The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was a landmark game. Hitting the tail-end of Wii U and launch of Switch it also completely re-invented 3D Zelda after nearly 2 decades. Gone were the rigidly linear systems and nearly all were replaced with an open world with few limits on how to accomplish your goals. You could just skip right to the final boss once you exited the starting area if you were good enough. This 2 part transition of hardware and gameplay resonated with people and it's become the most successful Zelda game by a large margin and one of the highest critical releases ever. Tears of the Kingdom is the direct follow up to that. Especially leading up it would have been hard to believe that it could live up, re-invention on that level is rare and that novelty of being completely new is what really drives those reactions. So one would expect that a sequel set in the same basic map would naturally lose some critical praise for being so similar but interestingly they found enough to layer on that it's almost revolutionary in it's own right.
BoTW had dense but thoughtful systems from the physics, to the weather to the "chemistry" systems that allow you to freeze water, electrify metal and create brush fires. TotK retains all of these and as a result of endless "did you know that" videos about BotW the system were very well explored. What TotK manages to add on are two more systems "fuse" and "ultrahand". "Fuse" addresses one of the largest criticisms of BotW, weapon durability. In BotW weapons you found broke after using them for a bit, and this required you to constantly find new weapons and horde good ones because they were rare finds. Fuse lets players take a weapon and some other item and fuse them together. This can create lots of interesting effects like adding elemental damage, bouncing enemies far away or enhanced range but more crucially it ups damage and durability. Durability of fused weapons is high enough that they don't feel quite like glass but you won't get through more than maybe one large monster. Damage is based on the fused item with rare monster parts giving the largest boosts. This way, provided you have monster parts you can make very high damage weapons when you need to. This neatly creates complexity and I think is a good compromise but may not fully win everyone over. The second ability "ultrahand" is the crux of the puzzle-solving gameplay. It allows you to manipulate items similar to magnesis in BotW but without the metal restriction. Furthermore you can fuse objects together to create more complex contraptions. This are aided by Zonai devices which are objects that add effects like wheels, flamethrowers, lights, rockets and steering wheels. Combinations of these are used in puzzle building especially for shrines and temples. But they can also be used to create vehicles like boats, cars and aircraft to get around or to hard to reach places. With a complex and robust (and not glitchy) physics system this layer is very complex and hits that discovery angle that helped BotW blow-up in the first place. Plenty of social media showing-off players building wildly imaginative things and using material in very surprising ways. But while I thought it was a brilliant solution for open world puzzles and quite frankly nearly a game to itself the vehicle aspect never really worked. Despawning was the worst part, you couldn't go very far without losing your build (which probably costs several minutes even for a small build). Autobuild, which lets you rebuild a selection of previous things sorta alleviates this but it felt like a late band-aid. It requires resources to use and bigger builds can be expensive. It's also that you frequently lose builds. A car will go until you get to a steep incline and then you need to abandon it. Horse travel in BotW had issues (and TotK retains all of them) but vehicle travel was just too inconvenient aside from very specific scenarios. Building prestige death machines was one thing but in-game practicality was another. In any case these two system very much create a new game with new layer of depth. Even just one would have been enough but it feels like there's so much here, more than they could reasonably use. If BotW set a new standard for open world games, I don't think the industry caught up, but TotK goes several steps further becoming what has to be one of the most open and limit removing games I've seen.
Beyond the core systems TotK adds some other elements. It adds new enemies and things but keeps the same overworld though completely remixed. In fact because I hadn't played BotW in a long time I really didn't remember to the topology too much and it felt fairly new. This is expanded in 3 directions. The first is caves which are found throughout Hyrule. These usually have some treasure in them and correspond closely with the concept of caves from other Zeldas. Each one also contains a hidden creature that gives you a collectable that can be exchanged for various gear. Caves also occasionally contain shrines which makes them very awkward to find as you'll get a signal a shrine is close but won't be able to find it because the entrance is much further away. They do let you see cave entrances via glowing creatures and the ability to temporarily send up signals so you can see them from far away. This can still be tedious though and I wish that was an ability you could use without needing to travel to specific places. The second is the sky islands. There's various clusters, most of which can be gotten to from launching off the lookout towers. These also tend to contain shrine puzzles but there's also a some other goodies up there. These aren't very big land masses though so its mostly trying to figure out how to hop from one to the other to get to treasure. The last and most substantial in the depths. This is basically a 1:1 with Hyrule over world but uses a slightly inverted height map. While it is still pretty much unique there's not too much going on down there. You can get some rare items where above ground settlements would be and there's some boss enemies wandering around. The main quest here is to find all the light roots which light up the darkness allowing you to progress easier, otherwise you need to take lots of light seeds and periodically throw them to light the area up. The depths feels like filler because of the lack of puzzles but sometimes you do need to get creative in how you navigate. These 3 things combined create a significant amount of content in addition to the remixed overworld. Shrines are also still shrines but mostly use Zonai device puzzles but one of the clever things about the depths having ties to the overworld is that light roots and shrines occupy the same space so you can reference each other to find things you missed in the other realm.
Another big improvement is the temples which unlike the divine beasts actually take up space and feel integrated with the world. Getting to and solving them involves a quest with each of the main side-characters and each has a special ability which you gain once you beat the boss. While these haven't greatly increased in complexity (each one is basically find 5 location and active a switch) they do feel better and have unique bosses. I would have loved to see more linearity in progression here though as it doesn't feel like they are strongly "designed" due to the open nature.
The final area is around the plot. The story is limited because of the open nature and so it uses a similar system to the flashbacks where you find certain areas to get story cutscenes. I found these scenes to be more interesting than in BotW and they serve a purpose of letting you find the Master Sword (in addition to other ways of finding it which was an interesting design choice). It feels like there's just more connection in general to your gameplay goals though the ludonarrative dissonance can set in when certain revealed plot points don't impact certain quests and dialog. Also the core driving narrative motivation just isn't there. Not that I found it matters but I don't suggest thinking too hard about it.
I sunk 150 hours in and got all the shrine and lit up the depths. There's more to do to 100% but that's an incredible achievement if someone ever does it. TotK is just an incredible experience, there's so much here and while it all works so well that I can just nit-pick it's interesting to think just how much more they could have done with the systems they built. A game this full with so much untapped potential just shows how far ahead they've gotten, I don't think I've seen game with this sort of issue of being almost too much and yet not enough. I'll be very interesting to see where this does happen to go.
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