The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is creativity made into a video game. This is the feeling that my first contact with what for many is the most anticipated title of the year has transmitted to me, an ambitious adventure that –in case there was any doubt– points to legend since before its launch.
Last week I had the opportunity to visit the Nintendo of Europe headquarters, in Frankfurt, to play 50 minutes of the latest wonder from the Japanese company. The game goes on sale next May 12 for Nintendo Switch, the expectation is maximum and these first impressions are completely free of spoilers.
Tears of the Kingdom is the sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, one of the most celebrated installments in an acclaimed series with almost 40 years of history. Released in 2017, this adventure was a breath of fresh air for so-called open world games. Its innovative mechanics, a structure that left the player free, a very believable physics system and a beautiful art direction have contributed to the fact that the game has sold more than 30 million copies and has won all the awards ever and ever.
Six years later, this sequel announced in 2019 is about to become a reality and many wonder how Nintendo has taken so long to carry it out if Tears of the Kingdom is supposed to take advantage of Breath of the Wild content. The answer, judging by this first contact, has to do with the desire to offer many new things and to curl the loop on everything that already worked in the previous title.
Recently, the game’s producer, Eiji Aonuma, has revealed some of the main news of Tears of the Kingdom in a video. Among them, the new powers that we can use stand out, but also an unusual scenario to date, the so-called celestial islands. Both these new Link abilities and the new scenario have been part of the playable demo to which the press has had access.
If in Breath of the Wild we had various abilities that allowed us to alter the state of game elements, in Tears of the Kingdom this ability to mess with the virtual world environment has multiplied. Link’s new powers are even more transformative and, if in the 2017 game they generated such an impact that users are still posting amazing videos even today, it’s hard for me to imagine the true genius that we will see when the general public gets their hands on this new adventure.
Tears of the Kingdom is a video game with a toy soul. It is what in the world of electronic entertainment is known as a sandbox, but in this case hyper-enhanced. It is no longer just the possibility of interacting freely and creatively with different elements, but the game directed by Hidemaro Fujibayashi encourages us to go a step further: to combine impossible objects, to cross walls, to build unimaginable vehicles, to deconstruct the time…
My main concern before getting behind the controls of the new Zelda was that all these playable possibilities would end up saturating me, but this feeling disappeared a few minutes into the game. In the end, the same situation can be carried out and resolved in a multitude of different ways and this is one of the great virtues of the game. Normally, the easiest and fastest solution would be the first one we would choose in any other title, but Tears of the Kingdom makes you want to approach each challenge in imaginative ways.
Historically, the games of the Japanese company have been characterized by their ability to surprise from the mechanics. They are not titles that generate interest through great stories and elaborate plots, but through the pleasure of movement and the most basic actions of what are still digital toys. Tears of the Kingdom takes this characteristic of Nintendo’s DNA one step further to deliver wildly creative and immersive gameplay.
One of Link’s new powers is his ability to build makeshift vehicles with which to move around the world of Hyrule. It is something that could be seen in the aforementioned Aonuma video, but it is also a new mechanic that caused me doubts due to its apparent complexity. Again, this distrust disappeared within a few minutes of departure. Although building my first airplane took me a while longer, especially due to the fact that I had to adapt to some controls that allow us to position each part as we want, after a while I was already building flying platforms and fantasy trucks in a fairly agile way.
But more fun than building a vehicle in a few seconds is the moment before hitting the engine with the sword and checking if that crazy car we have created is capable of moving and in what way. Here comes another of the strengths of Tears of the Kingdom, and it is none other than the comedy of ourselves playing in impossible ways with the environment.
It is no longer just the ability to create strange vehicles, there is also the power to combine objects to create weapons that are as absurd as they are effective, from uniting a sword with a mushroom, to turning a wheelbarrow into a shield that also serves as a makeshift skateboard. Special mention for the enormous combinatory possibilities offered by the bow and arrows, an inexhaustible and very stimulating source of experiments of all kinds.
Another element that has caught my attention is the importance of the puzzles, at least in the area that we have tested. A staple of the Zelda series since its origins in the mid-’80s, puzzles remain a central part of the experience here, scattered throughout the game world much like Skyward Sword turned its open world into a vast testing area. The hand of both Aonuma and Fujibayashi, known for their predilection for convoluted dungeons and puzzles, is noticeable here.
During this test session at the Nintendo offices, each member of the press had a game station for this first contact. It is significant that we did not have a set objective, but that each one had total freedom to do what they wanted within a considerable space of the stage. It is not usually something common in video game presentations, in which everything is scheduled, and shows how confident Nintendo is with its latest blockbuster.
As expected, at the end of the 50-minute test, each fellow press officer had a different chronicle of the events. There were those who had focused on experimenting with the combats, those who had found a giant boss, those who had spent all their time building motorized gadgets, those who had solved a puzzle in one way, and those who had solved it in another. As with Breath of the Wild, he doesn’t lead the player by the hand, but leaves them completely free.
A few weeks after launch, we still don’t know what the game’s plot will be and, if we did, it wouldn’t make much sense to reveal the magical mystery that has been created around it. We do know, on the other hand, that its possibilities will be immense. As I said, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom will be creativity made into a video game, but it remains to be seen how this torrent of imagination proposed by its mechanics will fit in with a story that, judging by its launch trailer, seems epic like few others.
