Day 1 Thoughts on TLoZ: Tears of the Kingdom

Dawn of the -1th Day

I started playing The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom around 00:20 on Friday 12th of May, the day it came out, for about 3 and a half hours. Right out of the gate the game pulls you in, we start in the middle of Zelda and Links quest to the bowels of Hyrule to find out whats causing a mysterious disease(?). The game gives you control very quickly (< 2mins) which I always appreciate and feels indistiguishable from BOTW in terms of how Link moves. Full hearts right away gives us something to lose, and later on is used to establish Links weakened state with the game mechanics, good stuff. There isn’t much to do in this intro but to remark on this being the first fully voice acted Ganondorf, and the first full game with Gandondorf as the villain since Wind Waker. He makes himself known immediately.

After watching the new level design build itself in front of you, we awake in a little shrine type area. Setting precedent for the rest of the game I hope: already you are seeing stuff you need to Metroid back to. The game teaches you about diving right away as you need it to navigate the islands for the moment and for falling through the lovely intro cinematic that makes way for the rest of the game. Unlike BOTW where you are given a nudge to speak to Rhoam with a not-subtle camera shot, TOTK has no such annoyance and instead is happy to let you explore at your leisure after getting your New Nintendo Switch 4k edition (purah pad). There are NPCs that will help you out but they can be comfortably ignored. This tied with the new mechanics is taking the freedom and flexibility of BOTW and contorting it in fantastic new ways. Any item you see can be attached to a weapon to transform it into a new weapon and I love it. Now sticks are no longer wasted slots or crap torches, but handles for rock destroying clubs. Rusted swords can have new blades stuck on to make it a totally new sword. Its taken the feeling of attrition present with the flimsy bats in BOTW we were stuck with and turns weapons into nuggets of potentiality. I get to run around with an actual sword and board so thats all i need to be honest, but I am excited to see what else we can do with this.

The Ultrahand (named after the 1960s toy designed by Gunpei Yokoi, nintendo cannot let the past go we know this) is another rich vein of valuable gameplay, the ability to construct anything feels like im in Death Stranding but I actually have to design the bridges. Controlling it is not perfect however, it’s a bit like a kids 3D modelling tool and because of how they implemented the rotation you can only rotate in certain ways which can mean getting the object in the exactly orientation you want can be a little fiddly, but nothing major. Its better than the KH1 gummi ship editor, to say something redundantly pointless, and the snap points of the glue all feel like they make sense and align with how I would realistically want to use these objects. I’ve made some bridges, trains, a boat and tried to make a hovercraft, but it was too heavy…

Combat is also a little different, it’s faster and the enemies don’t seem to take as much if any hit-stun from the basic one handed sword, one of the Zonai guys tells you this too. Bokoblins were easy to wail on so it’s interesting to see they changed it, we will see if this is for the better eventually. But generally im happy to see the combat be more deliberate and less spammy. Another huge thing is having a quick menu for dropping food, you were in and out of the menu all the time so it totally makes sense, the only problem is that I keep holding L thinking it will just let me use the power but it keeps bringing up the menu, it’s a tap in this one.

You’re also able to use a key item you get to power Zonai items, like a flamethrower or fans, ive not used this a ton yet but it seems cool, like everything else.

The intro area is a loop which is some classic Game DesignTM right there, but it works and you get a fun shortcut back. Overall the game is brimming with potential. In a word I am simply: excited.

Likes:

• New mechanics are so powerful I cant see the height of their potential yet and this is good
• In particular fuse might fix a lot of issues I have with weapon degradation, you get a lot more resources than in BOTW I think.
• More inventory slots was essential.
• You can go to the menu from the item acquired screen.
• You also have more default slots which was sorely needed
• Being able to break rocks with weapons was something I didn’t realise I needed until now.

Dislikes:

• They made the Pro UI worse, before you were still able to see health and some other things but now it removes all UI, give us more UI options pls.
• The Ultrahand doesn’t control perfectly but it’s a fairly complicated mechanic.