What Makes Tears of the Kingdom Special?
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom feels like a truly open-world RPG; making it a serious candidate for Game of the Year. Why is the game so good?
I have played my fair amount of open-world action RPGs. Every game has distinctive characteristics, but in general they all follow the same structure: Complete the main quests to finish the game and do the side quests in the meantime. Leveling up is optional, but highly suggested.
Most of them rely heavily on cinematics and character dialogue, like Horizon: Zero Dawn or Forbidden West, Days Gone, Ghost of Tsushima, and most recently, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and its sequel, Tears of the Kingdom.
Most of these games share that structure; so, what makes The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and Tears of the Kingdom stand out so much from the rest?
Freedom and Creativeness
You could be trying to tackle a Shrine, finish a temple, beat a boss, or simply just trying to get from point A to B, the game provides you with the freedom necessary to be creative. All roads lead to Rome, they say.
If you have played Breath of the Wild, or Tears of the Kingdom, you know that shrines can be completed in many ways, not precisely the ones that designers intended to. Both games have powers like Statis or Ultra hand that allow players a significant amount of freedom.
In Breath of the Wild you could experiment with physics when combining stasis with other powers. You could make the giant spheres in the shrines fly many yards onto the next platform.
In Tears of the Kingdom, you can build incredibly complex structures that can aid you in many ways. Making a platform from driftwood just to get across a gap or make a death machine if you combine it with the proper Zonai devices.
More than meets the eye
Adding the game mechanics mentioned above requires a high level of design. You might have overlooked it, but materials in Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom have distinctive characteristics.
For instance, wood has buoyancy, hence it floats in water. Another characteristic is weight. Wood is lighter than other materials, so Zonai devices are more efficient when attached to a piece of wood.
Making different subsystems work in tandem is a truly remarkable task. Developers must take care of every single detail to make them work seamlessly. I encourage you to take a few minutes to appreciate the amount of 'love' put into these things. Take your time to value how fine-tuned Tears of the Kingdom really is.
Fusing materials
In Tears of the Kingdom, you can find a plethora of materials; you might find them during exploration or by killing enemies. Each material can be fused with weapons and shields to give them an extra attribute.
Your arrows can be combined with bombs to make them 'missiles'; also, you can fuse them with Keese wings to give them more range. Keese (bats) drop eyes as well, so when you fuse them with arrows, you have a homing projectile that will seek the target.
Hand-wielded weapons like swords or spears can also be fused with materials. You can add a bomb to a long spear to make a ramming device. Add a rock to make a hammer to help you mine and break boulders.
The possibilities are 'endless'; that sort of freedom allows you to strategize in many ways, it gets your creative juices going.
Recipes and cooking
Only hard-core RPG games like Skyrim or Fallout have recipes or crafting mechanics. To have a game like Breath of the Wild use something similar allowed other popular action-oriented RPGs like Elden Ring, and Horizon: Forbidden West to implement it as well.
Even though these games now have recipes and cooking mechanics, Breath of the Wild, and subsequently Tears of the Kingdom have it so much more refined. Cooking is not just for recovering health; combining the right ingredients can provide boosts to your stamina, speed, heat resistance, cold resistance, stealth, and many more.
The key lies in the variety of materials or ingredients found across Hyrule. They not only have distinctive attributes, but also elemental properties. This provides the player with many options to play with.
This game mechanic also aids freedom and creativeness. It allows the player to strategize how they will traverse a desert or snowy mountain, beat a group of enemies, or get past them without being detected.
Playing on a sandbox
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom feels like a true open-world RPG. It takes you back to the time when you played in the sandbox with your toys. That level of freedom is what makes the game stand out from other action RPGs like the ones mentioned above.
It is not just about crafting; it is about how other mechanics work so well in tandem and makes the experience seamless. They say that if something is remarkably done, you will not even notice it.
These new Zelda games combine physics, crafting, and exploration with a level of freedom that hooks the player instantly. We have not even mentioned the visual aesthetics and art direction of the game, which is beautiful.
That is how Zelda, both Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom feel. The latter is a much more refined version. It is unfair to say that Tears of the Kingdom is 2.0 version of Breath of the Wild.
