The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom takes place in the same Hyrule as its predecessor, breath of the wild. It’s true that the map has been greatly altered by the events of Upheaval: Zonai ruins have fallen from the sky, islands of sky hover above them, and rifts have opened up into an inky underworld. But everything is still where it was: Hyrule Castle, the rugged, leaning towers of Dueling Peaks, the scorching hot deserts of the Gerudo Desert. It’s obviously the same place. For a full-fledged sequel that took Nintendo six years to create, this level of content recycling is unusual, to say the least.
Beforehand Tears of the KingdomSome fans wondered if the sequel would feel more like a glorified expansion. Since the release of the game, however, this topic has hardly been addressed. Even the anticipated spate of comparison shots or laundry lists of what has and hasn’t changed hasn’t really materialized (although players have noted that Zelda changed the setup after entering Link’s Pad). Carried away by the dizzying possibilities Tears of the KingdomWhether it’s the new toolkit or the surprise and mystery of its new quests, players don’t seem to notice or mind that they’re literally treading new ground.
At first I felt the same way. Maybe it had something to do with the opening of the game, high in the sky on Great Sky Island. The unbound, windblown novelty of this sublime location, topped with a sensational skydive into the more familiar world of Hyrule below, set the tone and made everything that followed feel fresh as a breeze. Perhaps it was the liberating joy of being back in the hands of master designers, with the confidence to give players the freedom to explore their world, and the craftsmanship to direct their gaze to all the exciting things that are there to do.
Anyhow, I hungrily began to devour the game’s mysteries and distractions, marveling at the sense of discovery it could inspire without even considering how doubly difficult it must have been to somehow convey a different feel to such a well-trodden landscape to lend. It was familiar, yet new, and I didn’t think twice about it until I happened upon the Great Plateau.
That was different. The Great Plateau is breath of the wild“Great Sky Island” – A safe, sunny, enclosed area, elevated above the fray, where players can learn the game’s systems and Link’s core skills in relative tranquility. It’s imprinted on my brain more than any other part of Hyrule; It’s formative in the truest sense of the word, as it’s where I learned to cook, paraglide, fight and how Link would interact with the world around him in-game. I can picture the geography of this pocket world clearly in my mind’s eye. Experiencing it in a completely different context was harrowing – even emotional.
In Tears of the Kingdom, the plateau feels wild and forbidding. There are now some mid to high level monsters here, and Link is being pursued by the Yiga Clan’s masked assassins. Maybe I came a bit early, but I had to be careful and prepare while exploring. The ruins, once picturesque, now look somehow raw and jagged, and there are ugly patches of gloom around several gaping chasms. It even felt different going up to this newly hostile location than sailing down from there like I did in the first game.
Exploring the Great Plateau is the most exciting adventure I have ever experienced Tears of the Kingdom to this day, and that has a lot to do with my memories of the area breath of the wild. Arriving at a place I knew so well and finding it turned upside down, approaching it from a new vantage point and seeing it from a new perspective, reorienting myself with a mixture of familiarity and uncertainty in the space – it was like going back to a childhood haunting. Everything was the same but different, familiar but incredibly strange. It was a powerful feeling, even stronger than the wonder of exploring something completely new.
There’s only one other gamescape that’s made me feel this way, and this is it World of WarcraftThis is Azeroth. Similar to Hyrule, Azeroth was turned on its head in the 2010s catastrophe Expansion – but other, more subtle changes over the years have had a similar effect on me. I’m sure long-time players of other massively multiplayer games will recognize this feeling. If, over time, you live with a Scope, stay there long enough for it to become deeply embedded in memories of one’s life, and then come back to find it’s still there, but has moved on without one – that’s what makes the virtual special to me, worlds to places that psychologically might as well be real.
Coming down from the Great Plateau to continue my exploration of the rest of Hyrule, I felt I understood why Nintendo decided to stick with it breath of the wild‘s card. Not because it’s a masterpiece (although it is) or because it would have been too much work (it must have been just as difficult to make any sense of it), but because bringing it back really adds more value to the game than anything completely new the world could have done. It brings history; it brings resonance; it brings meaning. It has rightly been said that Hyrule herself was the real star of breath of the wild. What would the sequel be without its star?