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[Thoughts] The Legend Of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom One Year Later


Tears of the kingdom celebrates it's first anniversary since the game came out today!

source: twitter.com/NintendoUK

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of The Kingdom is now officially one year old. Time has flown by since it's release and it feels as if it was yesterday I was hyping up for the game. To celebrate this event Nintendo have released new official art on X (Twitter), which can be seen above. Since it's been out a year, I have been able to think more on the game. What do I think now? Has my opinion changed? Well I will go into that in this blog.

Let's start off by saying I absolutely love this game and that has not changed. I would say it is probably still my favourite game of all time. However, the flaws have become more apparent over time. 

Source: zeldawiki.wiki
The first thing I want to talk about is the narrative. There are two things here to mention, firstly the fact you can get memories in any order can spoil the story. I thankfully didn't experience this as I actually did it relatively in order without trying to, but I can see it being an issue. This is all because they followed the exact same idea as BOTW's memories. Though BOTW didn't really have the same issue of being spoiled so it was fine there. They could have done it where there were no symbols on the ground and instead generic markings scattered, then the memories could play in order no matter which one you went to.
The second thing with narrative is some of the choices in it. Things such as the same cutscene repeating with no variation, Zelda not being able to identify Ganondorf and Ganondorf seemingly having no motive come to mind. For the repetitive cutscene they could have just showed you it once depending on which area you go to first. I am surprised they didn't do this actually. I am really not sure why zelda was not able to put the dots together though, it's fine for a character to not be perfect with their choices but this one felt like quite an odd one. Ganondorf having no motive seemingly is a shame though, this isn't something I thought about at first but when looking at Ganondorf in isolation it's more apparent. Apparently in the Japanese version he does have more of a motive though so maybe it was just a translation thing.

Source: zeldawiki.wiki
Moving on, I will talk about some of the content. The depths and sky are both a bit lacking, especially compared to the surface. The sky has little content and it's a shame because there are some really cool ideas for the islands when you do come across them. There is also a little bit of repetition in what is there as well though. However, it's no where near the amount of repetition as seen in the depths. This area completely mirrors the land and so has the same size. However, to fill this huge land they resorted to using a lot of the same assets and spreading them out. There are some unique enemies and items down in the depths as well as a really cool quest line involving Koga but I wish there were more interesting things to do down there as it's quite bland otherwise. In general, both could have done with some more unique and cool areas to make it more worth the trip upwards or down below.

Source: zeldawiki.wiki
Lastly, I want to talk about gameplay. The dungeons are a step up from BOTW but they do slightly suffer from how much choice the game gives you with it's powers. They can be cheesed and beaten quite quickly because of this. It's even possible to miss certain cool moments like the intro to the lighting temple with Riju by using ascend. You can't completely restrict these powers because that would ruin a lot of the puzzles and fun of the game. It's hard to find a balance here, but I would probably just make it much more limited on what you can use the powers on, I would probably turn off auto build completely though.

Acknowledging these flaws now, I would probably still keep it at a 10/10. These flaws don't really create much of an impact on the game to me and therefore don't hurt the recommendation scoring. No game is perfect after all, not even 10/10s. These flaws are definitely there though and may effect peoples enjoyment differently.

That's it for this blog, stay connected!

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