The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom review — a new kind of magic

Nintendo seldom creates direct sequels for The Legend of Zelda series. In the nearly 40 years since the first game, the Japanese video game giant has tended to wipe the slate clean with each entry, offering a different era in the kingdom of Hyrule’s history, a new version of its impish hero, Link.

In 2017, Breath of the Wild became the franchise’s biggest hit, a revolutionary open-world take on the series that was best known for its challenging dungeons. Lauded by critics and players for a world teeming with life and interactive possibility, the game went on to sell over 30mn copies. What could Nintendo do but make a direct sequel?

The opening moments of Tears of the Kingdom pick up where its predecessor left off, with Link and Princess Zelda exploring the underground halls of Hyrule castle now freed from the dominion of longtime villain, Calamity Ganon. This brief prologue out of the way, the action jumps to a sun-kissed island that floats high in the clouds. It quickly becomes clear that Nintendo has taken the bedrock that made Breath of the Wild such a tactile pleasure and increased the ways in which players can interact with its wanderlust-inspiring environs.

Link has a new set of powers thanks to an augmented arm (he has, in essence, become a cyborg), the most powerful of which is Ultrahand. With this ability, you’re able to fuse inanimate objects together to construct strange gizmos and wonky vehicles — a catapult, for example, a go-kart, or perhaps even a mech robot. The controls for the construction system are sometimes fiddly, but the freedom it offers is genuinely intoxicating. You’ll need everything at your disposal to solve the game’s head-scratching puzzles and navigate its vast world, one that now also encompasses the sky above and cavernous depths below.

It’s as if the fantasy realm of Hyrule has been transformed into a vast Lego-like playground, one that evokes the sandbox design of Minecraft and Fortnite but whose execution — at once silly, wondrous and unerringly robust — is pure Nintendo.

This shift in focus naturally causes a change in mood. If Breath of the Wild was rooted in the pastoral, Romantic tradition, one where a lone warrior wanders a mythic, untamed landscape, then Tears of the Kingdom is partly a game about the taming of such a place. Mining is a vital part of obtaining the resources you need for many of your contraptions, a process that occasionally veers into the kind of repetitive gameplay that Breath of the Wild so neatly sidestepped. Indeed, in its grindiest moments, Hyrule can almost feel as if it’s been stripped of some of its mystery, the land and its resources beginning to look like a stockpile waiting to be transformed into something useful.

Yet Tears of the Kingdom summons a different kind of joy to that found in Breath of the Wild. It tickles the part of the brain that enjoys tinkering and experimentation, of seeing machinery come to life through human input.

What’s more surprising than these pliable building mechanics is the way Nintendo has leaned into science fiction. This is also a game of lasers, rockets and robots, all of which feel consistent with the larger fiction Nintendo has spent decades crafting. Tears of the Kingdom may be a less earthy adventure than Breath of the Wild, but it is an undeniably worthy sequel. This time around, the magic stems as much from the player as the world itself.

★★★★☆

Available now for Nintendo Switch