Review Day: Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (Switch)

There are no major spoilers in this review.

We purchased this game almost a year ago, and haven't played it in at least 4 months, so I think it's safe to say that we'll never finish it.

Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is the sequel to Breath of the Wild which I gave a solid C- to. Looking past the hype, the first game was a tedious grind only made bearable by the fact that Maia loved watching me play it and there was nothing else to do during the pandemic.

This game reuses the same engine and takes place in the same world (although the world is so altered that it felt very different right off the bat). Though it has some newness injected, it does very little to fix the underlying flaws that plagued the first game.

First, the good:

• The new abilities and the puzzles that require you to glue things together in oddball ways are very clever and give you a lot of leeway for solving things in unexpected ways.
• The world is three times as large (there are now islands in the sky, the overland itself, and then the Depths underneath), and you spend plenty of time flying through the air as a means of exploration. This mechanism feels much better than it did in Skyward Sword, and is worlds better than the sailing in Wind Waker.

Now, the bad:

• The controls remain unintuitive and frustrating. The number of times I try to do one thing but end up doing something else (like climbing a wall instead of walking through a door) is extremely high in each play session. This is especially frustrating when enemies require lots of precision to beat.
• The "open world" concept still provides no reason to really explore off the beaten path. The world is huge but generic.
• The story is abysmal and repetitive. Because it's an open world game, you can solve the four main dungeons in any order, but they all have identical stories and story beats as a result. The same applies to many of the subquests -- doing something once is interesting, but then having to do it 5 more times is boring.

One day last year, Maia and I felt like we were close to the end and finally decided to beat the game. We had beaten the four main dungeons and traveled to the endgame to defeat the final boss. Only, it turns out there was a fifth leg of the game to deal with and what felt like "95% complete" actually turned out to be "75% complete". This deflated a lot of my urge to finish the game (and I'm a completionist!), and we never picked the game back up seriously after that. With so many other more fun activities to do, the incentive to go the rest of the way just isn't there. Also, Maia has moved on to Pokemon in the interim.

Final Grade: C