I finally beat The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom over the weekend. Took more than one hundred fifty hours of gameplay over the course of two months (with, you know, a three and a half week gap of not playing at all), and I still have tons of quests, Korok seeds, and unexplored areas if I ever want to spend more time in the world before whatever DLC there will be comes out. It feels a little unreal, if I’m being honest, since I wound up doing the last few major portions of the game in a relatively short time. Mostly because I’d accidentally done huge sections of them while wandering around the world in search of shrines or just exploring something that look cool before I got to the part of the game that prompted them. I’ll admit I really struggled to do some of those things when I stumbled across them because it was clear that I wasn’t supposed to be doing them yet (I got the Sage of Spirit as my second sage, because I wanted to see what was inside the permanent thunderstorm and literally just got lucky since my interrupted flight toward said clouds landed me right next to the final shrine of those sky islands), but at least it let me do them when I got there. It was a pretty fun game and I definitely enjoyed it overall, but there was a lot of stuff that just doesn’t really feel like it landed (pun absolutely intended) well.

I will say that none of my gripes about the game involve it falling (I’m on a roll) short of my expectations. I think the only place it fell short of what I thought the game would be is my overall impression of the game. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, stands out in my mind as this moment of inflection. There is my life before the game and my life after it. Not all of that weight can be firmly rested on the shoulders of BotW, though, since a lot happened in my life after it came out, but this was definitely a gaming experienced that changed the way I look at games after I played it the first time. When I started playing Tears of the Kindgom, I expected something that had the same level of quality, enjoyability, and glossy perfection (despite all of the bugs that people have found in the games, it remains and incredibly complex game that had almost no significant issues with said complex systems). After all, they were building off that base. The absolute least they could deliver was something of the same quality.

Which they did. They even managed to improve on it in a lot of places. The graphical quality of the world in TotK is much improved, with almost everything in the game looking more detailed or like it’s in sharper focus (and I’m not even talking about how amazing it looks on the OLED screen of my switch, since I played the majority of it on the same TV that I played BotW on). The music, something that rose and fell as you played BotW, does the same in TotK, but with moments of lare and brightness that shine at unexpected moments. Tears of the Kingdom not only has the subtle, careful introduction of themes and gently stirring music of Breathe of the Wild, but it has new elements to reflect the parts of the game that exist in TotK that did not exist in BotW. They even improved the physics engine, pushing the previously breakable and interactable world of BotW to grow into something that could be even more manipulated to reflect the new powers in TotK. Over all, a significant improvement in several of the more measurable aspects of the game.

My main gripe about the game, though, is also a measureable aspect of the game: the amount of time it took to clear the game. Now, I don’t have any issues with a game that takes a long time to clear, nor do I mind putting a ridiculous number of hours in a game (see the six hundred I put into BotW as reference), but TotK just felt too long. It took me twice as long to clear TotK in my first run of the game as it took me to clear BotW during that first run. This, on it’s own, isn’t really a problem, since there’s now three maps to explore, a ton of new stuff on the original map, and more than double the number of shrine/lightroot things to activate. I love having more stuff to do. What became a problem, though, was that exploring the depts wound up going from being my absolute favorite thing to do, to being my least favorite thing to do. All this despite that fact that the moment you enter the depths for the first time, falling past the gloom-coated walls that almost look like they’re closing in around you until you emerge into a massive underground space as a heavy guitar riff announces the change from the world you knew to one that is entirely foreign, strange, and dangerous, is one of my top ten video game moments of all time.

There just wasn’t enough stuff down there, other than hazards to avoid and even those were just repeats of the same thing after the first couple hours. It went from being this place of unknown wonder to being merely a dangerous area that took a significant amount of time to navigate, thanks to the darkness making it all but impossible to plot your path very far ahead of where you’re standing. When I finally had enough battery power to keep myself flying as I slowly chewed through all the gliders I’d collected from the Zonai Device Gachapon Machines, I stopped actually exploring and just flew to wherever the next lightroot was. Sure, I did side trips for chests marked on my map, boss battles, and some Yiga Clan Hideouts, but I mostly just cruised around until I had all of the lightrooms unlocked so I’d be able to find where all the shrines were on the mainland. It was mechanically nice, that the lightroots lined up with shrines, since it made it easier to find each of them, but it was still so much tedious work to locate and then get to all of the lightroots since there was no way to make the trip easier than I already had. At least on the surface, you can easily glide or teleport around since the wide-open map makes it easy to predict the path you’ll need to take, but any time I couldn’t just fly somewhere in the Depths, getting around got difficult because I just had no idea if the climb I was starting would give me a spot to rest and recover stamina on the way up. The darkness was cool, mechnically, at first, but it became a huge bother the instant the terrain involved more verticality and there just wasn’t enough cool stuff hidden inside it to make it feel worth the hassle.

My only other (I would argue “legitimate” is the adjective I should include here, knowing what is coming later on) gripe is the final boss fight. It was a major let-down. I think I took maybe ten hearts worth of damage in the entire thing. Since I’d already fought a lot of Phantom Ganondorfs (and had learned to beat them when I only had five hearts), fighting the real-deal was easy. The most alarming part was having hearts disappear in the final battle, but I had thirty-six of them at the time (I forgot to spend my last eight Light of Blessings before I went to fight the G-Man) so I didn’t really feel pressured by the one-heart-at-time damage I was taking. The whole thing just felt lackluster and like it lacked the weight and power of the Calamity Ganon fight in BotW. Sure, the final part of each battle was the same “hit the glowing weak points on a giant monster!” kind of battle, but the first stages of the Calamity Ganon battle had a massive shift in scale and introduced a bunch of brand new fight mechanics that are difficult for me to counter now, even after beating him many times, and all of which do too much damage for me to shrug off without buffing the hell out of myself before the fight. By the time I fought Ganondorf in TotK, though, I knew how to dodge, counter, or prevent all of his attacks and only got hit when I was getting ganged up on or one of my allies blocked the camera via their aimless, largely useless wandering through my battlefield. It just felt like such a let down after the fun I had in the rest of the rest of the game.

It feels strange for the final boss fight to have been so unsatisfying when I felt like combat had been improved across the board up to that point. It was no longer possible to just destroy whatever enemies I found without breaking a sweat since they were frequently grouped up with other enemy types and with various different weapons. I actually had to fight a multi-pronged battle every time I decided to get into melee rather than try to take them all out at a distance. Sure, the individual enemies died just as easily as they did in BotW, but I almost never fought individual enemies. This made it feel an actual investment any time I got into a fight with a tough enemy, since a lot of the Silver enemies could take me out in four or five hits even at the end of the game (I mostly wore the barbarian armor, which is difficult to upgrade since it requires Lynel parts, to trade the opporunity for higher defense away to get greater offensive power in return). I had to be judicious in how many fights I let myself get into since a failure to track the resources I was spending would leave me eating sixty apples to get back to full health and unable to get a crit on an enemy I needed to quickly chase off because I’d accidentally used up the last of my arrows. I actually had to think more carefully than when I was doing my Naked and Afraid run of BotW in April, even though I was better armored and equipped.

I also really enjoyed all the new consumables that the game added. Being able to confuse enemies, to alter what effects my arrows would have on the fly, to create smokescreens so I could drop a couple quick sneakstrikes in order to thin out the enemy ranks, to increase my swim speed or my grip on slick surfaces (ice and walls in the rain), and even to create little automatic combat devices that would add some choas and distraction to my battles was a lot of fun. I found a lot of joy experimenting with the new item mechanics and build odd contraptions that would do nothing useful but tons of silly, fun stuff. My favorite was the elaborate catapults I’d make to toss traveling Koroks around, when I didn’t want to bother with moving them around on foot. It was a lot of fun to do and the auto-build function meant it was easy to put things back together again when I’d break them through janky applications of the game’s physics.

Honestly, if it wasn’t for the lackluster final boss battle and the slog that was collecting the last shrines and lightroots, I think this would be a top-tier game. I don’t know if I was just too stressed when I started playing the game or if the size of the game played more of a factor, but I just never quite got the same feeling of wonder and excitement that BotW gave me. I wish I would have, or that my initial excitement would have lasted, but I just got tired after the twentieth cave was just another nest of enemies with some mushrooms, shields, and a giant glowing frog somewhere inside it. The repetition of everything just started to grate on me after a while, since the size of the game meant there was a lot of it. One of the stories about the origins of Tears of the Kingdom is that it grew out of DLC ideas for Breath of the Wild. I can see how that’s the case and I think the end result suffered because of that. Even if it would have been a major expansion to Breath of the Wild, I think it would have been a better experience if it was tied to that game rather being its own separate game. Sure, it worked pretty well as its own game, but I really think I’d have enjoyed it more if I was adding a layer on top of what I’d already done in Breath of the Wild rather than redoing a bunch of stuff with a slightly different name.

My final thoughts, which is just me giving voice to some pet peeves, was that I really hated some of the names of things in this game. Light of Blessing? Secret Stone? I mean, c’mon. I know Sacred Stones have a very different meaning in the series, but I’d rather them reuse the name than call something that LITERALLY EVERYONE PROMINENTLY DISPLAYED a “secret stone.” There’s nothing secret about them! Nothing they do has anything to do with being secret! What does that even mean? The “Light of Blessing” thing just feels awkward to say and read, but there’s nothing wrong with it beyond that. It’s just weirdly phrased and feels like a linguistic burr every time I run into it, but “secret stone” just feels awful to me in every possible way. Almost anything else would have been better in my eyes. The Sages and these stones are the precursors to the Sages and their Medallions in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, so some kind of direct tie to them would have been great. Instead, we’ve got everyone reverently saying “secret stone” like they’re discussing something forbidden and sounding (to me, at least) like they’re discussing a pet rock they didn’t want to admit they treasure.

Anyway. It’s a fun game. I’m just disappointed by how the game ended and complaining about a game that I enjoyed for at least 145 of the 155 hours I played. I had a good time, it’s just none of that stuff sticks out as much as the lackluster final boss fight and the irritation of hearing everyone say “secret stone” all the time. I mean, I know I’ve got a tendency to commit to things that maybe don’t deserve that much of my time, but I did genuinely enjoy this game. I had enough fun for most of it that I didn’t really feel the need to listen to podcasts while playing for most of that time. Trust me, there’ll be plenty of praise heaped on the game in the future. I just needed to get all this off my chest. And now that I have, I can go take a break with another game or three and then, if they haven’t announced some DLC by September, probably play through the entire game again. Much more quickly the second time around, I hope.