I’ve been replaying The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom in my evening game time for the last month or two. I’m trying to re-experience the game without all the urgency I felt last summer and to take the time I feel I need to explore and enjoy it more fully. So far, it has been a better experience. I’m frequently lost and unsure of what I’ve been doing or have already done, but having the Hero’s Path means I can at least check where I’ve physically been. That, plus getting the Korok Mask and Sensor upgrade much, MUCH earlier this time around means that I’m reasonably confident that, for everything but my first twenty-to-forty hours of this file, I found all the Korok seeds and Shrines in those areas. Being on my second pass of the game means I’ve been able to more specifically target my efforts. I can easily prioritize the stuff I encounter because I already know how most it will turn out and I can more directly tailor my nightly gaming experience to what I want. Some nights I focus on shrines and filling up my map of the Depths with marks for lightroots. Some nights I spend trying to explore the depths in a fun but still efficient manner (so it stays fun to explore them rather than getting tedious like it did in my first playthrough). Some nights I focus on running quests, filling out my map, or just exploring interesting looking ruins. It’s a lot more fun this time around, even if I’m not as excited about it as I was the first time around.

That said, since I’m taking the time to slow down and see the sights, I’m actually finding a bunch of stuff I missed the first time through. For instance, I somehow never went into the well behind Zelda’s house outside Hateno village in my fisrt game, despite spending a bunch of time over there angrily muttering to myself about her taking over my damn home. This time, when I went there, I had my well-scanner on and went down a well I was sure I’d already explored only to discover there was an entire extra journal down there that would lead me to a piece of clothing that I’d gotten in my first playthrough by pure happenstance. I also found a chest with a hairband in it that pulled Link’s hair back into the ponytail he wore in the first game, which was a very nostalgic moment for me, made even more so by the knowledge that this was a chest that Zelda had kept in her sanctum. She was holding onto it for purely sentimental reasons and I just loved that little detail.

Another thing I’m finding is more and more NPCs on the roads. While I still do a lot of off-road adventures while exploring, I spend a lot more time along the various roads of the world rather than warping everywhere like I did in my first playthrough. I’m also spending less time launching myself into the air or hopping up to sky islands and then paragliding places so I’ve got much better converage of the surface world than I did at this point in my first time through. Most of the NPCs haven’t left much of an impression on me since they’re fairly bare-bones, but it’s definitely making the world feel a bit more active and filled than it did in my initial impressions. I feel like taking the time to slow down a bit also means that I’m better able to appreciate the few NPCs I run into that have longer-running personal developments (mostly through the occasional quest), but I still find myself wishing that more people seemed to remember Link from the last game or even from the implied years between the two games given that he was a constant fixture at Zelda’s side and everybody and their mother seems to have tons to say about Zelda.

I don’t know how much more I’ll find that I missed my first time around, but I’m glad to see that this replay is serving its intended purpose. Sure, I’m definitely still watching Dimension20 at least as much as I’m playing the game each time I sit down, but it still feels a lot more pleasant than the hectic run for the finish line, the stress of finding shrines, and the constant bucking against the progression of the game because it dared gate things behind main plot progression when its predecessor let me do whatever the hell I wanted whenever the hell I wanted to do it. Being able to take my time has really opened up the game for me in a lot of ways and I hope it stays open since I really enjoy being able to play for a little bit and then go to bed. I don’t always succeed at that, but its a lot easier to play through this massive game when I don’t feel like I’m on a time crunch to complete it before I have to set aside my Switch for three weeks away due to a wedding and then moving house. So much more fun without all the self-imposed pressure.