During the holiday season, we’re republishing select articles from Nintendo Life writers and contributors as part of our Best of 2023 series. Enjoy!
Soapbox features allow our individual writers and contributors to voice their opinions on hot topics and random things they’ve been chewing on. TodayKate examines how Nintendo learned the economic lessons of past Zelda games in Tears of the Kingdom…
Just like me, Hyrule has always been bad with money. Not surprisingly. In an economy where you can find cold, hard cash in rocks, trees, bushes, pots, Grassand even sometimes just lying on the floor, you don’t need to be a financial expert to know that you will experience inflation at some point.
In most games, money is used for things that make the game better, like upgrades, new weapons, and new skills, but in the Zelda games, these things are god-sent. Why buy new weapons when you have a Master Sword? Why acquire new skills when dungeons provide everything you need? Why buy an upgrade when you can just wander into a cave and find a Great Fairy to do it for free?
And so, the problem of money is complex: you end up with a lot of it and very little to spend it on, which makes the poor rupee feel undervalued and useless. So why rupees anyway?
The problem is that games are all about dopamine. We play games like mice in a maze, running towards a delicious cheese reward. We are reward-oriented beings, and that means we must have something to encourage us to explore, discover and excitedly open chests in the hope of finding something new, which in turn means designers have to come up with something to put in those non-game-breaking chests. So, rupees – something that is not even a prize in itself, but a promise be able to get a bigger reward in the future through the exchange of money for goods.
Therein lies the problem: rupees are not rewards in themselves; must be worth something, they have to be placed on a purchase to have any value to the player. When Zelda games struggle to offer exciting purchases, the rupees in the chest might as well be a piece of paper that says, “You did it, here’s a gold star!”
Past Zelda games have tried to replicate the rupee economy to make it a little more exciting, but all have failed:
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Ocarina of Time has multiple wallet sizes, each with a limited capacity, but this seems like a limitation for limitation’s sake; if Link can carry bombs, shields, three tunic changes, multiple pairs of shoes, and a whole chicken in his pockets, why not a little more money?
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Majora’s Mask voids your rupees at the start of each cycle, making them more valuable, but then also introduces a bank that is somehow immune to causality that can hold the rupees through cycles, completely defeating the purpose of voiding.
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Wind Waker makes you pay Tingle for plot items, and later introduces Magic Armor, which spends rupees instead of hearts for damage – but this only reinforces the uselessness of rupees, especially in the late game
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Phantom Hourglass introduced by Rupoor, which takes away rupees from your wallet, but you can easily earn that money from a single treasure draw
You got it. Opening a rupee chest in a Zelda game has started to feel like some kind of cosmic joke being played on you, like a stocking Christmas present (again). Slowly though, over the last few Zelda games, things have started to change.
Skyward Sword introduced Treasure – not the first time they appeared in games, of course, but the first time they existed free of the economy. You could sell them, but they were primarily used to upgrade weapons and items, like the crafting system. Suddenly a treasure chest was a more enticing proposition because it might contain a rare treasure instead of a stash of coins.
In Breath of the Wild, this expanded further from treasure to materials. Again, you can sell them, or you can cook with them, craft with them, upgrade armor with them, or create elixirs that boost stats and boost survivability. Even the item descriptions guided you towards good use of these resources: “You could sell this to the trade,” the dragonclaw’s description says, “but it must have some other purpose.”
Weapon degradation gave the designers something to put into the insane number of chests scattered across Hyrule – the cheese in the open world maze
But the big change to Breath of the Wild’s treasure system was controversial. Weapons would now break after only a few uses, despite being something that swords and shields are especially designed not to work. The weapon degradation system came from a well-intentioned design, which hoped that players would be more willing to experiment, mix things up, and not be too precious about their sword; it also gave the designers something to put in the crazy number of chests scattered around Hyrule – the cheese in the open world maze.
But players didn’t like the weapon degradation system in BOTW, did they? It felt edgy, unfair, and irritating, especially when you had to switch weapons in the middle of a tense boss fight. Besides, shouldn’t the Master Sword be a bit more powerful and longer lasting than a dish sponge? Hasn’t it already survived through hundreds of years of Zelda lore? Why is anything more annoyed than a pointed stick that needs a nap? Of course, the treasure chests in Hyrule had a new purpose, but only thanks to a system similar to someone snapping all your pencils.
Enter Tears of the Kingdom, with its narrative rationale for weapon degradation (bad magic made the weapon rotten!) and its fuse system (stick a chicken drumstick on a spear to make a +5 spear spear!). Basically, they haven’t changed the number of items in the game that much – you can still get Bokoblin Fangs, Rusty Halberds and Dragon Scales – but suddenly, the combinatorial possibilities turn weapon degradation and treasure hunting into a whole new ballgame.
All is now a treasure worth having, limited only by your imagination. Do you like to stay away from enemies? Combine one crap spear with another crap spear to make a DOUBLE SINGLE SPEAR, which is twice as long! Are you going to fight Lynel and aim not to die a billion times? Combine your extremely durable wooden staff with one of your rarest materials – a black Bokoblin horn, perhaps, or a diamond – to make something that can take chunks out of that Lynel’s health bar in one fell swoop. Each individual treasure chest is either an exciting unknown or a true gift, something you can actually use right away instead of putting it in a money pot for some as-yet-undecided purpose.
shouldn’t the Master Sword be a bit more powerful and long lasting than a dish sponge?
Rupees still exist in TOTK’s Hyrule, of course, and can still – rarely – be found under rocks and in containers, mostly just as a fun throwback to the old days, but thanks to the ubiquity and variety of degraded weapons and loot to fuse, Rupees no longer they have to carry the weight of the player’s dopamine production. They are obtained instead as quest rewards, or just by selling items to merchants very occasionally as treasure chest rewards (or as poor Blupee’s bloodline). You know, like real money. It’s almost as if the rupee has been allowed to retire comfortably after carrying the treasure economy of Hyrule on its glittering back for decades; allowed to sink back into the currency economy which makes sense.
Listen, I know many of you are probably still fuming (heh) about weapon degradation still existing in Tears of the Kingdom. I get it – it’s still a bit irritating, a bit irritating and a bit unfair. But the trade-off is that every single cave, every chest, every Bokoblin camp is exciting again. The money is also more valuable, as it should be, because there are more prizes to compete for.
You see, dopamine isn’t really about rewards. It’s not about the cheese at the end of the maze. Dopamine is what makes you go after those rewards – which means it’s really about expectations. You’re much more likely to be excited about finding the chest and opening it than you are about what’s inside. That’s the exciting part. When you know the chest is likely to contain the same reward as the last ten chests, that thrill is less, as is the dopamine hit.
But in Tears of the Kingdom, with its hundreds of items, weapons, clothes, shields, bows, arrows, and so on and so forth, every chest is an unknown, so even when you have the thing that was in the chest, there’s still an unknown from what works when merged with other objects.
The joy is in ignorance, and Tears of the Kingdom is the most unknown Zelda game ever. I hope I never know everything. I hope that there is always some more cheese hidden somewhere in that labyrinth.
