Tears of the Kingdom’s ending is its own kind of tragedy

[Ed. note: Spoilers follow for the ending of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.]

Tears of the Kingdom ends with everything back where it started. Ganondorf is defeated. Zelda returns and takes her place on the throne. Link even gets his arm back. The motley band of helpers he has gathered on his journey gather to swear allegiance to the crown. Zelda vows to dedicate herself to keeping the peace in Hyrule.

Of course we know she won’t succeed. The inevitability of a new Legend of Zelda game, a new iteration of Ganon threatening the princess and the world and being held back by Link, is so obvious it’s canonized into the fiction itself. The three are locked in a cycle of reincarnation, driven into the universe by mysterious divine forces, and driven out of the universe by the ever-growing popularity of the franchise.

That cycle is the great tragedy behind the whole story of The Legend of Zelda. And yet, Tears of the Kingdom‘s ending pretends it’s a great victory to keep things completely the way they were. To win is to return to the status quo.

But The Legend of Zeldathe status quo is getting thinner every year. When Tears of the Kingdom was first announced, a look at a short-haired Zelda in the trailer a lot of people curious whether Nintendo would use the sequel to finally introduce a playable princess. Instead, her story is the same as it once was. Even the Master Sword gets more freedom of choice. In the scene where it appears to her in the past, Zelda says it “traveled through time to find and restore me [its] force’, implying an intentional journey, when she was simply ‘sent back’ by unknown forces.

Of course, if she returns, she will return to the throne. Being stranded in Hyrule’s early years and encountering Rauru, the kingdom’s founder, has taught her that she has the bloodline of a ruler going back as far, and possibly even before, if the rumors of the Zonai’s divine blood are to be believed. The modern-day sages repeat almost word for word the vow of loyalty made to Rauru by the previous sages. This is a game that skipped commercials in my country, maybe because of the Queen’s death. Anti-monarchy demonstrators at the coronation of her successor were subject to arrests.

There’s no hint in The Legend of Zelda that anyone is questioning her right to absolute rule – except Ganon. Zelda is presented as a completely benevolent dictator. She wants peace, without acknowledging that this is so a complicated word for those in power to toss around so casually. Yet the only threat to it, as Mineru puts it in an expository dialogue, is a “great evil emerging from the desert.” This laughably charged line and the racist tropes that have always underpinned Ganon’s story, such as the gendered aspects of Zelda’s repetitive role in the story, seem to be skating past simply because this has been going on for so long that it feels blasé to mention them.

Tears of the Kingdom does bring up its own lesser-known themes – before dismissing them in favor of a neat conclusion. For example, the game should have said something interesting about bodies. Link loses an arm and gets a prosthetic; Zelda completely transforms herself; Mineru is able to separate her mind and use a robotic construct, one she has Link control like a mech.

Image: Nintendo EPD/Nintendo via Polygon

But instead of paying any attention to the lasting effects of these changes or their thematic implications, the writers simply blot them out. Mineru steps out of her constructed self and disappears, and Zelda’s revival takes on a handwave explanation: her ancestors’ combined powers enabled her to do the impossible and return. Presumably the same can be said for Link’s arm, though it’s never acknowledged except for a brief moment of surprise from our hero.

What Tears of the Kingdom what is ultimately said about bodies is that in a neat happy ending they can only exist one way. Prostheses, scars, or deliberate modifications are imperfections that must be erased in the same move as the Demon King himself. Like the rest of the story – like the rest of the franchise – it celebrates nothing that changes.

In their excellent piece on Tears of the Kingdom ending, critic Harper asks Jay if it is “a story for our present times”. They argue that a bolder, more honest ending may have kept Zelda imprisoned in her draconian form, never quite remembering why she cries; that such a bittersweet move would show that to defeat evil there must be a sacrifice that cannot be swept away by dexterous magical skills.

Image: Nintendo EPD/Nintendo via Polygon

I agree Tears of the Kingdom is not a story for our present time, but it is a story by our current age – one that says sticking to the status quo is the equivalent of victory. It’s the story told to us by bosses Saying the demands of their striking workers are ‘unrealistic’. It’s the story being told by ineffective political leaders who refuse to challenge harmful government policies. It’s the story that motivates regressive, transphobic laws. It’s the story that makes it possible more to drill for oil during the climate crisis.

It is also a story that reflects the current business media landscape more broadly. Remakes, sequels, AI putting out the most average output of all it’s gotten, 45 commercials based on Mattel IP including the “grounded and gritty” Hot wheels 0. Everything is something you’ve seen before, again, only bigger. At one time, Nintendo used the success of Ocarina of Time to make Majora’s mask, something surprising and tonally unique. This time it didn’t.

What would break these cycles? Tears of the Kingdom is not interested in asking. It takes us back to the beginning so we’re ready to do it all over again, leaving no room for the apparent victory to actually be its own kind of tragedy.