Fears of the Kingdom

 Getting old is a very strange experience.

The Zelda series is as old as I am. The original Legend of Zelda came out in 1986, a few months before I was born. Of Nintendo's franchises, Zelda has generally been reserved as a kind of "event." While the company liberally throws Mario into all manner of genre-bending or simply other-genre games (spawning, for instance, perhaps the most beloved video game racing series in Mario Kart) Zelda has often come around only once or, occasionally, twice in a console generation.

While there were a few Zelda games around when I was a young kid, I actually didn't get into the series until 1998's Ocarina of Time. Later, I would go back and play A Link to the Past.

Breath of the Wild, the most recent entry in the main Zelda series, is a game that is beloved by countless players. The adoration and affection people feel for this game cannot be denied. But I've been on record here on this blog that I found the game thin and empty. Or, rather, I found that it didn't seem to belong to the Zelda series that I loved.

Now, opinions vary from person to person about all things, especially in matters of taste. My own opinions are just that - my own. BotW's popularity means that it clearly struck some chord with a massive number of people, but it's a chord that I have struggled to identify.

My best guess is that the reason people love this game is the experimentation it allows with the tools and environments. The game is a sandbox game, which until recently I simply thought of as an older term for what we now refer to as an open-world game. But the sandbox here is not about the world being open and free (the classic "see that mountain in the distance? You can climb it" which Breath of the Wild does, admirably, allow better than most games that make such promises) and is instead more about giving the players tools to make their own games and toys.

The formula of Zelda games that I grew up on was to have a narrative that led you through environmental traversal and quest-like objectives interacting with NPCs and into unique, aesthetically diverse dungeons that mixed puzzles with lightly challenging foes to fight, culminating in a challenging set-piece against a final boss. And, crucially, each dungeon gave you a new tool to use that would play a heavy role in the puzzles and final boss in that particular dungeon, but also expand your arsenal for the remainder of the game.

Though not an RPG, Zelda games had a sense of progression to them.

And there was a momentum that carried you through from the beginning of the narrative to the end.

The sandbox, by contrast, seems to think of such goals as distractions or merely one activity to pursue among many.

In other words, it seemed to me that the expectations I went into Breath of the Wild with - that I would play through an epic story that took me to diverse dungeons and environments, were simply wrong. Instead, the main appeal to the game was just playing around (or, to use more adult and perhaps judgmental language, just fucking around) in the world they provided.

And I don't think that doing so appeals to me. I'm looking for that structure, and for the reward of progression to allow me to see and do new things.

Breath of the Wild begins in a plateau where you get all the tools you're really going to have over the course of the game. You get things like bombs and the time-stop and magnet abilities all at once, because the game makes no assumptions about the order in which you are going to tackle its various challenges. Whereas previous Zelda games could have a first dungeon whose puzzles only involve things you can do with the tool you find within (say, the wind boomerang from the first dungeon in Twilight Princess,) Breath of the Wild, if anything, creates systems that only work inside its major dungeons (like being able to rotate parts of the divine beasts from the map) because they cannot gate things in this manner.

Again, I think that a player who just wants to mess around (which is perhaps a happy medium between my two phrasings) in that world might - and presumably does - see that as a boon. The openness means that nothing really gets in the way of just challenging yourself to do what you want to try to do.

I cannot help but feel like an old fogey, though, in my emotional response that Breath of the Wild has done Zelda dirty - that someone has taken away the series that I loved and replaced it with what is simply a different game.

Now, there are games in that series I didn't like before as well. The previous entry, Skyward Sword, had nearly opposite problems (the restrictiveness of its motion controls and the decidedly non-open world). And I think I would not feel so upset about it if I knew that this was going to be Zelda's experiment with a different kind of structure, similarly to how Wind Waker played its game of island-hopping before returning to a more Ocarina of Time-style world in Twilight Princess (a game I consider probably the second-best entry among the 3D Zelda games - again, a somewhat unpopular opinion).

This, though, is why the approach with Tears of the Kingdom worries me. A gameplay preview showed that this is once again set in a ruined world where weapons break after you swing them a handful of times, and the exciting features being shown off were the ability to assemble a vehicle out of pieces found in the world.

If you love this sandboxy approach, I'm sure this seems amazing and good.

But to me, it shows the Zelda series drifting away from the thing I once loved, and heading instead toward a Minecraft-style game-making tool, rather than a game in and of itself (I meant here to reference an old Chainsawsuit comic, but could not find it).

It's not like simply making a game open-world will always result in this. Elden Ring, by contrast, took the Dark Souls formula and blew it out into a massive explorable world. Elden Ring does suffer from some of the necessary evils of this kind of design - mainly the need to copy-paste tile sets to create its many mini-dungeons - but the game feels like an evolution of that Dark Souls format. Its Legacy Dungeons feel distinct, and it has many unique and interesting creature designs.

Now, I suppose one takeaway here is that this is one of the rare instances of a same-generation Zelda game. Zelda has sometimes been caught in generational transitions - Twilight Princess was meant as the second (and very different) Gamecube Zelda following the polarizing Wind Waker (which I think was only really polarizing because of its cartoonish visual style) but also wound up being a launch title for the Wii. Breath of the Wild was meant as the Wii U entry in the series, but the Wii U was not generally embraced by the public, and so Breath of the Wild became more associated with the newer Switch - a massive success of a console.

But we've seen, for example, Majora's Mask, which came out two years after Ocarina of Time, but was able to accomplish such quick turnaround by replicating a lot of the UI, assets, and overall structure of Ocarina of Time.

So, as someone who does not want to see Breath of the Wild as the immutable model for Zelda games moving forward, I can perhaps take some solace in the notion that Tears of the Kingdom is an attempt to expand out the idea of Breath of the Wild by using some of the systems and assets developed for that game.

Still, despite being a big Zelda fan in my early days as a gamer, I'm finding myself wondering whether I will even get Tears of the Kingdom. And to be clear, I am in no way condemning or complaining about people who are overjoyed to have more BotW-style Zelda to play through (or around in). Frankly, I expect this to be a massive success, and a beloved game to millions of players across the world.

It just means that I've got to accept that Zelda games might no longer be for me. Getting older is weird.