I realized just now that this is the first new Zelda game I've beaten since the release of Twilight Princess, the first game I got for the Wii back in 2006. To go eighteen years without doing so is kind of nuts, but in my defense, there are only two games between then and now to have come out - Skyward Sword and Breath of the Wild. (I did play and beat the Switch remake of Link's Awakening, but given that that is, as I understand it, a pretty faithful recreation of the 1993 Gameboy title, I'm not counting it as a "new" Zelda game.)
Tears of the Kingdom is, like Breath of the Wild, a big open world game, which means that the "main quest" of the game is a relatively small fraction of what exists there. I could, of course, spend many more hours hunting down every shrine, doing every side quest, but I suspect that the assumption Nintendo has is that you'll only do part of it. (Unlike my obsessive Elden Ring playthroughs in which I've done nearly everything on like seven different characters).
I don't know if there's some secret scaling, but while I did complete all the Divine Beasts in Breath of the Wild, I never felt quite ready to go face off against Calamity Ganon, and kind of ran out of enthusiasm as every cool weapon I had lasted about long enough to kill a single monster. I wonder if I were to go back and play it again (and maybe do so on the Switch rather than the Wii U) I might enjoy it more. But then again, the games are so similar in presentation, gameplay, and the world itself that I suspect I'd only miss the innovations from Tears of the Kingdom.
Still, let's talk about the finale.
As I said before, I actually discovered Mineru's construct's head in the sky island within the perpetual storm over Faron without having done the ring ruin quest in Kakariko Village. Likewise, I'd gotten the Master Sword prior to that point as well. So when I made my first attack on Hyrule Castle and defeated the Phantom Ganons there, the NPCs responded with shock that I was basically done with all the intermediary quests meant to happen in between visits (including the entire Spirit Temple). The only thing left was to track down Master Kogha and find out where Ganondorf was from him, though I imagine this can also be skipped.
I suppose I respect the fact that the game allows you to sequence break in this way - finding the construct head and the Spirit Temple purely through exploration seems like the kind of promise of this exploration-focused open world genre, but at the same time I felt like the narrative suffered a little.
Anyway, figuring I should get ready to play Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, I figured it was time to rip off the bandaid and go face off against the Demon King.
You don't get to fight him immediately. There's a gloom-filled set of ruins and caves to navigate with some moderately dangerous enemies. There's not really any mystery to how one gets where one needs to go - it's pretty linear. Eventually, you descend beneath the place where Ganondorf's desiccated body was first found at the start of the game, and then plummet down for a big brawl against waves of monsters. Given my experience doing things like the Lynel gauntlet in the arena in the Depths (which I use to farm bows, arrows, and Lynel parts for weapons) this wasn't terribly tough.
But then we get to the Ganondorf fight.
I walked in with I think 28 hearts and a fully-upgraded Fierce Deity armor set, plus a Silver Lynel blade horn fused to the Master Sword. So I think I was going in there with about as much power as I was going to (I suppose that I could have gotten more heart containers). The fight has three phases.
The first phase is a relatively straightforward fight, but you need to watch for gloom on the floor. I had plenty of gloom-recovery food that helped a lot. Without any previous experience fighting Ganondorf, I had a bit of trouble getting in flurry rushes by dodging attacks, but the power of my sword was high enough that I think it only took hitting him 8 or 9 times to take down his health bar.
Naturally, another phase begins after this. And this is honestly one of the funniest things that Nintendo does with its UI - as the health bar is revealed, it keeps growing, not centered as you'd expect it to be under his name, but growing all the way to the right side of the screen.
Once again, it didn't actually take that many hits to finish this phase (not unlike a lot of FromSoft bosses) but finding the opportunities to actually hit him proved tricky. Demon King Ganondorf (as he's called in this phase) can dodge your attacks just as you can dodge his, and does this even on a successful flurry rush, counterattacking in a way that is very difficult to dodge. In order to hit him, I realized I needed to wait until he was charging up one of his big attacks and hit him while he was busy in that animation.
The thing that makes this phase terrifying is that, much as he broke all but 3 of your heart containers in the beginning of the game, some of his attacks will full-on destroy a heart container. (I don't think you ever get this back - when you beat him, the game comes to a full end, and getting back into the game puts you right before the fight, with just a star next to the file's name and an NPC profile in your Purah Pad - so you'll still have all your hearts if you continue to play after beating the game, but Ganondorf remains unfought in this game state).
With this phase complete, Ganondorf does what Zelda did, swallowing his secret stone and becoming an eternal (well...) dragon.
Naturally, given the whole selling point of this game, the final phase of the final fight takes place high in the air above Hyrule. And it's genuinely one of the most thrilling and epic moments I've seen in a Zelda game, at least conceptually. The Demon Dragon, as he's now called, will fly around and spit more of that heart-container-destroying fire at you, but it's not too difficult to dodge in the air. Zelda, in her Light Dragon form, will fly to catch you (and when she sometimes misses because of an unexpected player input, she'll really twist around to make sure that you land on her head). There are a few concentrations of demonic corruption on the Demon Dragon's form. It turns out that these are the only places on him where you can land safely, as his scales will inflict gloom on you. Once you figure this out, though, it's pretty easy to spot where to go - Zelda/Light Dragon will bring you high above him and you can jump down to land on these nodules (they're pretty creepy-looking, like a big ball of eyes and gloom) and then whack them a few times with the Master Sword. When one is destroyed, you'll be launched off the dragon and need to get caught by Zelda to renew the process. Once all the nodules are gone, you go directly for his forehead, where the Secret Stone (now enormous) rests, glowing brightly - naturally this means dodging his heart-destroying fire, but again it's not too tough.
Plunging the Master Sword into the stone, you slay the dragon and, in another bit of UI humor, as you land back on Zelda and Ganondorf explodes, you get a "Mission Complete" for "Destroy Ganondorf."
That's not the last part of the game, though: in the afterglow of the explosion, Link finds himself in that strange godly realm, and the spirits of Sonia and Rauru somehow transform Zelda back into her Hylian form. Your last challenge is to plummet as fast as you can through the sky, grab Zelda, and protect her as you both plunge into a lake (I believe the same lake you fall into after the Great Sky Island tutorial.)
And there you have it. A pretty epic conclusion to the game.
I will say that Tears of the Kingdom definitely connected with me better than its predecessor, largely through quality of life improvements. I think that, given how big a part of the game they were, I wish the Zonai devices were more practical to use in the climactic parts of the game - maybe that was just my failure of imagination.
Even if this is a big improvement over Breath of the Wild, I still find myself wishing for a more traditional Zelda experience. If they're only going to come out with these games every six years, I don't see a lot of opportunity for diversity in the experience. I guess the thing is that the open-world genre kind of demands that a player pour a ton of hours into a game. As readers of this blog have noted, my initial playthrough of Alan Wake II lasted only a weekend, but the game was no less impactful for it.
This is, of course, a totally different game. And likewise, I'll concede that the Zelda games were always going for this vibe of being a grand world to explore and find secret caves and such.
Whatever complaints I have about the direction the series has gone, one cannot deny that these games have been breathtaking achievements in the craft of video game making. And in the end, if we're reducing opinion about a game to a thumbs up or a thumbs down, this one's for sure a thumbs up.
Now, to discover whether Final Fantasy VII Rebirth's open-world excesses are too much for me! (I loved Remake).
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