With skills that let you rewind time, avoid clipping through ceilings, craft a litany of improvised weapons, and build vehicles that would make Rube Goldberg salivate. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom can be a bit overwhelming.
Our advice? Embrace the chaos and enjoy the fact that there’s no wrong way to play this slapstick comedy of a game.
During the two-week preliminary assessment period Tears of the Kingdom‘s release, my colleagues and I were constantly talking about the ways we solved certain puzzles, battled specific bosses, or navigated certain areas of terrain. Where one of us fought the Water Temple boss several times in vain, another discovered a Fuse combination that made the fight trivial. One of us made an elaborate rocket boat to reach a high-altitude Sky Island, but another used Ascend to swim up a huge stalactite hanging from the bottom of the rock.
At first we were afraid that we were missing “the” solution and somehow broken or cheated the order. I myself returned to a white cetacean shrine for several days at a time, tortured over a treasure chest just out of reach, confident in the fact that I was missing some intricate detail that the game was trying to teach me about the Ultrahand ability. One day, I said never mindinvented the craziest machine possible and opened the chest.
Was it the intended solution? Irrelevant. In Tears of the Kingdom, “intended” solutions are only one path and in the end the ends justify the means. I recently spoke to director Hidemaro Fujibayashi and producer Eiji Aonuma, and they admitted that too. Ascend, one of the game’s most divine abilities, even started out as a developer cheat.
The game has only been out in the wild for a few days, but players are already embracing it Tears of the Kingdomfocus on player freedom. Some have used Fuse to make the game Link Hawk’s Pro Skater. Others have joined Team Long Bridge at every possible opportunity.
To wit: my colleague Russ Frushtick’s solution for the end of Runakit Shrine:
Now consider my solution to the same puzzle:
For so many people who have told me they worship Tears of the Kingdom, almost as many people have told me that they bounce off it because of the dizzying number of possibilities. And that’s fine: there’s a lot going on here, and Breath of the Wild is still a very good game, and well worth returning to if you’re not thrilled with the sequel.
But if you enjoy Tears of the Kingdom but still a little concerned, as I was two weeks ago, that you might be playing it wrong? Take a page from Fujibayashi’s book and enjoy the glory of a game that admits, “cheating can be fun.”