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I didn't know what to expect, but I've found myself quite surprised at how mixed I feel about this game.
Tears of the Kingdom is a great game that suffers from major flaws that keep it from being a masterpiece. I found myself often confused about why I am not enjoying this game as much as I thought I would be. I mean, this is considered the greatest game of all time by many people, and yet I was spending more time analyzing what exactly is wrong with this game than I was just enjoying the experience. I think it all comes down to two major issues: Quantity over Quality, and freedom coming at a massive cost.
Tears of the Kingdom has far more content than Breath of the Wild. There are NPCs pretty much everywhere now with side quests. This at a glance is a massive improvement over BOTW as that game lacked actual quests that didn't involve finding shrines, but I quickly realized almost all side quests are just fetch quests. Almost every NPC just asks you to collect a number of items for them in order to get some reward. There is almost no depth in so many of these side quests that at a point, I simply stopped doing them. I genuinely do not understand what the appeal is in getting 10 blue goblin horns, or giving away 10 mushrooms to unmarked NPCs that you have to scour a town for. It is the definition of mind-numbing content that I thought most games have moved past by now. You mainly see this stuff in MMORPGs nowadays to pad out XP farming, not in a game like this.
And don't get me started on the repeated tasks around the open world. It feels like there are a million koroks and they are all pretty much the same. You will see the guy putting up a sign like at least 50 times if you just ride in one direction that you have to help out. Sky islands are almost all copy and pasted across the map without many unique designs aside from the first one. The depths is identical almost throughout the entire map, without any unique biomes. This is lazy design and the exact kind of open world that I do not enjoy.
And this repetitive design finds its way into the actual main quest. Every sage quest is almost identical in going back and forth between talking to different people down to a nearly identical cutscene at the end explaining the exact same story. You will hear it 4 times.
Luckily, however, not all of TOTK is like this. There are still genuine moments of brilliance here. The 5 major dungeons overall are enjoyable and a massive step-up from BOTW's divine beasts. The boss fights are fantastic and unique. There are a few side quests that offer interesting twists and unlock new abilities. The shrines are actually a lot more interesting than the ones that were in BOTW. The puzzles overall are pretty fun, and I ended up doing way more shrines than I did in that game. The last quarter of the main story is incredible in specific and really offers the game's best moments and best boss fight.
It just sucks that so much of this game is repetitive, and it doesn't help that this is the same Hyrule. I wish the gloom modified the land more because, for the most part, Hyrule is copy-and-pasted from BOTW with some additions like caves and wells. It reminds me of how Saints Row 2 used the same city of Stillwater from the first game but completely modified it as a result of an in-lore earthquake, which resulted in entire districts being completely transformed. Nintendo opting to keep the map identical for 98% of it is a massive letdown.
My other major issue is the freedom. The entire philosophy of BOTW and TOTK is to give the player as much freedom as possible, and this is not a flaw; this is a fantastic thing. But TOTK makes a massive mistake in not being able to account for this freedom. Simply put, you can completely break this narrative by going for the memories at any point that isn't right before the ending. I made that mistake, and as a result, the story felt like a complete joke as characters kept investigating a mystery that I had already solved. They never commented on my accomplishment, and considering this game barely employs voice acting, it really would not have been hard to modify this dialogue to take into account that I have already solved this mystery. As a result of me doing things in the "wrong" order, TOTK's story fell flat. I was never emotionally attached to anything going on until the very end because the entire mystery of this game I already knew the answers to. This is genuinely a mind-boggling design decision that could've easily been avoided by locking the memories to a later point in the story. True freedom came at a cost, and that cost was the death of an interesting narrative.
I know I've been mainly criticizing this game so far, but that's not to say I didn't enjoy it, as TOTK's gameplay loop still manages to be addictive. There’s something about being able to ride in any direction and know that you'll find something interesting there, whether that's an encounter, a cave, or some side quest. There’s always something to find, and while at a point, you do start to ignore much of it because a lot of it is copy and pasted, there are moments where you find something truly unique, and it feels special again.
The new abilities that allow you to build different structures are the big thing here, and I like Ultra Hand. It’s an interesting addition, and I enjoyed building different contraptions and vehicles, even if they made horse riding completely irrelevant. However, these vehicles often break the game. You can easily make a hover bike and make the act of travel a joke. It removed that adventure feeling I had in BOTW where scaling the dual peaks was a genuinely memorable experience because now I can just fly over it or glide to them from one of the sky islands.
Fuse is another ability that I both loved and hated. It fixes the weapon durability system by making weapons basically just a base where you put the actual upgrade on top of, but the menu system for quickly dropping items is so bad it could be nominated for a worst UI design award. I have no idea why this wasn't a wheel with pages instead of being an endless scrolling act. And why do I have to keep opening this menu when I am shooting arrows? I'm not even going to get into the sage abilities and how they are attached to running to NPCs... It's these just small constant frustrations throughout the entire experience that add up.
The most enjoyable moments from TOTK are when it fully focuses on just one place and one specific challenge. The sequence where you climb up to the Wind Temple is one of the most memorable moments I think I'll ever have in a game. Chasing around Kohga in the depths is another fun series of quests. Everything leading up to the Mineru temple is masterfully done. Every time this game locks you into a specific sequence of events and challenges, you get some of the most thoughtful and interesting gameplay you can get from a game, ever. And that all comes together in the final quest where it felt like TOTK comes together to deliver an incredible ending.
So how do I feel about TOTK? Well, it has a very underwhelming broken narrative, fantastic gameplay with insane new mechanics, but they come at a cost by allowing you to trivialize too much of the game and exploration that has both incredible moments and unfortunately repetitive fetch quests with mediocre dialogue.
I think the biggest sin that this game makes is that it lost the cozy feeling that BOTW always gave me. There is so much busy work that I was often overwhelmed rather than feeling like I was allowed to visit Link's home after every few hours to display my new coolest finds on the wall because there were always so many fetch quests, so many koroks, so many signs to hold up so they can be fixed that I never felt like I was given a chance to take in the scenery and be immersed in the world.
As a result of all these issues, Tears of the Kingdom in my mind is a great but flawed game that just needed more of a focus on putting more interesting things in its world rather than just MORE.
FINAL VERDICT:
