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May 12 came out The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, a video game developed and published by Nintendo for the Switch console. It is the last chapter of the saga The Legend of Zeldaone of the most important intellectual properties for Nintendo and in general one of the most loved and influential series in the history of video games: for this reason the game was highly anticipated and once released it did not disappoint, receiving applause almost unanimous from the critics.
Tears of the Kingdom is an open world adventure game: the player can move freely in the game world and choose what to do and when to do it. There are islands in the sky to reach, caves to explore, and monsters to defeat, all of which have always been a part of the Zelda games, and indeed the series helped set the standard. Tears of the Kingdom is the sequel to Breath of the Wildthe previous chapter of the series also published on Switch, with which it shares the graphic style and the game world.
Its production had started in 2017 as an additional content of the same Breath of the Wild (in the world of videogames the expansions of already published games are called DLC, which stands for downloadable content), but given the large amount of new elements that the development team was working on, Nintendo decided to transform it into a complete game, in order to be able to exploit all the ideas they had.
The episodes of the series are usually disconnected from each other, even though they are set in the same universe, called Hyrule, and even though they share different elements, such as some populations, characters or legends. In video games you play a hero called Link, who usually has to help Princess Zelda defeat the threat posed by Ganon, the recurring antagonist who would like to destroy the world to shape one of him. Tears of the Kingdom is no exception and in fact repeats the same scheme: in the initial moments of the adventure, Princess Zelda discovers that Ganon is once again threatening Hyrule and asks Link to help her defeat him. Ideally each of these characters represents a part of a relic called the “Triforce” (respectively they are courage, wisdom and power), which once reunited allows any wish to be realized. Its research and its use are the narrative cue of most of the games in the series. This chapter, like the previous one, was developed under the guidance of Hidemaro Fujibayashi and Eiji Aonuma, who is the person within Nintendo who manages the entire series.
«Tears of the Kingdom it’s what happens when a development team takes six years to create a sequel, and when a triple-A project budget is invested almost entirely in the gameplay “wrote Fabio Bortolotti in the his review of the game on IGN Italia, which focuses on some choices made by the development team which later proved to be successful. Nintendo Switch came out over 6 years ago, and it’s a console that has now reached the final part of its life cycle. Therefore, considering the limitations imposed by the console hardware, the development team decided to focus its efforts almost exclusively on the gameplay (a term that defines both how to play and the experience itself that the player has with the video game) , in order to make the user experience as defined and enjoyable as possible. In doing so, however, he gave up on improving the game from a graphic point of view, and that’s why Tears of the Kingdom is essentially identical, from a visual point of view, to Breath of the Wild.
The gimmick that made it Tears of the Kingdom special is the possibility given to the protagonist to be able to combine almost all the game elements together, thus allowing him to create bizarre machinery or improbable constructions that allow him to face the challenges proposed by the game in a creative and different way for each player. The review of Guardian he defines this sense of freedom as “intoxicating”: «the realm of Hyrule is vast and full of possibilities, and being able to move between heaven and earth is a feeling that never ceases to excite. But Tears of the Kingdom it also offers a level of freedom hitherto unimaginable, even when thinking about how to approach the challenges proposed by the game. Link’s magical arm allows him to pick up, move and combine just about anything in the game. He attaches a glittering seed to the shield and it will dazzle enemies who try to attack you, combine a monster’s eye with an arrow and it will follow the enemies.’
One of the most discussed elements of Breath of the Wild it was the durability of the weapons: after a certain number of uses, in fact, they broke and became effectively useless. Aonuma and the development team thus decided to include the new object construction mechanics also to overcome, in an elegant way and without disavowing the previous game, what had in fact been one of the very few criticisms received. “I loved every single minute spent on it Tears of the Kingdom», writes Chris Carter su Destructoid, «but what really convinced me, what separates this game from its predecessor, is its set of powers. It felt like I was always in control, that I could create my own path.”
While the series is one of the longest-running and most successful in video game history, a new game hasn’t been so eagerly awaited for a while. The first Zelda chapter was released in 1986 for the NES, Nintendo’s first home console. It was developed by Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Super Mario, and Takashi Tezuka, who formalized it with the first The Legend of Zelda a new way of conceiving adventure games. The series has always been considered influential because over the years it has helped to create standards which have then been incorporated and reworked by the entire industry. Elements that we take for granted today such as the open world setting (an interconnected game environment not divided into levels but into areas that are more or less accessible based on certain conditions), exploration, environmental puzzles and even “dungeons” (special areas full of monsters, challenges and rewards) owe a lot, if not everything, to Zelda. Together with Super Mario, it was the series that most of all contributed in the eighties and nineties to impose Nintendo on the market and in the collective imagination, and just after Super Mario it is still the most important intellectual property for Nintendo.
If each Zelda, in its own way, has helped add elements to the adventure game genre, it was Ocarina of Time, released in 1998 for Nintendo 64, to make a big progress for the series and the entire industry. In fact, for the first time an adventure of this kind was entirely built in a three-dimensional environment (the previous ones were all in two dimensions), codifying a game system that would later become a standard. Even today the importance of Ocarina of Time is recognized by gamers, enthusiasts and developers: Dan Houser, one of the founders of Rockstar Games (the developer of Grand Theft Auto), he said in an interview al New York Times that if someone develops a game in 3D and says they are not taking a cue or inspiration from Ocarina of Time o super mario 64 (the first three-dimensional Mario game) is basically lying.
After Ocarina of Time, while many of the games that followed are still considered excellent, the series was less influential, and merely interpreted its genre rather than changing it as in the past. At least until the release of Breath of the Wild, which reinterpreted the key elements of the series (dungeons to discover, skills to acquire and exploration) in a context of total freedom, effectively returning to the spirit of the first Zelda games of the late 1980s. In Breath of the Wild in fact there is no precise order in which to do things, and if you want you can go and defeat your opponent even immediately, if you are good enough to do it.
In the first three days of marketing Tears of the Kingdom has sold over 10 million copies, becoming the best debut of the series and the second best launch of a Nintendo game in the UK. Part of its success is also due to the ability to intercept one of the most relevant trends in the sector in recent years, namely that of creating games that can become platforms in which players spend time doing activities unrelated to the main plot. For example like when in a game of the series Grand Theft Auto you simply walk around the city without starting any of the specific activities foreseen by the story.
In this sense, the guaranteed gameplay possibilities of the new Zelda are even higher: according to Bortolotti, the tools made available to the game will become «an extension of your thinking, as well as an incredible vehicle of playful freedom. Every time an idea came to me, no matter how bizarre or risky, I managed to make it happen. I have never come up with unfeasible ideas because the grammar is clear and clear and self-evident. The best thing is that every time I found a new element to add to my contraptions, a new world of possibilities opened up for me. In some cases it is even possible to “cheat”, overcoming certain challenges with less effort than necessary or remedying one’s mistakes with Fantozzi’s gimmicks». In the world of video games there are very few series that go on for so long that manage to be relevant to their audience, but there are even fewer that like Zelda manage to have the strength to impose their vision on the rest of the market and the rest of the industry.