Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’s immersive elements could revolutionize Zelda as we know it

On Tuesday, Nintendo showed ten minutes of gameplay from the long-awaited sequel The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. We’ve only seen 10 minutes of gameplay, but even that brief window showed a slew of possibilities in the open world. It looks like Link’s new powers will make The Legend of Zelda an even more immersive sim experience than that Breath of the Wild did.

Link has a snazzy set of new powers, at least a few of which seem like they’re not just for combat, but for giving players the chance to build new items and tinker with and experiment with different physics systems. These are the following: Recall, Ascend, Fuse and Ultrahand. Polygon has a full rundown on Link’s powers, but for the sake of this post, we’ll focus on two notable ones: Fuse and Ultrahand.

As the name suggests, the Fuse stream allows Link to fuse any two items. In the video, The Legend of Zelda producer Eiji Aonuma begins by fighting an enemy with a stick, as was possible in Inhale wildly. The stick breaks relatively quickly, as famous players might expect. Afterwards, however, Aonuma melts the stick with a stone to build a hammer-like weapon that is stronger and more durable. This interaction suggests an almost endless amount of permutations and combinations you can fuse – other examples included fusing a mushroom with a shield to make a smoke bomb, and an eyeball with an arrow, resulting in a heat-seeking projectile.

Oon top of that, we also get another immersive sim-like power: Ultrahand. This ability essentially allows Link to “glue” items together. In the video, Aonuma builds a whole raft for Link to ride across a lake. Unlike Fuse, which we saw largely as merging two forces, this allows Link to build any number of ad-hoc constructs using materials in the environment. (I can already imagine players building gigantic fortresses, ridiculous flying machines and more with it.)

The Fuse and Ultrahand abilities alone seem to greatly expand the Zelda sandbox Tears of the Kingdom. So much of what is made Breath of the Wild an enduring classic is that there are so many opportunities to tinker with the world’s items and physics. By combining Link’s powers and various objects in the game, players learned how to pull off ridiculous trick shots, complete amazing speedruns, and basically just break the game. Now it looks like we’re going to get even more of that.

This excitement is perhaps best summed up in Eiji Aonuma’s closing thought. ‘If you could Thatthen maybe you could do that this at. In this game you can do a lot of things just by thinking about what is possible.”