Before we get into the meat of this review, I’ve got a couple things to say. Firstly, this review WILL contain some sort of spoilers, if you wish to play TOTK as spoiler free as possible, DO NOT read this review. I’ve tried writing this without spoilers, and unfortunately it just doesn’t work out. Sorry! If you want to know if you’ll like the game or not, ask yourself this: did you like BOTW and want more of the same? Yes? Congratulations, you’re gonna love TOTK. Secondly, if you only make a comment based on the score I give and nothing else, just leave. I’m going to tell you right now I’m giving this game a 6.9/10, and it’s only because I don’t like number scoring systems for reviews so I put a meme number. Read the content, please. Thirdly, this review is INCOMPLETE. Due to certain circumstances, I've opted to post the majority of the review I had initially written for the official review. There are paragraphs missing, the majority of the editing was not finished, and there are probably some typos and inconsistencies along the way as I made new discoveries towards certain aspects in the game that simply didn't make this rough draft. I'm only posting this for the sake of clarity, so you all can see approximately what would have been posted, unedited, if no one had any issues. And with those out of the way, let's get started!

BOTW 2: Electric Boogaloo

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is Nintendo’s latest entry in the Zelda series. As a sequel to the beloved Breath of the Wild, there’s a lot to live up to, and Nintendo certainly tried their best to meet those expectations. But is it good enough? Let’s find out.

We’ll start off with the most important aspect of the game: The graphics! Ha, just kidding, we’re gonna talk about the gameplay. In Breath of the Wild, the main gameplay loop followed a pretty simple formula: you explore the large world, unlocking towers to reveal the map, doing shrines to earn orbs that can be traded in for heart containers/stamina wheel increases, find memories to learn most of the story of the game, and visit the four main races and do four “big” 10 minute dungeons so you can fight the evil boss Ganondorf. In Tears of the Kingdom, you explore the large world, unlocking towers to reveal the map, doing shrines to earn orbs that can be traded in for heart containers/stamina wheel increases, find memories to learn most of the story of the game, and visit four main races and do five “big” 10 minute dungeons so you can fight the evil boss Ganondorf. No, you didn’t suffer a stroke, it really is exactly the same game again. Yes, you can generalize just about anything to make them sound the exact same, but in this case it’s not a generalization; Nintendo really did just take BOTW, rearranged some shrine locations, added tiny areas in the sky and an inverse area below ground, and slapped a “BRAND NEW!” sticker on it.

But let’s go more in depth, just in case you simply don’t believe me. Like BOTW, TOTK introduces five “new” abilities to replace the Sheikah Slate runes of the previous game: you get Ultrahand, which you can think of as the magnet rune from BOTW, except now you can manipulate pretty much anything instead of metal only, and you can fuse most objects together to form structures (more on this later). There’s “Fuse”, which allows you to fuse items and materials you find in the main +world to your main hand weapon, shield, or arrows to “improve” them or add elements to them. “Ascend”, which lets you effectively jump up and “swim” through physical objects above your head which makes traversing areas and leaving caves fairly easy. Recall, which rewinds time for any moveable object. And “Autobuild”, which allows you to store memories of things you fuse together using Ultrahand so you can automatically remake them without having to fiddle around with building all the time. Mostly new, for the most part, but in the case of Ultrahand and Recall they’re basically just Magnet and Stasis but “slightly different”. Fuse is already part of a function with Ultrahand and could’ve just been lumped in with that for another ability.  Autobuild is only there because Nintendo realized the fusing mechanic to build stuff is very fiddly and they needed a QOL ability out of the gate. Ascend can be pretty neat, but its purpose is pretty much isolated to leaving caves without teleporting and shrine puzzles and that’s kind of it? They got rid of the infinite bombs, replacing them with bomb flowers instead as a limited resource which I appreciate, but at the same time miss given the number of breakable rocks they have in the game (but we’ll touch on that later, since it involves the Fuse function). The camera makes a comeback, as well as the Hyrule Compendium which you have to fill…again, although they helpfully allow you to buy entries with Rupees from Robbie for around 90% of the stuff that was already in the game so you don’t actually have to go and scan everything again, just the new stuff mostly.

Your weapon and shield inventories are still extremely limited in the beginning as before, and just like BOTW you have to find Korok seeds to expand it. The durability mechanic returns as well, which those of you who read my previous review will remember I hated. I still don’t like the mechanic whatsoever, but I will give Nintendo props here, at least this time there’s an actual reason for weapons degrading which I actually appreciate. I do wish Nintendo had bothered adding more than a couple new weapons to the game beyond Zonai weapons (which are basically just Guardian weapons from BOTW), but given the sheer number of individual weapons from the first game and the fuse mechanics, I can forgive that.

When it comes to shrines, they follow pretty much the same format as BOTW: they’re either combat-oriented, where they want you to just kill various enemies, puzzle oriented where you’re meant to use the various abilities to get around obstacles, or physics oriented where you’re meant to use or manipulate the in-game physics to make your way to the end. There are 120 shrines in Hyrule, most of which are in the same or near enough places as BOTW, but they did add an additional 32 in the sky areas which is nice I guess. I would’ve taken another big dungeon or two, personally, but at least there’s something to do up there. Speaking of dungeons, the four main dungeons also follow the same mechanics: you show up at the Zora, Gerudo, Rito, or Goron city, find out there’s some big problem caused by some evil influence, and you’re tasked with entering a dungeon to fight a boss to fix that problem. After defeating said boss and fixing the problem, you gain a spirit that gives you a new ability related to that area. Which again, is pretty much exactly what happens in BOTW. Story-wise I won’t go too in depth here if you skipped the spoiler section above, but it’s pretty much the typical Legend of Zelda plot: Zelda is trapped somewhere (or, shall I say, sometime?) Hyrule is in danger, and Link must save the world from Ganondorf…again, by finding the Master Sword and working together with the four main races who offer Link abilities unique to their race. Now it’s not necessarily a bad thing to have repeat mechanics in something like a sequel, but this much? In a $70 game? It’s inexcusable. 

While the gameplay loop is pretty much exactly the same as BOTW, Nintendo did add a couple new things to TOTK, most of which I quite appreciate. I’ll start with the big one, the aforementioned fusing mechanics. As noted above, this comes in two main flavors: the Ultrahand ability, which lets you fuse objects to other objects in the overworld, and the Fuse ability, which allows you to fuse materials to your weapons and arrows. I’ll get the simple one out of the way first, and that’s the Fuse ability. Much like BOTW, TOTK is full of materials you can use to make elixirs and cook and all that good stuff. Unlike BOTW, you can also fuse those materials to your weapons to increase durability or add elemental damage to them. Arrows, for example, no longer have separate elemental arrow types: now, you must pick up various materials like Fire Fruit for fire arrows, Shock Fruit for shock arrows, Bomb Flowers for bomb arrows, etc etc. This is one of the more annoying changes, as you have to fuse those materials to your arrows every single time you fire the bow. The game does slow time while you’re in the menu to do this, but it’s so clunky having to hit up d-pad to open a menu and choose a material every single time I want to shoot a fire arrow to light something up or bomb arrows to blow up breakable rocks. Most enemies drop things like horns or claws, which you can fuse to your mainhand weapon to increase its damage output, add an ability, or enhance the durability (albeit not by much). In the tutorial area, for example, they have you fuse a rock on the ground to a large club, making basically a giant rock hammer to easily break rocks. Enemies like the Zonai Constructs drop blade-like horns that can be attached to sticks to make swords. But you also have to plan these upgrades accordingly, as once you fuse something to your weapon or shield, you can’t retrieve the fused item at all, it’s either destroyed via the durability mechanic or is destroyed if you remove the fused item manually. All in all, a pretty ok mechanic that could use a little bit of QOL tweaking, at least where the arrows are concerned. But Ultrahand is truly where fusing fleshes itself out. 

As noted above, Ultrahand lets you fuse objects to other objects, letting you make things like bridges, ramps, cars, planes, boats and all sorts of other things to make traversing the world or solving puzzles oh so much fun! Most of the vehicles you can make are possible thanks to Zonai items scattered throughout the world, which includes fans, gliders, rockets, wheels, hoverboards, hot air balloons, control sticks, water spouts, laser shooters, fire shooters, and probably more. Each of these things can be combined in all sorts of ways, letting you make planes, cars, boats, and more, using new “Zonai Batteries” as a limited power source to power each device. And that’s really great! I loved stuffing as many fans on the glider as possible to make a super fast plane. Strapping rockets onto a hot air balloon to make it shoot into the air so I can skip climbing a mountain to get to a shrine was great! This is by far the best thing Nintendo added to the game…that’s unfortunately ruined by Nintendo’s quirky nature of ruining fun by adding timers and limits to things that shouldn’t need a limit. Every Zonai device you use seems to have some kind of arbitrary timer that makes the vehicle disappear for…seemingly no reason. It’s not even related to the Zonair battery meter, you can recharge that using items you get in-game while operating the devices. They just have some weird built-in timer to expire for seemingly no reason. I’m sure it’s to prevent you from just flying around all of Hyrule, easily exploring the few sky islands they added, but why would they want to limit exploration in a game where the primary focus is exploration?? 

And then there are the two new areas in the game, the Sky islands and the Depths. The Sky Islands are disappointing to say the least, with barely a handful of islands scattered throughout the air whose only main purpose seems to be 32 extra shrines, occasional mini boss fights, and housing two of the main dungeons. The Depths, however, seem much more fleshed out and interesting to explore. Throughout the world of Hyrule, giant black holes in the ground appeared during the Upheaval which lead down below the surface, opening up to a giant pitch black area that covers the entire map of Hyrule. And when I say pitch black, I mean there are initially no sources of light in this entire area and you won’t be able to see anything in front of you. In order to light up the depths, you must explore and find giant root bulbs that, when activated, will light up a small section of the map. You can think of it like the towers, but smaller. After exploring the entirety of this area, I can confirm the roots line up exactly where shrines are in Hyrule, meaning there are 120 roots to find and activate. Most of the enemies down below tend to be higher level than above, and instead of just normally damaging you, they cause Gloom damage which is a new debuff that temporarily lowers your total number of available hearts. This can be cured, with elixirs, by activating/sitting under the roots you discover, or by simply traveling to the surface where the gloom effect doesn’t seem to take hold for long. Enemy variety is also vastly improved upon from the first game. Classic enemies like the Gleeok, Like Likes, and Gibdos make a welcome return, and new enemies are introduced like Horriblins, Aerocudas, Boss Bokoblins, Froxs, and various Zonai constructs. 

And now we can finally address the graphics and sound design. The first thing pretty much anyone will notice when they start Tears of the Kingdom up is that boy it sure does look almost exactly like Breath of the Wild, which is a given: Nintendo is reusing the same engine and map as Breath of the Wild, albeit with a couple small improvements. The second thing you’ll notice is that boy, the draw distance sure does suck. Detailed textures for the ground pop in basically five feet in front of you, and it remains pretty obvious in nearly every area of the game. Framerates are also just about as bad as in Breath of the Wild, too, with huge dips anytime something busy happens on screen. This is true both docked and undocked, and if I’m being honest, with max overclock across the board with sys-clock (but shh, don’t tell Nintendo ;) ). It’s no real surprise, it’s not like the Switch magically grew more powerful the last six years, but I do wish Nintendo would’ve done a better job optimizing the game for the hardware they have, especially this late in the consoles life. Sound-wise, the soundtrack of Tears of the Kingdom is excellent as expected. Manaka Kataoka and her team of composers continued the simplistic, piano-focused style BOTW had, and it still sounds pretty great. But the voice acting...it's not too bad for the most part, Zelda still sounds the same and the few returning characters are pretty much spot on, but Goron's just shouldn't sound like whiny teenagers and I will stick by this forever. 

But the real question is, is Tears of the Kingdom worth the $70 that Nintendo decided to charge for it? Nintendo spent at least six years in development working on this game, but is it enough to justify the price jump? In my opinion, no, it’s not. If you’ve reached this far, you’ll have noticed by now just how common the phrase “Like BOTW” is in this review, and that’s the real issue here. They reused the shrines, Korok seeds, horse mechanics, combat mechanics, the base story is barely different, durability returns, the same graphics and overall design, even performance issues…So much content is just ripped directly from BOTW that it’s hard to believe this wasn’t originally planned as a DLC but they took too long and opted to just slap stuff in there from the last game and hoped people liked Breath of the Wild so much that they won’t complain if they just do it all over again with barely any changes.