I’m not terribly sad right now but am extremely tired. I managed to get a temporary fix to my bad mattress/back issues that has at least worked for one night but has left me feeling the cumulative weight of not sleeping well for about three weeks in a row. We’ll see if it lasts and doesn’t introduce its own issues [it hasn’t so far, as of the day before this goes up, even if it is clearly not an ideal solution], but right now I’ve spend all my spoons on work stuff (to the degree that I bought takeout rather than spend any time or effort on preparing food for myself) and I don’t have it in me to come up with anything thoughtful or reflective of this moment in my life, so I though I’d formally write down why I liked The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild so much and feel so neutrally about its sequel, Tears of the Kingdom. I can boil it down pretty succinctly, which is why this will be a relatively normal-length blog post, but I want you to know, reader, that there’s another version of this that takes up a week’s worth of posts because I’ve been thinking about this for over a year now and this sort of critical analysis via comparison and contrasting is the core skill forming the ground on which all my media analysis skills have grown. Which is to say that the reason I like BotW more than TotK is because the first one holds your hand long enough to get you up and walking while the second one holds onto your hand throughout the entire run of the game, which often means you have to drag it behind you as you try to experience the game.

Breath of the Wild opens with a little tutorial meant to introduce a couple items and the core of your explorations mechanics: interacting with objects, looking at stuff, running around, and climbing. From there, you’re shown a beautiful vista of the world you’ll soon be able to explore, summoned to the first programmed step on your journey into the wider game, and then immediately set loose to do whatever you want. You can completely ignore the prompt to go look at a fire if you want and just start exploring the place you’ve found yourself, picking things up, climbing things, and running around until you’re inevitably slain by an enemy, burned alive by your own folly, or found your way to one of two plot movement areas. If you happen upon your first target, the Sheikah Tower that will activate the others all around the world and wake the Shrines you’ll spend the rest of the game discovering, you can just interact with it and move the game forward even if you don’t talk to the tutorial guide sitting by that fire you saw. The game continues like this for the rest of its duration. You can just go do whatever you want in whatever order you want and the game will only occasionally slow you down to remind you that there is plot to be found, either by following the clues it lays out for you or by stumbling on it accidentally as you explore the world. It holds out a hand for you to take whenever you need the reassurance it can provide but otherwise is content to wait in passive silence until you want it again.

Tears of the Kingdom, on the other hand, has you on the rails from the very beginning. You’re locked into a slow introductory sequence with very little to actually do. It works narratively, as a cool build toward the eventual disaster, but then it keeps you on the rails well past the point where it is interesting. Sure, the sky island is fun, but being forced to work through it all in order to move forward was a little frustrating and boring. I mean, there were definitely fun bits, but I often felt restricted in how I could interact with the world. Sure, there’s an element of game design at work there, as the game forced me to act certain ways in order to learn about how the world works, but it felt a little insulting to see how little I was trusted to figure out the world after Breath of the Wild only taught me the very basics and then set me free. It felt like such a waste of time in a place that I almost never returned to outside of a couple small moments that still didn’t do much with the massive sky island (that unfortunately makes up a huge portion of the sky islands, excluding other sky dungeons, which are even more on-rails than this first sky island). Even once you get off the sky island, there’s still a set of rails the game expects you to follow even if it does give you the option of jumping track and roughing it instead. So much of the game’s systems are only introduced as you follow this path it has laid out for you, which means you’re going to encountering tons of pointless friction unless you follow the game’s plotline until you’re told to prepare for the final boss fight. Sure, you can walk away from this path any time, but the game is going to be constantly trying to drag you back to the path every time you run into a new place or event that just isn’t possible to do until you’ve finished a certain number of plot points. Heaven forbid that you do things at your own pace.

I do not like to feel restricted or restrained. Any time I feel like I’m stuck in some way (other than by a limitation of my own ability, such as when I can’t figure out a puzzle), I start to feel incredibly frustrated. I don’t like being trapped in one place or being told that I can’t do what I want “just because” to the degree that I will often immediately ditch any situation that sets either of those things up. TotK set up a lot of them, which meant it was often a struggle for me to enjoy the game while I was feeling a chain dragging me back toward the plot. Despite that, due to my own stubbornness and petulance, I dug my heels in and fought it as long as I could, getting through a huge portion of my first playthrough the game without even the basic scanner feature because I didn’t want to do the plot that the game was forcing me to, I wanted to stumble over it like I did in Breath of the Wild. I wanted to freely explore and to happen upon the plot.

BotW asks you, as Link, to recover from some unknown disaster and, as you play, you recover your strength, you recover your memories, and you find yourself amidst a world that is recovering on its own, that still needs you to save it this time around but that has already been so changed by your first failure that there’s no going back for it. You get the feeling that, like the world you’re exploring, there’s no going back for you either. What has changed cannot simply be changed back. You can recover, you can learn anew, and you can grow into something great and wonderful, but you cannot become what you were before. You can still be the hero, you can still save the day, but you can’t undo what has been done. Tears of the Kingdom… well, it asks you to find the princess and save the day. It makes statements about the world of Hyrule that almost entirely ignore the game that came before it, forcing you to retread ground you’ve already walked in a ruined world that has no bearing and weight on what you’re doing now. Any change, disaster, and danger can be placed at the foot of the evil force you’re supposed to eventually surmount and all the game wants you to do is cleanse this infectious darkness from your being, find better weapons, awaken sages, and then save the day. There’s no lasting consequences, there’s no sense of danger, change, or loss, and you just wind up undoing all the damage that was done. No sacrifice was so great that it couldn’t be undone by your eventual victory. Yes, you had to recover, but you’re back to being the hero you were before you were hurt and none the worse for your experience. Nothing has changed and the game asks nothing of you, the player, other than a big time commitment.

Playing Breath of the Wild always felt like having my questions answered with questions or with answers that only gave me more questions to ask. Tears of the Kingdom felt like a multiple choice test. One of those fills me with wonder and the other I find moderately satisfying when I do it well. One sparks a joy and drive in me that has kept me playing for over six hundred hours (about twice what I’ve spent on any other game I’ve ever played, which says a lot for a game with little variability in it) and the other I finished and am still struggling to appreciate. One is perhaps my favorite game of all time and the other is a fun, memorable, but ultimately uninspiring entry in my favorite franchise. I’ll admit that it was unlikely that anything could have filled BotW’s shoes, but something like Wind Waker is probably a closer spiritual sibling than Tears of the Kingdom… At least in terms of my experience of the game, anyway. I played most of TotK feeling like it really should have been a DLC or expansion of Breath of the Wild rather than an entire game of its own. Which feels harsh to say, but it would have felt like such a more cohesive experience if it had been able to build on what I’d done in Breath of the Wild rather than being stuck in a world that was unable to assume I’d done much of anything at all prior to it. If it had been an expansion or huge DLC, I think it would have been another stellar part of the franchise and all I can do is hope that we don’t need to wait another six years for another mainline Legend of Zelda game. It would be frustrating, to say the least, to have only that to keep me company (between any other smaller games like Echoes of Wisdom, of course) for that long.