When the Switch launched back in March 2017, I had just finished playing through Horizon Zero Dawn and then jumped into Breath of the Wild. The difference between the two was night and day, cut to now and I had just finished playing Horizon Forbidden West before Tears of the Kingdom released and the differences were not as vast. The similarities between my two experiences there, also echo the experience within both games, there is a strange feeling of déjà vu.

Due to my avoiding much about the game, before I booted it up, I wasn’t quite sure how it would start, having the company name and then the title appear in small letters on a black screen, was nowhere near what I could have imagined. It set a tone that was equal parts mystery and eerie and things only got more entertaining from there. Of course, as Zelda and Link are exploring the tunnels beneath Hyrule Castle, they discover a man or the remains of one and before much can be done, it comes alive and the pair are separated. Zelda has vanished and Link has been cursed by darkness, but someone saves him, amputating his cursed arm and replacing it with another. Once Link has woken up, he is informed of the events by a being known as Rauru and that the arm Link has been given was once his arm and it has power to help him in the fight ahead. From here the story follows the tutorial flow, similar to that of Breath of the Wild and Link’s time on the Great Plateau, but soon Link has to head down to the main land of Hyrule and that is where the adventure really begins.

I have issues with the story, the biggest one is that it is so disjointed it makes it hard to follow along with. The main quest Link has been given is to locate Princess Zelda, seemingly a simple quest as she keeps appearing all over the place, but in addition to that, he is given other tasks as well. The tracking of the Princess ties into the four major regions of the world, exactly like the first game. The other major goal is to study the geoglyphs that have appeared across Hyrule since Zelda and Link vanished. There are additional main quests, but I won’t explain them here, needless to say each of the main quests never connects to the others directly, but they are connected. The issue with the disjointed nature is that as the game lets you explore the world and complete things in any order you desire, it never really changes. The first region you save, no matter which one, explains the events that sealed the man below the castle and then the second one you save, explains the exact same event. There is no growth in the story, you don’t learn extra information in saving the second region or the fourth and once you report back to Purah about your success, it never changes.

Speaking of never changing, I need to address the main landscape of Hyrule, it is 98% the same as the previous game and while that might be ok for many, I often felt like I was playing an expansion for Breath of the Wild as I ran around the world. The upheaval, the events that have caused heaps of islands to start floating in the sky, would have been a great reason to reshape much of the land, as the islands had to come from somewhere, but they seem to have just not cared. There are changes of course, one stable has moved and Hateno Village has a school, but those are minor compared to the size of the world. Please don’t misunderstand the world itself is delightful and worth exploring all over again, but I just wish they had done more with it. Of course, the floating islands have much to see and do, some of them are connected to the issues plaguing the world below, some have world bosses just chilling in the clouds and others are just tiny little rocks in a vast expanse of empty sky. The more time I spent in the clouds, the more I got a Wind Waker type feeling to things, as that also had some large locations to explore, a smattering of smaller one and then vast plots of nothing between. Discovering ways of getting up to some islands is a fun challenge, but sometimes the rewards for doing so are not worth the effort.

Now Nintendo were very quiet on the Depths before the game released and it was a massive surprise when I descended down into them. The Depths span the entire land mass that is Hyrule, just below it and the entire region is filled with danger. The first time I landed down there was for a quest and it was a safe-ish exploration mission, but later on, as I started to venture down on my own the dangers really amplified. The biggest challenge in the Depths is the darkness, because until you start to active the light-roots around the place, you will never be able to see where you are going. There are times when this isn’t really a problem as the ground is level enough but venture out towards the edges and watch the land elevation change. It took me a while, but I discovered that using the ability to make things and building a car, with a few Giant Brightbloom Seeds all around it gave me some safety while exploring. The Depths are not just a random place to visit there are missions to complete down there, resources to collect and of course, enemies both big and small to fight and its really a great juxtaposition to that of Hyrule itself.

I mentioned before about building a car and that seems like a good time to talk about the new powers that Link has access to, thanks to his new arm. Ultrahand, Fuse, Ascend and Rewind are the four basic abilities that you get in the tutorial section of the game. Ultrahand is the one that will likely be used the most as it lets you pick objects up and then connect them to others. At first its simple contraptions like a raft, but then depending on your skills, it becomes something more. Early on, I could not work out how to get to one of the shrines in the tutorial section, so I used Ultrahand to build a random tower of logs and climbed up, it was ugly and wobbly as heck, but it worked. Fuse is an extension of Ultrahand but works by fusing items to your weapon or shield and depending on the combination can provide extra attack power. The main reason I used this was to put rocks on the end of sticks, so I could bash open ore deposits. You can take two long weapons and fuse them together to give you even more reach, but the overall attack power may not be worth it.

Perhaps the most underused for me was Ascend, which lets you swim up through the land above you, to the top of it. Due to its inherent cheating nature, I honestly kept forgetting about it, as in there were times when Ascending up out of a well would have been quicker, but I often found myself warping to the nearest shrine and then running back. Rewind is just that, the ability to rewind time on some objects. For the most part I would use this to get height, before leaping off to glide somewhere, but beyond that I rarely touched it. Now none of the abilities are bad, they do offer a great way to let you play through the game, but I do wonder why there is no bomb power anymore, it can’t have been that they thought it would be to overpowered, given the other abilities, but I just missed being able to glide above an enemy camp and drop bombs on them.

I could talk for hours about the various quests and activities that you can do, from racing cars to researching the wells around the world, but I would be remiss not to mention some of the issues with the gameplay. One of the most aggravating is that of the Sage’s that follow you around, at least once you unlock their powered ghostly versions, they behave like a puppy. The problem is that like a puppy, they often run off to do their own thing, which usually happens at times when you want them nearby. In one boss fight, I died almost a dozen times because the Sage that was meant to be with me, was halfway across the room doing their own thing and as the power you can trigger from them, can only be done when they are next to you, it made it hard to fight back. Something that was in the last game and was something I had hoped wouldn’t make it here, are the constant fade to blacks for characters. Link talks to a lot of people and when someone moves on from a location the game almost always fades to black to remove them from the area. This is just lazy execution and is not something I expected to see, then again Nintendo for some reason left the constant reminders of what some items are in the game, so they clearly have some priorities that only they know about. With any open world game there are always issues with characters popping in and that was the case here as well, I would often see enemies spawn in the base’s or people in towns and coming in from up high made that worse. Sadly there were times of people spawning in right in front of me and in one instance right on top of me, nothing says ‘Welcome to Hyrule’ like a horse and cart spawning above me and crushing me to the ground.

Talking about pop in gives me a nice segue into the games presentation, for the most part it looks identical to Breath of the Wild. The game sports the same visual flourishes that the previous title had, but of course has new locales to explore, along with new enemies, weapons and gear. There are a number of returning characters that dot the landscape and while there are also plenty of new ones, there are a few that stand out. Of course the folks that become Sage’s will be familiar to returning players and they clearly got just a little bit more attention. The folks that live in Lookout Landing are unique enough, but again there are a few choice characters, like Purah that stand out from the rest. As the main landscape is the same as before, the same themes apply to each area, so cold for the Rito, desert for the Gerudo and so on. The game does take some advantage of slight differences in the games story to modify the locales for a while, but they are not too different from their normal. The only location that doesn’t get back to pre-upheaval state is Death Mountain and the reasons the game provides make sense.

The Depths are the most visually interesting, if only because the amount of light around there can change your perception of things. There were a number of times that I would see minor amounts of light hit an object in the distance, only to get close and discover it was more gloom or the top of a tree. As you start to fill in the Depths with light, the design does start to come through, but the entire region shines, pardon the pun, in an absence of light. The Depths have a real sense of unease about them, more so when you are in the dark, as you don’t know what is around, where the ground is or any enemies lurking nearby. This sense of unease makes the Depths feel all the more special and that is saying something. I do question the entire second set of hidden shrines around the world, at this point the land of Hyrule must have the consistency of Swiss cheese and at no point in digging up the first set of shrines, which are completely removed in this game, did no one spot the other ancient civilizations buildings lurking nearby?

The Depths also get a boost in their creep factor thanks to the games use of sound, especially the music. Don’t get me wrong music does play a great factor in the land about the Depths and the Sky, but below the surface is where it really stands out. There are times when the music would fade out and I would be more concerned with what was going on, only for it to kick back in and some dangerous foe to appear. On the surface the music had a lot of melodies from the first game and while it was nice to hear them again, there were the few occasional new pieces. The sky was mostly devoid of music, unless you dived towards the surface, then you got to hear something epic. The other part of the audio for the game is the voice work, except its no where near as large as I was expecting. There are a lot more voices this time around and they do all sound amazing, but sometimes the game will go to a spoken cutscene for one sentence and then its back to text boxes and noises.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is not quite the game I was expecting, but I have been enjoying my time in the game. While the recycling of the main landmass from the previous game is a letdown, the Depths do add more to the game and exploring that feels like something truly new. While I wanted to love my time in the clouds, the sheer lack of major things to do there or any real sense of where they came from made it hard to enjoy. The inclusion of the building mechanic is great, if only because it gives players an outlet for when saving the world is too boring. The other new abilities are fine, they do have their moments and forcing myself to remember to use them is something I had to keep doing. Story wise its mostly the same thing, Link helps people to help Zelda, but there is enough of a more impactful story that it adds both a sense of dread and delight. If you were someone that enjoyed Breath of the Wild, this will likely be a game you enjoy just as much, however if you were not a fan of the gameplay that the first game ushered in, this may not do enough to change your mind. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is an incredible experience, and while there were times that I experienced a fair amount of déjà vu, when it offered up new moments of joy, it was utterly delightful.