I’m glad Nintendo didn’t make a new Hyrule for Tears of the Kingdom

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom takes place in the same Hyrule as its predecessor, Breath of the Wild. It’s true that the map has been dramatically altered by the events of the Upheaval: Zonai ruins have fallen from the sky, islands of sky hover overhead, and rifts have opened up into a pitch-black underworld. But everything is still where it was: Hyrule Castle, the jagged, leaning spiers of the Dueling Peaks, the baking wastes of the Gerudo Desert. It is recognizably the same place. For a full-fledged sequel that took Nintendo six years to complete, this level of content recycling is unusual, to say the least.

For Tears of the Kingdom‘s release, some fans wondered if the sequel would feel more like a glorified expansion. However, since the launch of the game, this topic has hardly been discussed. Even the expected deluge of comparison shots, or the laundry lists of what has and hasn’t changed, haven’t really materialized (although players have noticed that Zelda changed the decor after moving to Link’s path). Dragged into the dizzying possibilities of Tears of the Kingdom‘s new toolkit, or the surprise and mystery of its new quests, players don’t seem to notice, or mind, that they are literally treading old roads.

For starters, I felt the same. Maybe it had something to do with the opening of the game, high up in the sky on Great Sky Island. The untethered, windswept newness of this lofty place, capped off with a sensational skydive to the more familiar world of Hyrule below, set the tone and made everything that followed feel like a breeze. Perhaps it was the liberating joy of being back in the hands of master designers with the confidence to give players the freedom to explore their world, and the craftsmanship to guide their eyes to all the exciting things out there.

Anyway, I began to hungrily gobble up the game’s secrets and distractions, marveling at the sense of discovery it could generate, without even considering how doubly difficult it must have been to explore such a well-trodden landscape in one way or another. somehow make it feel different. It looked familiar yet felt new, and I didn’t give it a second thought – until I happened upon the Great Plateau.

This hit differently. The Great Plateau is Breath of the Wild‘s Great Sky Island – a safe, sunny, enclosed area, elevated above the battle, where players can learn the systems of the game and Link’s core skills in relative tranquility. More than any other part of Hyrule, it’s etched in my mind; it’s formative in a literal sense, because here I learned how to cook, how to paraglide and how to fight, and how Link would relate to the world around him in the game. I can clearly picture the geography of this pocket world. Encountering it in a radically different context was shocking – even emotional.

In Tears of the Kingdom, the Plateau feels wild and foreboding. There are some medium to high level monsters here now and Link is being hunted by the masked assassins of the Yiga clan. Maybe I came a little early, but I had to be careful and prepare during my reconnaissance. The ruins, once picturesque, now look somehow rugged and jagged, and there are ugly splashes of gloom around multiple gaping chasms. It even felt different to take off to this newly hostile place, instead of sailing away from it like in the first game.

Image: Nintendo EPD/Nintendo via Polygon

Exploring the Great Plateau is the most exciting adventure I’ve been on Tears of the Kingdom until now, and that has a lot to do with my memories of the area of Breath of the Wild. When I arrived at a place I knew so well and found it turned upside down, approached it from a new angle and saw it from a new perspective, rediscovered my way through space with a mixture of familiarity and uncertainty – it was like going back to a childhood haunt. Everything was the same but different, familiar but impossibly strange. This was a powerful feeling, stronger even than the wonder of exploring a totally new place.

There’s only one other game landscape that makes me feel this way, and that’s it World of Warcraft‘s Azeroth. Azeroth was turned upside down by 2010, in a similar fashion to Hyrule disaster expansion – but other more subtle changes over the years have had a similar effect on me. I’m sure long-term players of any other massively multiplayer game will recognize the feeling. If you live with a leeway over time, you spend so long there that it becomes deeply enmeshed in your memories of your life, then come back to find it’s still there but has moved on without you – to me, this is what elevates virtual worlds to places that, psychologically speaking, might as well be real.

As I descended from the Great Plateau to resume my exploration of the rest of Hyrule, I felt I understood why Nintendo had chosen to join Breath of the Wild‘s map. Not because it’s a masterpiece (although it is), or because it would have been too much work (it must have been just as hard to rework it meaningfully), but because bringing it back really adds more to the game than a brand new game. world could have done. It brings history; it brings resonance; it brings meaning. It has rightly been said that Hyrule itself was the real star of Breath of the Wild. What would the sequel have been without its star?