Tales of the Kingdom: A Zelda Postmortem

Posted byNicholas RadfordPosted inUncategorizedTags:, , , ,

I’ve forgotten more than I’ll ever remember about my experience with The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, but the arguably much-improved sequel to what is widely considered to be one of the best games of all time took up many hours of playtime, a full year of real-time (well, it took a year to beat), and still occupies much of my mind. I find myself thinking about the ending, I regret not going back to finish helping Sign Guy put up the rest of his advertisements, I wonder what it would have been like if I had completed all of the Shrines or Lightroots. I wouldn’t normally write a whole blog about my experience with a single video game, but since this one still occupies so much space in my life, I thought expressing it here would purge me of this specter and give me closure. Or–since everyone’s journey in this game can be so different while still echoing similar beats–maybe it’ll just be a fun MOSTLY SPOILER-FREE retrospective on my personal experience. Let’s find out together!

**INSERT HYRULE FIELD THEME PLAYED ON A RECORDER**

My relationship with the Legend of Zelda can be described as tumultuous. The first time I played a game in the series was renting Majora’s Mask when I was too young to appreciate it. I just made Link nap until the moon crashed to the ground and destroyed Hyrule. I didn’t touch another game in this acclaimed franchise until college when all of my friends gushed about how good Ocarina of Time was, so I decided to give it a shot. This time, I mostly just played the fishing mini-game until I started a new save, but the game never really hooked me and I didn’t get far from the starting area. After that, my angsty contrarian instincts led me to grow a distaste for the games because, as I justified to myself, if I didn’t discover it as a kid like everyone else, it simply couldn’t be that good. As I, fortunately, aged out of that mindset and adopted a more benign ‘it just isn’t for me’ mindset, I mostly forgot about Zelda and her hero of Hyrule…until the Nintendo Switch was announced.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was the launch game for the Nintendo Switch which I initially did not intend to buy on day one. This wasn’t because I didn’t want it–I was hyped–but I was severely broke at the time and a new console simply wasn’t in the cards. That is until I attended my first gig as extra talent for the global professional wrestling (sports entertainment?) conglomerate, WWE. I may have told this story before in the blog–I know I’ve tweeted about it in the past–so forgive me if you’ve heard it before. I didn’t expect much to come out of my first gig as extra talent–I was a newbie, and they knew other folks better, but I was dead wrong. Braun Strowman, “The Monster Among Men,” had just recently joined the main roster and was actively having matches against “enhancement talent,” aka local talent. Monday Night RAW live from the Moda Center (then known as the Rose Garden) in Portland, Oregon was no different. This time, they wanted to change it up a bit. Traditionally, an enhancement match would feature a one-on-one fight, but Braun Strowman was a special case. As his moniker indicates, he was being built up as a monster, and he’d already won several singles matches. This time, the plan was for Strowman to face four opponents at once, and they wanted to use the four smallest wrestlers to showcase his size. As luck would have it, I was one of the four smallest wrestlers that day and was added to the match.

Tears of the Kingdom dropped just as I started my Octopath Traveler II playthrough before I gathered all eight characters into my party. I had originally intended to finish Octopath before jumping into TOTK, but, as happened with Breath of the Wild, I got swept up in the hype fairly quickly. IGN even dedicated about ten weeks of their Nintendo podcast to just this game! Between that and seeing clips of everyone’s fun builds on Twitter, I knew I had to start ASAP. This feeling of urgency was only compounded as the weeks went on and IGN teased an impending spoiler cast, prompting the same response that a new Marvel movie evokes deep in my heart. For context, ever since Avengers: Endgame, I’ve tried to watch all Marvel movies opening week, and if I’m unable to, I will mute as many words as possible to avoid spoilers. This tactic, I believe, is why Marvel movies drop off so hard after opening weekend. The people who care will see it as soon as possible, and those who don’t just wait until it’s on Disney+.

I don’t normally care about spoilers in video games, or at all–Marvel aside–but the fact that the story of TOTK was being built up so much–especially after BOTW’s somewhat lackluster story–made me think it was something special, and it was. That said, I didn’t want to rush straight to the end. My favorite thing about BOTW was meandering through the world and experiencing things organically. That setup led to me pulling my first video game all-nighter since college, and I wanted to recreate it in TOTK. Now, my life is very different than when BOTW came out. At that time, I was essentially unemployed and living in a studio apartment, so I was a little more inclined to pull an all-nighter. Just because I’m married with a cat and a full-time job, doesn’t mean I enjoyed TOTK any less, despite never once pulling an all-nighter. I enjoyed it way more! I don’t think I will ever go back to BOTW now. Ultimately, it just meant that this new game took me much longer to beat–a little over a year! There were a couple of break periods, as the two pieces of DLC content for Pokemon Violet dropped in late 2023 and early 2024. Still, like the previously mentioned Avengers film, TOTK was inevitable. 

I went through phases in my playthrough. Early on, I was all about exploring and questing, never intending to look at a guide. As things progressed and the hours flew by, I became engrossed with The Depths…and less opposed to guides. I never sought out 100% completion–in any game except Kingdom Hearts II and Pokemon Sapphire–but I knew there were some benchmarks I wanted to hit. I felt compelled to do as many of the Lightroots in The Depths as possible, and I got DANG CLOSE but I reached a point where I simply couldn’t figure out which one I had missed–the map looked complete and I’d cross-referenced with the Shrines on top (in case you didn’t know, each Lightroot correlates to a Shrine)–so I abandoned that quest. That said, some little side quests and interactive pieces truly captured my imagination. Helping out the sign guy–a poor gentleman seeking to advertise his boss by installing signs of his face all across Hyrule–became a passion of mine for a while. I always stopped to help him because the puzzling nature of making that dang sign stand on its own scratched an itch in my brain, plus the guy was just so sweet! 

The Lucky Clover Gazette side story with Penn the Rito reporter was another passion project of mine. His thirst for a story, although often misguided, was truly inspiring and I did what I did to solve whatever local mystery he had uncovered at each stable along my path. I don’t think I ever saw the quest through to completion, but I enjoyed the time I’d spent with my news-sniffing friend. IT felt like we were working for Weekly World News in its heyday, except all of the stories had rational explanations.

I was so focused on side-quests that I completely ignored the Dragon’s Tears until right before I went to take on the final boss, though I’d pretty much pieced together the story by that point–obtaining the Master Sword was a huge hint. But it’s about how they get to the endpoint that matters (most of the time), that’s why I don’t mind spoilers (again, most of the time). I’m glad I did them though, because I was interested in seeing Princess Zelda’s side of the story. While it wasn’t the opportunity to finally play as Zelda in a main-series game, as so many people predicted, Nintendo did eventually grant our wish when they announced The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom last month. (A game that I am very interested in playing!)

When I finally felt satisfied with my playthrough, I set my sights on Ganondorf. Making the the final trek through The Depths below Hyrule Castle proved challenging, but doable for a “seasoned” warrior like myself. I’m not particularly good at combat in these games–I mostly utilize bombs or cheese my opponents with arrows or a spear so they can’t touch me–but as I approached the latter portion of my playthrough, I started practicing dodging and countering more, knowing that those skills would come in handy during the final fight. The story beats that happened immediately before and during the final battles were more satisfying than I can describe. I won’t go into details about it–since I somehow avoided being spoiled and I benefited from it–but after a game of collecting what was essentially the Infinity Stones and loading them up into my version of the Infinity Gauntlet, I was delighted to see the actual payoff. The finale was epic and breathtaking, calling back to the start of the adventure in a very satisfying way–storytelling at its finest. While I understand Nintendo’s need to have the ending they did, there is a world where the story ended on a truly bittersweet note, which I felt in my gut until the true ending was revealed. 

When all was said and done, I felt satisfied closing the game, knowing I would never open it again. I appreciated the experience and had a good time unraveling the story at my own pace and, while this is definitely my favorite Legend of Zelda game, I have no desire to return to this world. There are other games to play and stories to experience. I will always appreciate the open-world Zelda games for opening the door and helping me understand what others see in the franchise. I went back to Majora’s Mask when it was released on 3DS, and though I never finished it, I enjoyed my time with it. I own Link’s Awakening, too. I’ll never prioritize this series, but I can appreciate it from a quality standpoint. I do really want to check out Echoes of Wisdom, though…

THE WORLD IS YOUR BURRITO!

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