The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom review

The Japanese open-world bible

*Image taken from the Nintendo Switch website. No copyright infringement intended.

April 11, 2025

Categorization: Major in Fantasy, minor in Science Fiction

Where played: Nintendo Switch

Non-spoiler review.

If you haven’t played this game, then do yourself a favor and just go get it. Just… stop reading this right now and pick up The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. It is such an incredible open world experience that you and your kids can play for months (I think I averaged about five months per game, and those five months were chock-filled with real stuff to do, not the usual game filler or padding, which makes the cost per use very inexpensive).

I only have one regret about this game, which is that I wish it had come out when I was a kid. Because as much as I enjoyed it in my thirties, I can just imagine how much my joy would have been multiplied being an 8 or 9 year old exploring Hyrule and having a child's patience and ingenuity to build all kinds of things in order to properly unravel all the world’s secrets and beat all of its monsters.

So the story is simple, right? You are Link and you have to pick up weapons and shields and cook things and solve puzzles all over the world to unravel the mystery around Zelda. It’s a lovely story with plenty of cool plots enough to keep any lore-hungry adventurer going but the main strength of this game is all the secrets that this world has to offer, from the giant gloomy castle to the shrines, to the islands in the middle of nowhere containing monsters you are just not ready for, to giant glowy frogs and dragons and crazy tinkers, this Hayao Miyazaki style-adventure is a Fantasy-adventure lover's delight. You will be heading over to the next town but then see a cave and you will just need to know what is in that frickin' cave, and then you will trod over and possible get beaten up by some goblins or a Cyclops but it’ll be worth it! Because the sense of discovery is just so fulfilling.

And one thing I really appreciate, that I often find condescending about modern games, is that both Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom are not easy games. They will give you some basic training in the game's logic at the start, but a lot of things you will have to figure out by yourself, and the game means to challenge you at every turn. I died several times in Tears of the Kingdom’s training area, for example, because I could not figure out how to climb a mountain without freezing to death. And I remember that I spent more than a week stuck desperately trying to defeat a flying dragon-type creature, by pelting it with all kinds of random gimcracks in my knapsack and shooting it full of arrows. My brother also just admitted to me a couple months ago that he failed to finish Breath of the Wild as he could not figure out how to get past one of the main dungeon areas. I am ashamed of him but satisfied with how this reinforces my point.

The Legend of Zelda BOTW and TOTK also make all of these moments of difficulty absolutely worth it. You know how video game reviewers have a sort of criterion, on whether or not a game "rewards exploration"? Well, both BOTW and TOTK wrote the book on how to do that. Very few games can compare with BOTW and TOTK's ability to make exploring so enjoyable and adventuresome. The world (the highs and lows and mountains and rivers and gorgeous ruins and castles and temples) and the whimsical characters are just so darn randomly charming that every new area unlocked, and every forest with talking plants and fairy creatures, produces a sense of immersive awe. I wanted to keep on playing these games and explore these worlds forever. I did all of the quests and collected every resource available and dragged it on and on until I realized, alas, that the caves were starting to have the same type of resources, and the enemies were starting to all look the same (this was after five months and more than a hundred fifty hours of relentless exploring, mind you, so don’t take this as any kind of negative feedback on the game). And it was only then that I proceeded to end the main quest, finally and decisively, in a grown-up decision (proud of myself) to let all good things run their course and move on with my life.

What’s next for this franchise? I haven’t felt the need to play the other Zelda remasters that have come out, as I am worried that they will just make me yearn to be back in BOTW and TOTK once more, and then I wouldn’t be doing justice to what I am sure is a very good standalone game in itself.

But to Nintendo, please, more of this open-world Miyazaki Fantasy-type games. This is a special and unique competence that only Japanese video game developers have brought and can bring to the world in all its excellence. And as one of the biggest Japanese gaming companies and having done it already twice, only Nintendo can make something of so epic a scale as BOTW and TOTK . So PLEASE, please keep this Zelda formula in your list of forever projects. You are the only one who can give this gift to the world, and trust me, it will always have a place in the gaming landscape.