beard ひげ @beardalaxy@gameliberty.club

Well, there it is, my extreme dissection of Tears of the Kingdom. If you actually read the whole thing you must be insane. It's one thing to have enough passion to write something out this long, but it's another thing to be passionate for someone else's passion, enough to read about it. So thanks, I guess.

Tears of the Kingdom is an amazing game, with the only real thing weighing it down being the messy story. While many things come together as being more than the sum of their parts, I wouldn't say the same is true for this game. It's parts feel a little disconnected, but some of them are so good you tend to forget about the others. It's also so long and so dense with content that it works to its detriment. I wouldn't wish a 100% playthrough of this game on my worst enemy. By the time I got halfway done I was struggling, treating the game more like a task meant to be finished than a game meant to be enjoyed. I was in somewhat of an abusive relationship with it, and at a certain point I just had to finish it and set it aside so I could focus on other things. This review is like a final goodbye to the game, as I'm sure I won't be playing it again any time soon, if ever. It really wore me down, and even when I was playing the game for 8-10 hours a day and it was all I could think about, I would need to take breaks every couple of days because it was just so full of stuff that was pulling me in every direction.

If you have the chance to play the game, or are wondering if you should pick it up, I would say that it is worth playing. Maybe not at the $70 price point, but if you can get a used copy for cheaper or something then go for it. Just please do not try and do everything the game has to offer and control yourself a little bit. The more I played the game, the less I enjoyed it, and that's really unfortunate because Breath of the Wild stayed pretty fun for me the entire way through.

Tears of the Kingdom is a flawed game, but it's the best flawed game I've ever played.

How does this game run on the Switch? Really, how? Okay, it barely does. The frame rate can drop pretty significantly and there is a dynamic resolution system in place. Thankfully, I have the ability to overclock my Switch which made the game run at 30 FPS in pretty much all circumstances, but I do feel bad for those that weren't able to play the game like this. Ultrahand often tanks the game's frame rate and it's very jarring. Still, the consistency of gameplay without any major bugs or huge input delay problems is proof of Nintendo's passion for creating polished games, and the fact that this thing can fit on a 16 GB game cartridge is a technical achievement. There seriously must be some technomancy going on here. The game has no stuttering issues either, which is nice to see in 2023. You'd expect some when going from the Sky to the Surface, of the Surface to the Depths, but it is all so cohesive and I'm sure Nintendo spent a lot of time refining this. Unfortunately there are still some issues, like sub 1080p resolution and a really poor sense of object permanence, and those things can indeed detract from the experience at some points. It would have been awesome to see this game on a better console, and I'm hoping that we do eventually get that on whatever Nintendo's next console is.

I'm just going to say it, the menus are clunky. Even after 100 hours I was still not quite used to it, and could think of so many ways it could be changed for the better. Something as simple as looping selection doesn't even exist here, where if you push down at the end of a list it would go back to the top of the list. Nope, not in Tears of the Kingdom. You have to scroll all the way back to the first item. I was expecting this to be patched relatively quickly, but I guess not enough people complained about it because you still cannot do that. There are some other baffling design decisions as well that definitely seem stuck in the past, which a friend referred to as being "very Japanese." I'd love to be able to see quest objectives on the quest screen instead of needing to check how many of an item I have in the inventory. I'd love to be told what items I need to upgrade each piece of armor and how many I already have right in the armor's description. The item throwing system is super clunky. The weapon/shield/bow quick selection should have been a radial menu just like the ability selection menu is. So many little things that could cut down on so much time.

I'm a little impartial on the audio design. It isn't particularly memorable like themes from classic Zelda games for anything beyond the main theme, and if the music does get stuck in your head it is usually because it is a new version of an older song, like the Rito Village music being just like Dragon Roost Island's. There is a lot of remixed music from Breath of the Wild here, and I'm glad they didn't copy it over wholesale. There's a good use of refrain as well, but maybe not to the extent that Breath of the Wild had. There isn't much to say about the audio in general, it's not offensive in the slightest but it's also not something I'll really internalize and remember for the rest of my life. Compared to Ocarina of Time, Wind Waker, Twilight Princess... it just doesn't compare.

The voice acting is, once again, a little in the uncanny valley territory. It doesn't help that the main story is only somewhat voice acted. You'll be in a cutscene with VA one moment and then you'll be talking to that same character with just the basic "Oh!" kind of voice lines the next. It must be something to do with the voice acting direction, or the animation, or something, because all of the voices sound fine on paper but in practice they come off as a little bit strange. I didn't like the voice acting much in Breath of the Wild either, and Tears continues that trend.