Six Years of Breath of the Wild; or, Why Tears of the Kingdom is My 2023 Game of the Year
I can’t write about my feelings on the two modern Zelda games without splitting it into two parts; how I actually feel about Tears of the Kingdom, and how it took me 5 years to beat Breath of the Wild. The latter almost certainly colors my opinion on the former, but also just kind of explains me as a person. I’ve always been a communal gamer. Obviously that means I enjoy multiplayer games (to the point where I played League of Legends for much longer than I actually enjoyed doing so because my friends played it together), but it also means playing single player games when other people are around.
It started young. In high school, two friends and I would bring our Xboxes and TVs to one place and each play our own Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind saves in the same living room. When Mass Effect 3 came out, my two college roommates and I had a similar set-up. These days it’s why I stream on Twitch, or to friends in our Discord server. It’s also a common way I’ve spent time with people I’ve dated.
I loved Breath of the Wild. It’s as good as every critic you and I respect say it was. I was lucky enough to play the game side-by-side with my partner at the time. We both loved it. We’d watch each other play, celebrating when one of us found something the other hadn’t seen yet. When we split, we also split Breath of the Wild. I left her with the Wii U we had been playing together on; in exchange, she bought me a copy of the game for the Switch.
I struggle divorcing things from the experiences I’ve had with them. Faced with the task of replaying all of Breath of the Wild alone, without the relationship we had built it into, I fell off, just short of finishing the game.
I jumped back in leading up to the release of Tears of the Kingdom. I finished Breath of the Wild right under the gun, beating Ganon the weekend before the release of the sequel. It was such a relief, finally being able to put to bed a game I had attached an incredible amount of baggage to. To my delight, I was about to start a game that felt as strongly about communal experiences as I did.
One of the great things Breath of the Wild did was make an open world that felt lived-in. Every aspect of the map felt intentional, with well-placed puzzles or secrets, and other characters who felt like they were truly living and traveling in the space. To me, this is the thing Tears of the Kingdom improves on the most: saving Tears of the Kingdom’s Hyrule is a communal experience.
After your extended tutorial area, Link finds himself in Lookout Landing, your headquarters for the game. Lookout Landing houses a growing population of folks from all over Hyrule, all working together to rebuild. The rest of the game follows the tone, with each major village struggling from its own unique issues. In Breath of the Wild, I often felt like Link was a catalyst, cleaning up the mess caused by the Divine Beasts that simply could not be resolved until he arrived. In Tears of the Kingdom, it feels like Link is arriving in the middle of events, a helping hand rather than a deus ex machina. In this way, Hyrule feels like it exists. Obviously Link is still the Hero, but he is working with people who are On Top Of It.
The fact that Link is never doing his work alone reinforces this feeling; you’re alway solving a dungeon along-side someone who has been figuring things out before Link ever arrived. While the player can technically stumble into the game’s final fight on their own, Link cannot. Characters from Lookout Landing and each of the four major villages are providing the important information that Link needs to figure out exactly what, how, and when things are happening. As you help the four Villages, they send an advisor to Lookout Landing. They each bring their Xboxes and TVs to Hyrule’s living room, to share what they’ve learned and celebrate when each other finds a secret.
Breath of the Wild is lived in; Tears of the Kingdom has Community.
I love this game.
WRITER’S NOTE: Isaias wanted me to add the word “thematic” to this piece somewhere but I couldn’t find a place to squeeze it in. So I’m cheating.