Well, the results are in. Tears of the Kingdom is just Breath of the Wild again. Oh sure, the characters are more developed, the narrative more nuanced, the powers Link has at his disposal even more inventive and far more open to creativity than before. But the general consensus is that Breath of the Wild is the best game of all time, and Tears of the Kingdom is better. It's no bad thing to build on Breath of the Wild, especially when you can do it so successfully. Yet it confirms that The Legend of Zelda as an entity has changed, and that leaves a mighty void behind.
Sequels are rare in Zelda land. There are various complex timelines to the series (including a secret one few people know about), but as far as casual observation goes, each game has usually been a retelling of the same tale. The same characters, the same events, the same goals, reinterpreted in fresh ways with new abilities, new dungeons, new art styles. Breath of the Wild was that, to an extent, but in its scope and approach to challenging open world tropes, it transformed what a Zelda game could be. With Tears of the Kingdom, we're not only looking at what a Zelda game could be, but what a Zelda game is.
We don't know what will happen beyond Tears of the Kingdom. Maybe we'll get a threequel, or another reboot will be in the offing that does something completely different. But we know that it can't go back, not after this. Zelda fundamentally means something else now, and as special and as cherished as some of those earlier games are, it can't go back to it. So what does that mean for the Zelda-like?
A lot of indie games have been borrowing old habits from Zelda's dungeon crawling puzzles, or its pre-BOTW approach to towns and the call to adventure. Tunic is probably the most 'oh, so just Zelda, yeah?' of them all. There's a steady stream of these games on the indie scene, and with good reason. The old Zelda games were fun, but simple, and could be easily replicated while leaving a lot of room for devs to imprint their own ideas onto them.
The problem is these games all blur into one after a while. There's a sparkle to Zelda, the older games had a far larger budget and more legendary names attached than modern indie copycats, and so while Green Elf Boy In Dungeon 2 might scratch an itch, you're always very aware that you're watching someone do an impression of Zelda. It's like seeing a tribute act. They might be good, but Elvis is dead.
But if Zelda is really moving on to challenge regularly at the apex of the open world genre, as you'd expect it would after the reception of Breath of the Wild and Tears for the Kingdom, will the Zelda-like genre fade away? Will it stay as it is right now? I have a third option - maybe it could rise again?
It's a bad habit of gamers and press alike to say 'You know this thing the indie scene does? I want a triple-A dev to take six years doing the same thing for 25 times the budget'. However, a lot of these Zelda-likes are clearly too thin to ever be great, as a consequence of the way they're developed. All games are a miracle, et cetera, but Zelda-likes have proven to be one of the easier genres to adapt into a workable framework because of the existing foundation and the fact you can learn from everyone else's mistakes. If someone, not necessarily your big Rockstar-level devs, but someone backed by Devolver or Annapurna with a little bit of extra funding and guidance could grow the Zelda-like, there's now a huge void for it to grow into.
Breath of the Wild did not modernise or improve the Zelda formula, it completely upended it. In turn, that leaves a gap in the catalogue for someone to modernise and improve. It doesn't need to shake the foundations like Breath of the Wild, it just needs to have not been made for the money found down the sofa then flipped on Steam for $0.99.