4. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, dev. Nintendo EPD
I'm going to sound very The Wire Season 2 "We used to make shit in this country" right now: Nintendo used to make Zelda games.
People got tired of the "Zelda formula". Nobody was more ready than me to burn it all down after Skyward Sword. But remember when we had Zelda games, on the regular? Imagine having a full Zelda game, every two or three years? We did not just have huge console releases, we had the smaller 2D ones on handhelds. Some of the those were fantastic damn games: Minish Cap is a glory, I love riding around in my choo-choo in Spirit Tracks. That's gone now. Indie games fill that space, sometimes great ones. We get one proper Zelda every six years and they are the most enormous experiences imaginable. Things of this magnitude can only take a whole console generation to come out.
I feel like this is a losing proposition no matter how good your game is. Final Fantasy XVI is a perfectly decent product. However, it cannot stand up to the pressure of being the only full Final Fantasy for a decade. Starfield seems to have a similar problem of impossible expectations. Zelda is doing better than most, in fact. Tears of the Kingdom was basically everything everybody wanted from a Breath of the Wild 2 (minus playable Zelda, sadly). And yet, less than a year later, it feels like the temperature on this game is way down. It had a big month of hype as everybody showed off their wild creations with the physics engine toolset, and then people realized the game part of the game was mostly okay. We just had very few opinions about it all.
I had a great time with Tears of the Kingdom. I played this game more than any other game this year. I had whole sessions where I accomplished nothing in particular at all, just had fun exploring the sky islands and the deep underground depths. I just wanted to see where the floating island chains of breadcrumbs led, sometimes somewhere cool, sometimes nowhere. I loved the terror of the darkness, with this running paranoia that you'd run out of light seeds and maybe be lost down there forever. Some people could go out and use the Lego pieces Nintendo gave you and build themselves a fully functional Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II. I could not. But I still enjoyed fitzing around with the rockets and propellers and wings and limited resources. It was fun to fail with those things, to just not be able to reach the enticing floating castles in the sky, that turned out to only have a Shrine in there anyway. There's real magic here in the loop of exploration: getting launched into the sky and doing Link's HALO jumps from low orbit down to find shrines or fun.
And yet... Tears of the Kingdom is the fourth best game of 2024. There's a lot of reasons for that. For one, it is just Breath of the Wild again, even down to the same map. You can't be the grand revolution in open world gaming twice. Heck, BOTW even in 2017 was only my third favorite game of that year. Nintendo brought back everything about BOTW - even most of the flaws. The dungeons this time are better, but I realize now after two 100-hour games of this that the core combat system flatly sucks. I avoided fighting monsters for most of TOTK because it is bad. It is an unfun experience. Nintendo is still terrified of having too much narrative. That was fine last time, when most of it was environmental storytelling in the post-apocalypse. Now that Hyrule has been reborn and is even thriving - a very thrilling narrative concept - we actually do need more meat on the bone. Zelda, and Ganondorf should be more characters in this. I barely know either of them! Nothing of the lore of Tears of the Kingdom makes any sense next to the lore of the last game. It is almost like this should not have been a direct sequel at all.
This is so big. There is no technical achievement in 2023 that was more impressive than Tears of the Kingdom. It is the finest craftsmanship in gaming. The physics engine is unbelievable, flawless. I cannot believe it never glitched out even once. And yet...
I'm fine with big open world games and the loop of quests and the danger of the physics. I really do like what Tears of the Kingdom is doing. But after awhile, I'm tired of the survival game loot stuff, I'm tired of physics, I'm tired of climbing. I just wann to play a Zelda-ass Zelda game again, like Twilight Princess or Wind Waker, two of the greatest games ever made in my opinion. Nintendo does not make those anymore. The promise with these Switch Zeldas that we can have everything: immense open worlds, survival game friction, and still a Zelda game hiding in the core. I'm not sure that promise holds up. Tears of the Kingdom is a great game, it is not a particularly great Zelda game.
I do feel like the combat in these games has been lacking. I still think Twilight Princess has my personal favorite combat system, with all the moves you can learn over the course of the game, and even Skyward Sword used the multi-directional motion controls of the Wiimote pretty creatively in its combat.
ReplyDeleteWe really did need the Finishing Move in these BOTW/TOTK games. So many times an orc would be on the ground and I would just wish I could just Aerith stomp them into oblivion.
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