The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom – Zero Punctuation

Okay, that wasn’t fair. Let’s start with the effusive praise, maybe the Nintendo fans will get cold and run back to their nice cozy bubble before we get as far as the other stuff. Tears of the Kingdom is an extraordinary technical achievement. I was grousing in Extra Punctuation recently about how games have an astonishing amount of power available and seem to be mostly using it to make extremely realistic sweat drops fly off characters as they grind out the same shitty combat loops as always, but Tears of the Kingdom is a blanket “Nuh-uh!” to that. It’s made new pushes in what technology can achieve in terms of the way we play games and the choices we can be offered. I mean, not a whole lot beyond what Garry’s Mod and Banjo Kazooie Nuts & Bolts were doing years ago and it’s a shame it’s taken this long to get back around to it – effusive praise, Yahtz, remember! They’ve got flamethrowers! – but never before at this scale or complexity. It’s very gratifying to gaze out over a hostile landscape between us and our goal, trying to decide how best to navigate it, before concluding “I know! I’ll build a fucking jump jet! Out of some random shit I found at the bottom of my gym bag!”

Yeah, you should be looking nervous, Mr. Horse, starting to really question the point of keeping you around ‘cos my soapbox stealth bomber doesn’t get all prima donna on me about navigating a 45 degree slope. Admittedly it has a tendency to explode over the mountains but don’t think having to carve off my own buttocks for nourishment to sustain me for the trudge to the nearest stable is making you any more endearing. So yes, to make my position clear, having a degree of potential for creative problem solving and creative Korok abusing that Jurassic Park Trespasser could only have dreamt of as it pillowed its head on its health bar tits, carries the game amazingly. But the fact is, there’s a lot that NEEDS carrying, and I can’t eternally sustain praise, effusive or otherwise, for any game in which I skip cutscenes in my first runthrough because they’re so bloody boring. Breath of the Wild has a phenomenal opening. Wake up in a coffin, go through a cave, get smacked in the face with the entire environment design budget. That’s a hook. Inevitably I thought of it when Tears of the Kingdom started with a fucking walk and talk sequence where we control a sullen Link being forced to wait for Zelda to slowly mooch through some tunnels as she prattles on about her bullshit, looking like me when the wife makes me come bra shopping.

But then Ganondorf gets released and snatches up Zelda, monsters infest the land, Link gets fucked up to the tune of about thirty-seven hearts, you know, an average Hyrule Sunday. And THEN you wake up in a coffin and go through a cave and etc and we’re back in the Breath of the Wild groove. In fact it’s beat for beat exactly the same groove. First you go around the tutorial island to learn your new powers – glue thing to thing, fuse thing with thing, and teleport through a ceiling. That last one’s a bit random and only tentatively gels with the established theme of putting things on top of other things, probably why I kept forgetting I had it and getting trapped down wells like little Timmy. After that we skydive down to Hyrule proper and yeah, broadly speaking it’s Breath of the Wild again – go to Hyrule castle now and get mashed into overdressed pate or go to the birds, the fish, the frogs and the desert lesbians in turn and kill whatever giant monster is putting wasabi in their hemhorrhoid cream this time. Then get a prolonged cutscene in which ancient spirit du jour says “Yes, NPC support character du jour, you are the Sage of Onion Stuffing or whatever, now help this emotionally stunted twink beat up his angry dad.”

Those specifically were the cutscenes I started skipping after the first two because they were all the same and no one in the cutscenes for this game can so much as pick their fucking nose without everyone else in the scene reacting to it for way too fucking long. Still, the dungeon bosses are actually unique monsters now rather than just all being one of Ganon’s runaway farts, that’s a plus, but in the combat generally, I was a little disappointed by the weapon fusion mechanic. You glue random objects to the end of sword du jour and it just adds some extra damage points. It allows for none of the demented creativity the physics object fusing does. I wanted to glue a tree trunk to the end of a Twix and watch Link give himself a hernia trying to lift it. Plus you have to do it with every single weapon you find to keep up with the enemy health bars, as well as glue things to every single arrow you use and it feels very rude to have to pause combat over and over again to rifle through your stuff without even offering your enemies a magazine. Tits of the Kinkshamer also doesn’t fix the Breath of the Wild problem of so much of it feeling like it was generated by algorithms.

Everywhere you go, the same monster encounters, shrines with the same decor and endless motherfucking grass. Having said that, I liked how each shrine was a bespoke lateral thinking physics puzzle and I didn’t find a single one that was just “kill this one oversized kitchen appliance” like about one third of Breath of the Wild’s shrines, so the game effectively shakes its moneymaker there. On the whole don’t take away that I hate the game, for Christ’s sake, but I know what you’re going to say. “Oh who cares about the story stroke copy pasted sandbox map stroke everything else you’re widdling about when you can craft a flame spewing helicopter motorbike shaped like Leonard Cohen’s left testicle.” In turn I will say what I always say: if the game did have a mind-blowing story and original sandbox map, you would not be saying that they didn’t matter. You didn’t learn your lesson when Breath of the Wild came out and you all went “It’s perfect! It’s perfect! Never change a thing!” ‘Cos now they’ve improved on it and you’re all going “Okay, NOW it’s perfect! Never change a thing!” Spurt, by all means, just don’t spurt yourself dry in case you need a little spurting room for what tomorrow may bring. My little spurting room is under the stairs.