#102 - Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

Well hey hi hello there!

This week, I took the week off work and had to make a concerted effort not to spend the entire time just playing the new Zelda game. And I’ve mostly succeeded!

I’ve managed to make my way to a karaoke bar, to three different coffeeshops to write my daily pages (& I even went to the Williamsburg waterfront for one and somehow managed to finagle my fingers into a position to keep all the pages flat lest my moleskin fly away and be reunited with the recently resurged East River dolphins #natureishealing), and tonight I’m going to some comedy show/live dating app extravaganza so like, please clap.

Because I really love the new Zelda game. I really really love it, it’s wonderful, a feat of technology and video game artistry once again.

Great job Nintendo!!

It was reported this week that they had finished the mechanics of the game almost a year ago and proceeded to polish the physics and mechanics right up until the release date.

And, just like the head of Nintendo when he was first presented with Breath Of The Wild, I can’t stop climbing things.

It’s so fun!

You just run at the wall and suddenly you’re scaling it. Oh baby, the joy! The wonder! The endless possibilities as long as you have enough stamina-recovery meals cooked!

Zelda ruins other video games in such silly ways. I played Red Dead for the first time in like two weeks yesterday and got so frustrated with not having the mechanic that just allows me to scale anything and get anywhere!! Why won’t Rockstar let me be FREE!

My love of video games is now uh, well documented, but Zelda has honestly never scored big in my game rankings.

Mostly because the game is about 90% puzzles, a thing I am not great at! But this iteration of Zelda feels very different, despite the fact that I walk around the world constantly living with this mantra in my head:

This has meant that I’ve spent well over 50% of my time playing the game using walkthroughs to solve shit. Because I still want to play I just don’t always have it in me to solve.

(& a very special shoutout to everyone who uploads shrine, temple, and quest walkthroughs without commentary. You are the true heroes and backbone of society!!!!)

I know that’s what other people love about the game, and that’s so wonderful and I’m even so glad there’s a game chock-full of puzzles for them to test their skills with. And I’m even more glad that I don’t have to get completely stalled out because my brain prefers to spend its power in other parts of the skill tree. (See? I can speak gamer.)

In general, I think that there’s almost nothing lamer than dictating how someone plays a video game. If there are levels of difficulty, there’s no shame in playing on easy. Sometimes, players are there to get satisfaction out of solutions, while other players may just enjoy testing out different cooking recipes. And in a great game, both of those players can have equally great times exploring what interests them and makes their little game brain go whiiiiiirrrrrr.

With this game, much like Breath of the Wild, I am so here for all the horse and stable quests (surprise!!) and I love foraging and discovering the map and getting lost in little corners of the world and finding caves full of sapphires (shout out to my birthstone, September really got a top-tier gem) and completing all the side quests and stranger adventures.

It’s shocking that the two games share a map since the land feels incredibly new and different in Tears of the Kingdom. Apparently, it’s mostly due to having the sun in the opposite location which is casting new shadows over the land. Fucking neat!

And anytime I get bored with a quest, I travel to a sky tower and launch myself quite literally into a new part of the map and take off exploring once again!

I did think that an early spoiler for this game was that you got to play as Zelda. And while I haven’t completed the main quest so I can’t say for sure whether it happens or not (but I feel like it would have been all over twitter soooooo I don’t have much hope), I do wish that had been an option.

For all that I can appreciate what Nintendo has done in regard to gender representation (even though I’ll never fully forgive them for rejecting my fourth-grade letter where I proposed they made a gamegirl and not just a gameboy because I was already sick of boys telling me that the device I obsessively played The Lion King game on wasn’t for me) (who the fuck was it for then????) and their non-sexualization of Peach’s “catsuit” in 3D Mario World, I just…want to play as Zelda. Always have always will!

Like, gimme.

It can’t be that hard!

I appreciate that for many Link is a non-binary icon, but for me, I want to play as the princess. (Even if one of my teeny tiny gripes about the game is the voice actor for Zelda, she’s just so quiet in the cutscenes like girlie SPEAK UP I have this TV set to like volume 3 as I will be consuming a podcast the entire time I play it. Honestly it’d be fine because if she became the lead she would be rendered to gasp-reactions just like Link is now!!!) She’s the titular fucking character give her a GAME!

The beauty of the last two Zelda installments has been the absolute nailing of open-world game mechanics.

Every decision has consequences, everything is kept under a very understandable physics system which means that tackling any given puzzle kind of has infinite solutions—which is really exciting for me, someone who is aforementionedly not good at puzzles. I’ve been pleasantly surprised when I get it on my own only to discover that none of the tutorials solved it the same way. This game is a true sandbox. The experience is completely dependent on what the player brings and what stories we’re most interested in telling.

Part of what I think has helped their teams so immensely is the longevity of the careers of game designers at Nintendo.

There is no substitute for experience and some of these people have been around and working since the very first Zelda game. They get the game, they get what’s good about it, and there’s always some delightful new element with each pass on this franchise because they’re able to do more.

And it’s part technical skill improvement—it’s easier to improve a draft than churn out the original materials—but the other part is love and loyalty.

Not just to the company, not just to their own legacy, but to the stories, to the fans. There’s pride in the work because it was created in humane conditions, absent of “crunch”. They could slow down and take their time because there was no imminent threat of their jobs being taken away.

We know that humans have productivity limits. We know that the best work will never be done at the end of an 80-hour work week by sleep-deprived, stressed, lightly malnourished, vitamin D deficient folks. It’s just not possible.

So why does basically every other major game development studio work that way? Oh, because they don’t care about longevity or the labor being performed because we think of workers as infinitely replaceable rather than unique individuals who can learn, grow, and get more efficient at skills over time?

Zelda has always proven that fans will wait, and that they will always be happier with a playable perfected game than one with months of patch rollouts.

Authenticity is still valuable to us. And, like the ability to clock textile quality, it’s intrinsically understood.

Love is always the secret ingredient in creative endeavors.

And Tears of the Kingdom is one of the loveliest games I’ve ever played.

100/10 would recommend!!!