At the end of 2022, I started a replay of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, my first full replay since devouring the game on Wii U back in 2017. This run was fairly thorough. I did all the Divine Beasts again, sought out some secrets, like the King of the Mountain, that I hadn’t seen in my first playthrough, and generally played the hell out of it. Now, Tears of the Kingdom is here and I’m wishing I hadn’t.
On the one hand, Tears of the Kingdom rewards in-depth knowledge of Breath of the Wild. Anytime you visit a recognizable location, there’s an a-ha moment as you get to see how it has changed in the time since the first game. Tarrey Town now has an elevated train — cool!
And, it rewards specific knowledge, too. Earlier this week, I saw a tweet with screenshots of an NPC, Shamae, in both Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, first as a young child, then a few years older. In the first screen, she says, "Good kids can see it! They can see the kingdom floating in the sky." In the second, vindicated by the geographical changes wrought by the Upheaval, she says, "I always knew there was a kingdom in the sky, and I've always dreamed of going up there to play with the sky animals!" It's a small detail, and one that I never would have noticed, but it's there if you know the original game inside and out.
Tears of the Kingdom’s verbs are also distinct enough that when you’re actively engaging with the new mechanics, it feels like a very different game. Breath of the Wild didn't let you make a speeder bike and fly around Hyrule, or mine ore in a creepy underworld, or swim through the ceiling. In many specifics, the games are extremely different.
But a lot of the time you’re just running around Hyrule, pressing all the same buttons you used for 100 hours in Breath of the Wild. In those moments, it feels exactly like Breath of the Wild. That isn’t a bad thing. Breath of the Wild is a great game and Tears of the Kingdom builds on it wonderfully. But it has me wishing that the memory of Breath of the Wild wasn’t so fresh in my mind.
It was always going to be a tough needle for Tears of the Kingdom to thread. Breath of the Wild offered the shock of something new after decades following a similar structure. For a series that had become too closely bound to Ocarina of Time and A Link to the Past's formula, it was a radical reimagining. That meant that when you ran out of the Shrine of Resurrection for the first time, you were experiencing something that felt completely different than what Zelda had been before.
It was amazing, but how do you recapture that feeling again when the surprise is gone? You ever watch a comedy a second time and find that none of it makes you laugh because you know all the punchlines? So much of the Breath of the Wild experience was defined by witnessing the unexpected, that there was no way Tears of the Kingdom, an iterative sequel, could shock in the same way. It's fortunate then that the Zelda team is still operating at the height of its craft. I may not feel blindsided by the experience, but surprise being gone is an invitation to appreciate a work on a deeper level.