While watching Dimension20, I’ve been playing through The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom again. I’ve given up on any hope I had for a Master Mode and done my best to accept the game that was sold to us. It feels unfair to say this, but it feels so much less than I hoped it would be. I understand that my expectations were set sky-high by Breath of the Wild, but I feel like so much went into turning that game into An Experience that just wasn’t kept around for the sequel. The sense of wonder and grandeur that Breath of the Wild builds is spent trying to create a sense of horror around The Gloom and Ganondorf’s return instead. All of the early building in the introductory sequence falls flat because all that accomplishes is setting us at what is the common starting-point for almost all Legend of Zelda games and then none of the freaky gloom, horrific music, or creepy visuals come up again as something to be dealt with or feared for multiple hours. Then, when it finally comes up again, it is a minor environmental hazard tied to The Depths, which is unfortunately the section of the game with the greatest squandered potential of all, or a strange and potentially terrifying encounter that is incredibly easy to flee from. It becomes a minor concern only during the final boss fight and, even then, if you’re set up with halfway decent armor, good food buffs, and tons of hearts, it’s trivial. With none of that to rely on to create a coherent throughline for the game (like the mixed wonder of exploration, grief at finding a decayed world you can’t remember but know you failed to protect, and hope for the future that thread their way through all of Breath of the Wild), all you’ve got is an admittedly fun game to play with an interesting world to explore while building all kinds of weird machines.

To be clear, I’m enjoying myself and, if I’m ever not enjoying myself, it is entirely because I’m too tired to enjoy anything from a long, exhausting, and defeating day at work and I wouldn’t be enjoying anything I do (which I mention specifically because this was my experience the night before I wrote this). It really is fun to wander around the world, fight whatever thinks it can take me, and hunt for koroks as I give this whole world the attention I couldn’t during my first playthrough. This time, instead of hiding from the plot while also trying to beat the game as quickly as possible between major events in my life, I’m just going through the game as my attention and desire direct me to. I went through the first Sage Awakening pretty quickly since I wanted the boost to my flight and the chance to advance other plots. I didn’t want to get one hundred hours into the game before I unlocked the scanner and hero’s path mode again. I also wanted to get the Korok Mask more quickly so I’d be better able to find the Koroks that are well-hidden while I’m already exploring the map rather than having to spend a lot of time figuring out where I’d gone prior to the time I started wearing it constantly. Plus, I missed coming out of emotional memories or important cutscenes to find the blank, vaguely-dismayed face of the Korok Mask looking back at me instead of Link’s expressive face. It always amused me in Breath of the Wild and is once again amusing me in Tears of the Kingdom.

While I’m still skipping most dialogue since I’m listening to/watching an Actual Play show during my game time, I still can’t help but notice the way that Link is treated. While more of the world appears to recongize and respect him in ways that open up longer conversations and add a level of depth to the world and characters that Breath of the Wild lacked, I miss the somewhat more gender neutral treatment of Link. Sure, the characters of the world always address Link using masculine terminology (and the game itself gave some insight into Link’s character that showed the ways he suffered at the hands of that world’s toxic masculinity), but the world also swapped to adress Link using feminime terminology if Link was wearing a feminine outfit. Plus, one of the developers in on record as saying that they wanted to make Link more gender neutral in appearance and reference in Breath of the Wild, which I absolutely loved. That all seems to have vanished for Tears of the Kingdom, though. Seeing that disappear shortly after they removed all of the gender neutral references to the player character from Pokemon Scarlet and Violet makes me wonder if that was a deliberate decision to step back toward a singular masculine interpretation of the character. It wouldn’t be the first time a reactionary element took hold following an (incredibly mild) progressive step forward and it feels too specific and thorough to be anything but a deliberate choice.

The thing I’ve learned during the early hours of replaying this game is that I have a lot of complicated feelings about it. Sure, some of them are holdovers from the other stuff going on in my life when I started playing Tears of the Kingdom the first time and then had to force myself to break through the mental barriers preventing me from returning to it and some of them are just the lingering effects of last year as a whole, but some of them belong solidly and solely to this game. I was worried that this game would fall short of my hopes for it and I’m disappointed to say that, fairly or unfairly, it did. It’s still a great game and I’ll still enjoy playing through it however often I feel so inclined, but it’s difficult not to see the amazing game it could have been after Breath of the Wild opened up our eyes to the amazing stuff the Legend of Zelda team could do. I mean, Majora’s Mask is my favorite Legend of Zelda game, thematically speaking, and they could have leaned into the darker elements that they clearly wanted to include in this game. I don’t know why they shied away from making this a thematically darker game like the introduction and the major plot elements make it seem like they wanted to make. I think that, since they’re building on the skeleton of the game that came before it, they could have gone all-in and people would have loved it just as much as Breath of the Wild, if not more. I can see the structures of something incredibly new and wonderful beneath the game we got and it’s difficult not to be disappointed playing the game we got instead of the one we could have gotten.

I’m sure I’ll process and move past these feelings eventually, but they’re difficult to entirely ignore since I can see the evidence legitimizing them more now than before, thanks to playing the game more slowly and thoroughly. I’m not going to apologize for complaining and expressing these feelings despite how much I feel I should undercut them right now since this is still a very good game. I have no qualms about spending another two hundred hours playing through it again and I definitely think it’s still a great Legend of Zelda game, so I’d still recommend it if you’ve got that kind of time and enjoy this kind of exploration/adventure/puzzle game, but I’ve been thinking about this game for seven months now and I need to be realistic about my thoughts. I love this game but I can’t help but see where it falls short and there’s nothing wrong with that. Especially for an entry in a franchise that consumes so much of my thoughts since, you know, I’ve got a whole blog post series about distracting myself from my negative emotions by thinking about said franchise to cheer myself up.