It has been almost three months since I wrote the last entry in this series. I thought I’d probably hold off on more entries in this series until I’d spent more time in Tears of the Kingdom, but I’ve yet to have a reason to return to that entry in the franchise. All of my video game time has been spent on new games (or at least new to me, since Ni No Kuni is absolutely NOT a new game), so I haven’t felt much call to return to any old games, other than the sort of on-going repitition of playing Baldur’s Gate 3 (though I’d argue that doing alternate storylines isn’t exactly the same thing) and a desire to do a New Game + of Chained Echoes because I still don’t have anyone to talk to about that game. There isn’t as much beckoning replayability in Tears of the Kingdom as there was in Breath of the Wild. BotW had DLC already planned for it, that you could pre-purchase the day the game came out, after all. It has now been four months since TotK came out and there’s no word on DLC other than Nintendo’s usual “we have no plans at this time” statement. Which, you know, feels like it is misleading a lot of the time, but I’ll admit that this feeling might be a bit misdirected because Nintendo probably doesn’t get asked about unannounced DLC for small games that are unlikely to have it. They probably only get questioned on big games that don’t have DLC already announced, which feels like an incredibly skewed data pool to be used as the basis for drawing any kind of conclusions. So who knows what there will be, if anything, for TotK in the future, but I’m not going to hold my breath.

There’s a part of me that almost wants to go back and play BotW more than TotK, despite there still being so much I haven’t done in TotK. I don’t think I quite broke two hundred Koroks found, plus there’s still tons of caves, side quests, and challenges left to encounter. I’ve got plenty of equipment to upgrade yet, since I just couldn’t afford to do most of it during my initial run. There’s all kinds of giant baddies for me to fight, sections of map that have been barely touched since most of my travel involved flight or teleporting places, and who knows how many pieces of gear yet unclaimed. So much still to do, even if I’ve found all the shrines, explored the depths, and finished every piece of the main story. I could easily get another fifty to one hundred hours out of the game, even without restarting it. I just don’t really feel inclined to do it.

So much of my experience of that game is still marred by my inability to give it much attention for a while. So much of what dragged me into BotW again and again–the sense of limitless horizons, the draw of “what’s that over there,” and the promise of a greater challenge in Master Mode–just doesn’t exist in the same way in TotK. The horizons are so big that it’s impossible to feel like you can explore all of them without needing to establish a search grid. There’s so much everywhere that none of it feels important and there’s so little rhyme or reason to where things are that it’s incredibly easy to wander from a place you should be to one you absolutely should not (I’m thinking of how close that massive Ice Gleeok is to the northern-most snowy stable). There’s no Master Mode at all. Whatever challenge the game offered initially is all I’ll get. Which is why restarting is tempting, because that would be one way to force me back to the point where things in the world still posed a threat. I had such a great experience running around with only five hearts for the longest time, since it left me with almost no margin for error, especially since I couldn’t upgrade my armor for quite a while and then, when I finally could upgrade it, I couldn’t afford it. Every fight was a risk back then. Now, or at least when I finished playing the game, it was just a question of how many arrows I had to stock up on or what combination of mechanics I’d use to win. Even the final boss fight didn’t feel risky, and that’s even with my hearts being slowly drained by Ganondorf.

Don’t get me wrong, I had a fun time playing the game. I just don’t really feel the draw to return to it like I did in Breath of the Wild. There’s a very reasonable part of my mind that suggests if I replayed it and focused in on recreating the stuff I loved about Breath of the Wild, I would enjoy it more. If I just took my time to explore and experience the game, rather than somewhat frantically push myself to map every bit of the Depths, find every shrine despite ignoring the tools the game was trying to give me, and work through every bit of plot I could find, I’d probably remember it more fondly. I was in such a rush, before my friends’ wedding, during their wedding week, and then after moving… I never slowed down. I never stopped. I just kept grinding my way through the game. And yeah, some part of that might be because I eventually got tired of how much time and effort it took to explore the depths. How resource-intensive most battling was. How demanding it felt to explore every inch of surface area in order to find every possible secret entrance to every possible well, cavern, and hidden tunnel to the Depths. Everything just took so much time and I just couldn’t relax enough to enjoy it.

So maybe now, when I’m feeling less stressed all the time, when I don’t have so much hanging over me, I could better appreciate it. Maybe now I could find the joy in Tears of the Kingdom that I found (and still find) in Breath of the Wild. Maybe I should put the cartridge back in my Switch and look at maybe investing some of my spare hours into a replay of TotK once I’ve worked my way through Ni No Kuni. It certainly couldn’t hurt. Unless, of course, they announce some DLC or even just a Master Mode update for the game sometime in the next few months. I’d probably regret doing a full restart at that point, since I’d want to do another one to incorporate whatever got added. So maybe I’ll hold off a bit longer, just to be safe. It’s not like the game is going anywhere, nor am I champing at the bit to play it again. It’s mostly an intellectual exercise that’s telling me I should probably give it another try, to overwrite the less positive experience I had during my first play of the game. There’s no real urgency there. Just, you know, a small glimmer of hope.