The Legend of Zelda series has always held a special place in my heart. My first foray into the series was The Ocarina of Time. I’ve played the majority of the games, and I have an in-depth understanding of the lore and inspirations for the series. In spring of 2023, a friend of mine gave me his Wii-U, which also included Breath of the Wild. I completed the story and extra content around July, and had to turn around and prepare to move along to a new career opportunity. I purchased a Nintendo Switch around November, and played Tears of the Kingdom, completing it in May of 2025. This will be a comprehensive review of both games, as I believe you cannot review Tears of the Kingdom without reviewing Breath of the Wild. This review will include spoilers for both games.
Breath of the Wild:
The Zelda series has two main themes: The Hero’s Journey, and Overcoming the Unknown. These are two powerful themes for children, as childhood is inherently a journey through the unknown, and growing into the person (the hero), you always wanted to be. The Ocarina of Time is the quintessential example of these two themes, as Link is a child living in a forest of children, but is given the responsibility of becoming the Hero of Time. The first game, The Legend of Zelda, begins with Link entering a cave, and receiving a sword from an unfamiliar old man simply stating “It’s dangerous to go alone, take this”. The journey in each game is a journey of discovering a larger world that is more intricate and complex than the simplicity of the starting area. Each game requires both Link, and by extension, the player, to grow both in game skills, and maturity.
The introduction of Breath of the Wild sets the tone for the game perfectly. Link awakens inside a dark, dank chamber, with a mysterious device beckoning him, and a woman’s voice calling out to him. After unlocking the doors, the voice explains that he is about to undergo a difficult journey, that it is his responsibility to save the Kingdom of Hyrule. She ends her monologue by simply stating “Now go”. Link runs out of the cave, and into the light, revealing Hyrule, and the wilderness that it has become. The tone set by this introduction sets the player up to want to explore the world, to set out on an adventure. I was impressed by the beginning, and experienced the same feeling that I felt when I first played The Ocarina of Time/Majoras Mask/most other Zelda games.
The overall story of the Breath of the Wild was built to be fairly non-linear. Overall, to complete the game, Link must solve the problems in four of the regions of Hyrule where four of the main cultures inhabit. Link must purge the Divine Beasts, ancient machines designed to fight against the Calamity Ganon, corrupted by Calamity Ganon and his Malice. However, unlike most other Zelda games, where each region is more or less solved sequentially, Breath of the Wild allows the player to solve any region they want, in any order they want. There are also more than four regions, with numerous amounts of side quests to accomplish, and a lot overall to explore across Hyrule. There are also hundreds of Shrines, small puzzles to solve, that reward the player with pieces of extra hearts, or stamina wheels. Breath of the Wild is a game that encourages the player to explore, allowing Link to free climb/parkour fly with the glider anywhere around Hyrule. A general rule of thumb with the game is that if you can see somewhere in the distance, you can get to it. My first playthrough of Breath of the Wild, I rushed through as fast as I could, utilizing the glider to fly as directly as I could from place to place to complete the four main areas, and utilized the shrine teleports anytime I had to backtrack. In my subsequent playthrough, I rode a horse everywhere, and seldom ever used teleports, just so I could experience more of the map, and the hidden gems everywhere.
I found the exploration of the world organic, and the story’s integration into the exploration was organic. While running around, near the Zora’s Domain, I encountered a Zora stating that their homeland needed help, and that Prince Sidon, the son of their sovereign, was seeking a Hylian to aid him. Intrigued, I began making my way towards the Zora’s Domain. I encountered more Zora’s, all pointing me in the correct direction, and imbuing a sense of urgency to me. When I finally reached where Prince Sidon was hanging out, I was given a cut scene where Sidon, a Zora of immense charisma, convinced me, the player, to run up the Lanayru Highland, where it was raining, so I could not climb the mountains, and instead had to run up a mountain pass, and fight through a number of monsters to reach the Zora’s Domain. These were not easy fights, and I died numerous times on my ascent. Upon reaching the domain, Link meets with Prince Sidon, and King of the Zora’s. The Divine Beast Vah Ruta, a giant elephantine machine, was rampaging, and causing a torrential downpour that is threatening to flood Hyrule. Sidon tasked Link with climbing Mount Lanayru, where at the summit a Lynel (A strong centaur-like monster) lives, where it shoots lightning arrows at any trespassers, to steal the lightning arrows from the Lynel. Sidon gifts Link the Zora’s armor, a piece of gear that his sister, Mipha, was crafting for Link in the distant past, as a marriage proposal gift. The armor allows Link to ascend waterfalls, giving Link access to Mount Lanayru’s summit, and the Lynel. I made the ascent, and quickly found myself face to face with the Lynel. Sidon advised Link (and the player), to sneak around, and steal arrows from the Lynel, which I tried to do. However, I was caught, and forced to fight the Lynel. The fight overall was an incredibly difficult fight, where I almost died numerous times, and was forced to consume virtually every food item in my inventory. However, I eventually won, and felt like I had accomplished a task akin to ancient Greek myth. Just in this one instance of exploration, I went from aimlessly running around, to fighting a mythical monster, in an epic and memorable fight. This was a common occurrence while playing through the game, and I could write a small book on my own adventure through Breath of the Wild.
Another aspect of exploration that Breath of the Wild accomplished fairly well was the crafting/gathering materials aspect. Many open world games have a collecting aspect, and I generally hate materials collecting, as with most games, it interrupts gameplay/flow. Breath of the Wild places materials/resources virtually everywhere around the map (generally around where you need them), making collection fairly simple. My only complaints with the collection system is that cooking pots, which are needed for the vast majority of crafting, are fairly few and far between. Cooking was also fairly tedious, requiring the player to enter into a menu screen, select the materials the player wanted to cook, exit the menus screen, and toss them into the cooking pot, just to watch an animation that the player could skip. I believe that, the first time, there should have been an animation. However for subsequent cooking sessions, the player could just enter into a menu, and create the meals/elixirs seamlessly and quickly. However, when I needed to craft a heat/cooling elixir because I was going into a hot/cold region, it wasn’t too difficult to collect a few critters, and craft the corresponding elixir. Most of the environmental factors could also be mitigated by clothing, which could be purchased in whatever region you were about to explore.
The overall story of the game, and the quests associated with the main story, are not anything new to the Zelda series. More or less, Link is solving a dungeon (In this case, ancient magical machines), and releasing an ancient spirit (in this case, a dead champion killed in the Calamity that occurred 100 years ago), and building the power needed to defeat Calamity Ganon. The majority of sidequests in the game are simple, straightforward, and offer fairly innocuous rewards (usually food or basic materials). Many of the quests are written fairly ambiguously, and I found myself looking up online guides on how to complete the smaller sidequests because of how they were written, and how non-specific some of the tasks were. Some of the bigger quests (such as the Tarrey Town quest), were well written, and were rewarding to complete because they invested the player in the outcome of the quest (I will be writing about Tarrey Town in a musing). The characters themselves were memorable as well, especially Mipha the Zora, and Daruk the Goron. As the majority of the character interactions between Zelda, the Champions, and Link, occurred in the past, a large chunk of the story is told through memories linked to various locations across Hyrule. This also encourages exploration. These memories have a linear story, though their discovery is likely going to be non-linear. As an example, in my most recent playthrough, the first memory I unlocked was Zelda running away from Link, and ordering him to return to Hyrule Castle, frustrated with her father, the king assigning an escort to babysit her. In my first playthrough, the first memory I unlocked was Zelda praying inside a sacred spring, attempting to unlock her dormant powers, and despairing that she could not unlock her powers. The context experienced within the story changes depending on the order in which you experience the memories. This makes the story that you’re experiencing feel like “your story”, rather than a more generic experience you’d find in other games, even other Zelda games.
Overall, Breath of the Wild was a substantial story to tell, and by far one of the most memorable Zelda games I have played to date. It is a game that, once I completed it, I wanted to play it again, to experience it again, and further in-depth exploration into the world that I largely overlooked in my attempt to experience the story as quickly as possible. I’d recommend this game to anyone who wants to experience a Lord of the Rings style story.
Tears of the Kingdom:
Following completion of Breath of the Wild, I was excited to purchase a Nintendo Switch, and to play Tears of the Kingdom. I had to wait a few months, as a change in my career required me to undergo a period where I had to focus exclusively on training for my new career. However, I did eventually find the time to purchase a Switch, and to play Tears of the Kingdom.
I was a little…. surprised, that Tears of the Kingdom was essentially a reboot of Breath of the Wild. The overall story, an ancient evil is threatening Hyrule, and Link needs to travel to four regions to unlock ancient sages, along with the ancient Shrines/technologically advanced civilization giving Link the power he needs to defeat Gannadorf, is more or less the same as it was in Breath of the Wild. Tears of the Kingdom changed the map of Hyrule, making the land feel flatter, and more compressed. Some of the regions were changed, and the number of monster forts has increased to the point where yo can quite literally encounter a monster fort every few minutes of travel.
On the subject of travel, overland travel was changed significantly. Tears of the Kingdom includes three more areas alongside overland Hyrule: The Sky, The Caves, and The Depths. With the advent of The Sky, the towers used to unlock the map launch Link into The Sky, more or less making the map accessible from any point via glider. The necessity to use horses for travel is rendered obsolete, and I found myself teleporting to the highest/nearest point in The Sky that I needed in order to travel to a certain spot, and gliding to the location. The Depths was a different, and significantly more frustrating tale of exploration. The Depths is a subterranean mirror of Hyrule, with lacks, mountains, and rivers, creating impassible walls, necessitating overland travel to another chasm in order to explore that area. The Depths was also not illuminated, which makes sense because the sun does not shine underneath the ground. There were a few ways to create light: Using brightbloom seeds to create brightbloom flowers, which illuminate a small area, wearing light emitting armor/consuming a light emitting food or elixirs, or activating a lightroot, which permanently illuminates a significant area. These lightroots correspond with shrines located on the surface, so locating a lightroot will locate a shrine on the surface, and vice versa. I will admit this is a neat trick to encourage exploration of two areas that are immediately unconnected. However, I found myself using the lightroots as a crutch to find shrines on the surface, and spent the majority of my time traveling The Depths traversing lightroot to lightroot, and ignoring anything exploration related due to the darkness of The Depths, and my lack of desire to reexplore areas I’ve already travelled through. I spent little time in The Depths because there was very little to do, and very little questlines/stories associated with it. The only major plot points that occur in The Depths are the Yiga Clan quests, and the final battle with Gannondorf at the end. I believe that Nintendo could have devoted more time to developing more content for the overworld/The Sky (which was infinitely more interesting than The Depths) if they had forgone developing a whole Hyrule underneath Hyrule.
As stated above, the story was also disappointing compared to Breath of the Wild. The story felt like a copy of Breath of the Wild, with some additional characters added. The idea that an even more ancinetier race (the Zonai) had built everywhere on Hyrule, but disappeared, and left behind few ruins -except-for-all-the-buried-ruins- really throws a wrench into the whole Zelda timeline in general. While all of the other games were occurring, including Breath of the Wild, Tears Gannondorf was biding his time underneath Hyrule castle, building up the energy to overpower Rauru’s arm, and unleash his plan to conquer the kingdom. Even after Gannondorf is freed, and gloom/chaos is unleashed upon the land, the majority of people merely continue about as if nothing has happened, which made the world feel like it was filled with NPC’s. In Breath of the Wild, running into random characters across the map felt organic, even if they had very NPC routes they walked on.
Had Tears of the Kingdom been its own Zelda game, without Breath of the Wild preceding it (Or made several years later after a few other games had been published), I would have enjoyed the story. However, it felt like Nintendo was plagiarizing its own story by releasing Tears after Wild.
That being said, I’d still recommend playing both games, as they are both great adventures in their own rights.