This piece contains spoilers for the approach to the first dungeon in Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.
I can see now that I came to Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom excited but slightly nervous. I think I was unable to easily put into words exactly what I hoped for from it. This is because I loved Breath of the Wild, but I didn’t always like it. I knew Zelda had to change and I really admired the way this ingenious, generous, agenda-shifting game rethought the basic template. I would play it for hours on end. But maybe there weren’t quite enough of those hours where I genuinely felt I was playing a Zelda game.
Five or six hours into Tears of the Kingdom, though, something happened. I suddenly realised that, while I was clearly playing a game built on the foundation of Breath of the Wild, I was also playing a game that was starting to feel like Zelda. Easy to say, but hard to actually explain. I still don’t have the words easily to hand. So instead, I’ll return to the point at which I started to feel this way, and we’ll see what happens.
