games echo each other but also sit alongside each other as separate, equally visionary works.
Silence
Silence plays a big part of both games’ adventure experiences. Breath of the Wild embraced silence as a major theme — your adventure was conducted in solitude, exploring the ruins of a long-dead kingdom. The weight of the silence that hung over Hyrule was oppressive. It was the still, ceaseless silence you find inside a tomb. Beyond the sound of Link’s footfalls and the clink of his equipment rattling on his belt, often the soundscape was kept deliberately minimal. Occasional birdsong. Water in a nearby stream. The wind in the trees — the titular breath of the wild. Music — big, orchestral arrangements of the kind found in other games — was mostly reserved for major story beats. Outside of those moments, it was little more than a tinkling of keys as Link rode his horse, or an occasional note, the world that used to exist here trying with all its might to speak to you across time.
Tears of the Kingdom keeps this strategy, though the silence is lessened this time around. Where the world was dormant, it is now finding its voice again. The musical flourishes are more noticeable and more florid. It never overpowers, but it does cut through the silence on the plains. Traversing the world is less of a lonely trek as well — the countryside is dotted with camps and stables, little places where the people of Hyrule have begun to make their homes.
Link himself remains a silent protagonist, clearly conversing with other characters but never given a line of dialogue himself beyond his usual grunts and cries. His silence may seem unusual in a world of games where full voice acting is the norm, but Nintendo understands something about their lead that perhaps other game designers don’t. Link doesn’t need to speak because his motivations are always clear. They’re clear because they’re your motivations. The open-ended design of Tears of the Kingdom means that whatever Link finds himself doing in that moment, no matter who he is doing it for, you always know why. He wants what you want: to find the princess and save the day. Every path before him leads to the same place.
To hit on the sensation of riding across the Hyrule plains and enjoying the quiet one final time: how nice is it to play a giant, open-world adventure game where the protagonist isn’t cracking weak jokes every 15 seconds? How nice is it to be free of inane open-world chatter? Death to banter that only exists because marketing said it tested well with 15-25-year-olds.
Patience
You need a lot of patience to accomplish any goal in Tears of the Kingdom. Any construct you create will probably fail on the first attempt and require iteration. Every quest requires a great deal of location hopping, sometimes from one side of Hyrule’s mountain ranges to the other. Just traversing the open world takes a good long while to do. And then there are the things that test your patience, like the fact that almost every enemy does one-shot damage until you get six or seven hearts under your belt. Your best hope for curbing this is hunting down some better armour, or conjuring it out of an Amiibo, acts that require an additional degree of patience.
It all takes time. Everything in TotK occurs at a languid pace. Getting around takes time. Fights take time. Quests take time. Shrines take time. Temples take time. Bosses take time. Collecting the parts required for your most fanciful inventions takes time. There’s a rejection of instant gratification at play here that makes the brain hum with pleasure. Every boon is earned. Everything you have, you worked hard to get. Reflecting on your adventure and the tools you collected along the way, you understand the patience and dedication it took to accrue them.
But Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’s greatest test of my patience came from The Depths, the colossal, pitch-dark cave system beneath Hyrule. Nintendo’s Tears of the Kingdom marketing was mostly focused on the Sky Islands, great hovering platforms dappled by the sun, an Elysian dream ripe for exploration. What they didn’t mention in the marketing was that the Sky Islands make up a tiny percentage of TotK‘s total play time, while The Depths is a complete, subterranean Hyrule only traversable with a Dolphin flashlight (aka a bag full of glowing mushrooms — yes, if you’ve been cooking your brightcap mushrooms, you need to STOP immediately. It’s dangerous to go alone. You’ll need to take these.)
The Depths are as dizzying in their scale as they are dangerous and hideously oppressive. Firing an arrow into the dark to test the drop seems to go on forever, the flint-strike of the arrow on rock a distant, tiny flash. Every move I made in The Depths seemed to get me killed. Every decision I made, alone in the dark, seemed doomed to fail. So intense was the pressure cooker of its design that it drove me from the game for several days until I worked up the will to return.
Grace
Tears of the Kingdom is a game touched by grace, even if the trait itself does not manifest itself in its hero. My Link is a tinkerer and blunderer, his slapdash engineering regularly brought low by a lack of forethought and numerous unexplained fires. The grace of Tears of the Kingdom lies not in anything you can build yourself but in its own rock-solid construction. It’s now understood that when Nintendo delayed Tears of the Kingdom in March of 2022, the team considered the game to be in a state where it could have comfortably shipped. Granted an entire extra year of development time, the team dedicated all of its resources to pure polish, probing and refining all of TotK‘s systems to ensure that, come launch day, it all just worked.
Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about.
The game programming flex of all time. pic.twitter.com/id2K5uE5mz
— William Armstrong (@WillWArmstrong) May 21, 2023
Show the clip above to any programmer or software engineer you know, and watch their jaws drop in amazement. The rope bridge is under tension throughout the clip, interacting with a second physics-based creation, the player, and itself. The player can attach the bridge to the machine they’ve cobbled together and drag it across undulating terrain on command, the bridge unfolding and clattering against itself as it goes. And not once — not once — does the physics simulation bug out. There’s no jank; there are no collision problems or funky physics. It just works. This one puzzle, for which you are watching the simplest solution, displays a greater feat of optimisation than can be found in almost any major game of the last ten years.
Nintendo was prepared to hold its ground in a world where major AAA games consistently release well before they’re ready to come out of the oven. It demonstrated a level of confidence other modern publishers lack because it knew the end product would be better for business. The decision paid off. Short-term pain on a few quarterly financials transformed into a record-breaking launch, a spike in console sales, and sold-out retailers around the world.
Discussing this with my colleague Matt Hopkins, he said he felt this was the kind of thing that makes him want to break into stockholder meetings at other publishers and throw a copy down on the table. To scream at them that this is the kind of success you can enjoy when you have the courage to forget about the money for a minute and just back your people. He’s right. It’s insane that Nintendo doing its due diligence — something that should be considered the bare minimum — is so remarkable in the modern industry. And yet it is. Nintendo showed grace under what must have been almighty pressure to keep the dollars rolling in, particularly as console sales sagged and economic uncertainty loomed.
I’ll say it again for the Koroks in the back: The simple act of backing your people is an act of courage. Doubly so when investor calls for ROI are a fire consuming the building and growing more intense by the day.
Final thoughts
I fully expect The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom to storm the 2023 Game of the Year season when the time comes. It’s a rare feat in modern game design, a legitimate capital-g, capital-w Great Work. I understand there are a few for whom this new free-form era of Zelda isn’t clicking. I get that. I fully appreciate that The New Zelda Blueprint won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. But it is mine. I can, have, and will continue to lose myself in this remarkable world inside this remarkable game.
It’s a masterpiece. I don’t know how Nintendo keeps topping itself like this. Tears of the Kingdom is so complex that it feels like it shouldn’t even be possible to conceive in its entirety, let alone execute. And yet, it does, conceptually, visually, mechanically, and all on withering seven-year-old mobile hardware. It is a feat of design and engineering that I feel will go unrivalled in 2023. It will inspire new games for years to come and be remembered as an instant classic.
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