Nintendo’s10-minutedemonstrationofThe Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom,left me feeling blown away by a gaming presentation for the first time in nearly five years. Though there have beentriple-Agames I’ve loved in the past half-decade, few of them have felt like real game-changers. Nintendo’s sequel, however, looks innovative in a way that games at its budget level almost never are anymore.
I still play and enjoy triple-A games, and there are plenty I’m looking forward to right now. If there weren’t, I would have a hard time doing this job. But so many of them come with a ‘… but.’ TheCrackdown-esque gameplayofSuicide Squad: Kill the Justice Leaguelooks like kinetic fun… but will it be fun enough to overcome how much the live-service elements will probably suck?Redfall’ssetting looks cool… but I havereservationsabout Arkane’s pivot away from single-player immersive sims.Star Wars Jedi: Survivoris the sequel to a game I liked a whole lot… but that game was kind of a mess.Starfieldpromises a space-faring sci-fi RPG (my dream game)… but the proc-gen content may threaten to drown out the authored missions.Baldur’s Gate 3promises to be a meaty RPG… but I have doubts about how far I’ll make it after struggling withDivinity: Original Sin 2.
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All of these games look good… with major caveats. And all of them look good in spite of the fact that they aren’t promising anything all that new. In the past few years, I’ve basically given up on triple-A games offering innovation and have mostly settled for these big, expensive games being pretty, atmospheric, and, occasionally, telling pretty good stories. As someone who feels like 3D games provide a level of environmental immersion that 2D games just can’t match, it’s a bummer to see most of the biggest 3D games being funneled toward a few safe design paradigms.
But Eiji Aonuma’s demonstration of Tears of the Kingdom’s gameplay set my brain on fire. Over the course of about 10 minutes of gameplay, Aonuma showed off four new abilities: Recall, Fuse, Ultrahand, and Ascend. Each of these has gigantic implications for how Link will be able to interact with Hyrule.
In the demo, a rock fell from the sky to a nearby cliff and Link ran over, climbed up and used his Recall ability to rewind the rock’s movement back up into the sky, jump off it, and glide down to a floating island. Ascend, similarly, will make vertical movement easier, allowing Link to travel upward and through any ceiling over his head. So, if there’s a cave at the bottom of a mountain, you can enter, ascend, and quickly reach the peak. Those are massive changes from Breath of the Wild and Ascend is unlike anything I can ever remember seeing in a game. Though the demo use case for Recall was fairly straightforward — a block falling straight down — it’s easy to imagine how this could quickly go off the rails. In the first game, Link could use Stasis to hold something in place, whack it around a bunch, then when it unfroze it would careen off into the distance. If Link’s old powers are still present in the sequel, it’s easy to see how you would encounter objects with bizarre flight paths that could be gamed for goofy glory.
The other two powers, Fuse and Ultrahand, have even bigger implications for what the game will be like to play. Breath of the Wild had extensive crafting, but Tears of the Kingdom seems to be working overtime to put Miyamoto’s famous aphorism, “A good idea is something that does not solve just one single problem, but rather can solve multiple problems at once”, into practice. Keese Eyes are no longer just a crafting ingredient or junk to sell. Now, they can be combined with arrows to make homing arrows, and given the way the demo presented the Fuse system, you’ll seemingly be able to combine them with just about anything else in your inventory, too. The Ultrahand ability seems to be Fuse applied to things too big for you to hold, and promises just as much mix-and-match ability. It’s a lot to take in!
In the last five years, the most innovative triple-A game I’ve played was probablyThe Last of Us Part 2, and that was innovative purely in terms of the way its story was structured; the gameplay was largely a refinement of its predecessor’s. I’ve seen some players complain that Tears of the Kingdom doesn’t look like a full sequel because it doesn’t seem to be introducing an entirely new map. But Link’s new abilities bring so much more to the table than an entirely new landmass ever could. They bring new ways to play.
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