The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, now only has been on the wild for a few days, marking a little less than a full day of time as players will spend exploring Hyrules, fresh secrets, in the coming months and even the next few years if Breath of the Wild is a signal.

For anyone who doesn’t like full-game reviews and spoilers, here are some early thoughts on the full-blown survival simulators first 20 hours or so. From here on out there, it is the warning of Tears of the Kingdom. I won’t get into it much in the world of plot-related stuff. The most interesting is gameplay, map and mechanics. If you’ve never played yet, some of the world’s surprises are really worth saving. Have a nice one!

The starter area is big out of the gate. A very good view of the wild is the result of its gaming fans’ favourite rhythms and lush natural life, but Tears of the Kingdom takes off on an interconnected series of mysterious floating sky islands, with a variety of esoteric instruments and elaborate crumbling ruins. Getting out of this area took three hours, and as of last few thou we was able to observe the target, with a little effort: go go to shrines, give them new abilities and chill with an inexplicably handsome androgynous goat guy giving me spiritual guidance.

Nintendo has credit card.

Tears of the Kingdom bring back many key objects in these early sequences, opening up players into the skysilver in the upper layers of the map and making clear all of the gameplay of the last game still intact, except for the repeated loss of weapons during a fire, while re-reading the action and retaining myself before crashing the battle controls again.

The tutorial is a bit fun, right from Links unprosperous and sudden dive into the sky a moment that moved to tears over a few Zelda players I know. This grand skydive sets the tone for that equally grand adventure: Jumping off the first cliff is a trustfall with the u.s. army. – A theme that Breath of the Wilds is repeating constantly. Trust the game; trust in the game to trust the player. and Tears of the Kingdom will reward you once again.

The G.O.A.T. image credit: Nintendo.

Even more so than in 2016’s Breath of the Wild, Tears is extremely confident that the player is not only clever enough to have a unique path through Hyrule, but also inventive enough to fool even the players themselves. It’s a big miracle, but somehow this clever chaos works within the parameters of the game physics engine, relying on big, bold and often dumb ideas. Tears of the Kingdom rewards creative thinking and incites hijinks, giving players a deep toolkit of abilities that are as much as mischief as a powerful way to save the kingdom or as anything that was before we were to the rescue / what we were doing.

We have gotten back to the cloud. When you’re out of them, you’ll have four new capabilities that make Tears look interesting, making a new world of navigation opportunities and problems for the people of the Wilds even smaller.

They’re watching me rollin. Games: Nintendo provides images.

Tears of the Kingdom gives Link four new special powers: Recall, Ascend, Fuse and Ultrahand. Recall rewinds an objects path through time, while Ascend speeds you up by mountains and buildings (hardly to explain, very cool in practice). Two and one-dimensional powers are enunciated by the latter. The latter invites players to transform weapons with other objects, and the latter demonstrates the power of the last game, Magnesis, a powered-up version of the trg’s Magnesis, allowing players to buy a thing, manipulate them in space and glue them to others and things in the world. Apart from that, there is a whole system of ancient technology today (dispensed in ridiculously literal gacha machines) that introduces to Hyrule the devices like fans, wheels and rockets to the game, imbuing the big mane from Wile E. Coyote energy. That’s a lot!

Players acquire all these abilities early. Since finding the best match is tough and it’s all about them. I won’t spoil an awful use for remember here, but even though it’s the only good way to use that power, he’s still very cool. I remember how much I had to do with Ascend when I was playing, but it has already been a huge help to exploration. If one doesn’t try to clear a cave, why don’t we have to backtrack? Take Ascend. Want to get up the mountain without causing the drop of link? Go to the summit and get in the distance.

The competition might not be easy with it, but instead, use and manipulate them, together. If you were disappointed to hear that weapons would again break over time like in Breath of the Wild, you’ll gladly know that Fuse somehow manages to make this process, not only too annoying, but very enjoyable. The magic of the world, which means the giant boulders and the monster horn can be incorporated into the tiger, can change weapon attributes at different times. In practice, Fuse solves a lack of motivation that prevailed during Breath of the Wild, when players hoard their best weapons just so he could.

Fusing guns also increases strength.

Nintendo of Europe (@NintendoEurope) March 29, 2023

You can buy moblin horns or other miscellaneous pointy items instead of hoarding (yes, they were still hoarding) a ton of powerful stuff later while doing a terrible and fun experiment with everything you find on Hyrule.

The Tears of the Kingdoms emphasis on a silly experiment, worry-free environment that players need to explore a lot. It’s still being able to collect, cook, sweat, and freeze, but these more tedious survival elements (managing your stamina while scaling huge peaks, new weapons & more) are leavened by the additional freedoms that New Tears have brought to the table. Even though you look for weapons often in the games early, it doesn’t matter which way you use, even while the games make longer lasting, so they’ll also swarm up thousands of pieces the next time you get the most out of those enemies with what the evil devil has for you, the devil wants to say, even that you just can’t do it again.

That leaves the king of the Kingdom, where in many ways the king’s head is, the centerpiece of the Tears of the Kingdom. If you were to catch content from the new Zelda game, you probably saw some wild, Flintstone-looking contraptions rolling into Hyrules vast meadows, and suckling on flames (possibly with a Korok hood ornament). Ultrahand is a giant shim of Knex with Tears of the Kingdoms combined and a deep layer of Minecraft-like building that keeps committed players busy for years to come.

Personally, I’m not the kind of player that my patience is, so I have to put together a crude cart before deciding whether to return to trying to whack bokoblins. Even relative dumb-dumbs like me feel like geniuses when solving a shrine and joking around. And most importantly, Ultrahand has already been used to torture Koroks who absolutely deserve everything they’ve arrived to them (yahaha, bitch!).

HopCat (@HopCaterpie) 13 mai 2023

If Tears of the Kingdom rewards players who live to solve Rube Goldberg’s challenges, the rewards, more or less, help players who want to explore the game. I am in that camp but spending hours filling out the map of Breath of the Wilds was an all-consuming and enchanting experience, but somehow my new relationship energy with Hyrule led to a big increase in Koroks. The first part of the new game, spending a lot of time off the ground, suggests that Tears of the Kingdom is likely to reopen with a wealth of discoveries, from new cave systems to mystical creatures to more compelling side quests and a variety of mobs to tangle with. Oh yeah, and under the map is a whole new map. Wait, what?

The question of Kingdoms immense promise turned clear for me when, for a short time, during the afternoon hike out of Lookout Landing, the new encampment just south of Hyrule, I saw an abandoned hole in the ground – so this happened. When I ran into that ill-looking cave, I rushed to a dark, dark subterranean void that could now be accessed from the hilltops of Hyrule.

The biggest revelation that came when a Nintendo preview of Tears of the Kingdom was revealed, was that some clever misdirection made the game easy, because ten-day games for Zelda fans was always at an outward view of the new sky-high realm. And its a new area, but an entirely new plane, a plane that runs across the dark, and begging to be explored. A yes.

I just spent a few hours in the new zone known as the Depths, but it is also deadly, difficult to navigate and conjure the unsensible, exciting vibes of survival-horror games where managing resources is a balance making forward progress. The Depths introduces a fresh lullaby. This gives gamers a fun groove: gather the liars over the terrain (apart from the usual cave’s many great ones), and so on, then the deepest wilderness. This extraordinary trip to the dark corners of a state-of-the-art map will amaze us, like many of the Elden Rings. It would be fun to see why they’ve just gone to the dark corner of the dark coast.

All this verticality is beautiful, and a perfect way to add literal depth to a game that revisits the Breath of the Wilds map (and the plot-related tectonic events and other shakeups allotwithstanding). As a huge fan of Xenoblade, I wonder how much of layered design is being influenced by Monolith Soft, a Nintendo-owned studio that helped create all the characters of Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. The xenoblade Chronicles series maps show the great beauty of the final two open world Zelda games.

Music credits: Nintendo.

After more than twenty hours of the game, I will be sure to say that Nintendo is giving Breath of the Wild fans more of what they didn’t have gotten to last time around. The result is always exciting rather than indulgent, mostly due to one-while old talents and an even more cool surprise that Nintendo was able to keep in the eye. All of the changes that have been made – even the most recent one, including the swap of the bosses of Divine Beast for elegant elemental dungeons that somehow create a well-designed dungeon-like look, even though all of us have seen previously. (I have only done one of these so far, the Wind Temple, but, rather than dreading the fact that the story goes on the road, I’m going to start looking forward to the next one.)

It was unfolding in the first half of The Legend of Zelda: The Tears of the Kingdom revealed the triumph of game design. Breath of the Wilds sequel is bigger and bolder in any imaginable way and in many ways impossible to imagine because no game has ever brought them off before. Like linking an armful of ingredients into his cooking pot, Nintendos recipe here is full of fun ideas and fresh flavors. Now eat down.

The third of my 20 hours: The third of my games, The Third Of Time, and the Second Of All.

• A swan dive combined with the ancient visuals of the starting zone give away an Assassins Creed Odyssey vibe. But I am here for that.
• Hyrule seems to have a new Deal-like series of public works projects. Is everyone on board with the monarchy? What’s the taxation system? I can only imagine that it will be resolved with DLC.
• The Zonai ancient civilization helps Tears make new Archaeology/mythology fascinating. I don’t remember the world’s culture being so interesting.
• Beedle, the nonbinary, bug-loving retailer is returning!
• In Hyrule, there is only the Korok. If they’d at least changed the sound effect for finding one, then maybe we wouldn’t need to launch those little dudes into Hyrules lower atmosphere.
• I know, however, that the world is better off than BotW. So, it’s really important that players enjoy running around for hundreds of hours.
• I hate Purah and Joshas whole female hacker genius.
• You know, I began to feel a little stupid killing all goblins. Most of them just seem to enjoy their diverse odd meats peacefully. Perhaps I should leave them to that?

My Legend of Zelda: The Tears of the Kingdom shows a preview of the story.