Everything in Tears of the Kingdom is Temporary, and it’s Annoying

Let’s get this out of the way: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is one my favourite video games of all time. It’s a game that, possibly for the first time in my life, made me feel an almost childlike sense of discovery. A game where I found joy in the aimless wander, rejecting my otherwise annoyingly pragmatic, objective-driven brain. Where I would come across a random hill or nondescript rock face and think, “I want to climb up there and see what’s at the top.” I’d never felt so immersed in a game’s world, especially one that didn’t have a strong narrative to help guide it like The Witcher 3–another one of my all-time favourites. The world itself was enough, it felt alive and as if it were telling a story itself.

So when I saw the review of one my favourite critics, Stephanie Sterling, I was disheartened to read that she didn’t get along with the game as well as I and many others did. Her main gripe for the game was its weapon durability system, saying: “Weapon durability systems are never fun, and Zelda goes out of its way to make it as excruciating as it possibly can.” She’d go on to say with her podcast cohorts on the Podquisition that the stamina meter was also a point of irritation for her. She felt it depleted far too quickly in the early game and that it wouldn’t be until a handful of upgrades later that she felt it adequate and what players should have started with. Many of these grievances return for Sterling in her Tears of the Kingdom review as well, a game that she also gave a 7/10, which though commendable and what she still considers a “good” game, sits well below the title’s aggregated average.         

I can understand why these systems could be annoying for some, but I never felt it got in the way of Breath of the Wild’s greatness. I was too engrossed in my adventure, my next discovery, my next shrine to focus on how many more hits I had left on my ‘Knight’s Broadsword’, because I knew a ‘Gerudo Scimitar’ was right around the corner. And the stamina meter was just a small challenge I needed to overcome in order to get to the place where I was looking forward to going. It’s been six years since my adventure in the lands of Hyrule came to a close, and never once do I look back at my time with Breath of the Wild and think of the word “frustrating.” I am now currently 55 hours into Nintendo’s sequel, and it shocks me to say but “frustrating” has unfortunately been a word that’s fluttered across my mind more than once during this time.

Tears of the Kingdom is just as much the same as it is better than its predecessor. It has you play once again in the exact same Hyrule as you did before, though this time it adds to it by introducing explorable islands in the sky as well as a cavernous underworld. It has a little over the same number of shrines to complete, though this time each of them must be solved with the use of the Ultrahand, Link’s new toy this time around, which allows for some incredibly creative solutions to puzzles and exploration—but more on that later. Many of the NPC’s are also the same, though now some of them have side-quests that are bolstered by a proper narrative. And just like before, weapon degradation and that pesky stamina meter return.

There’s definitely a sense that much of the “magic” that resonated so deeply with me in Breath of the Wild has been lost here in Tears of the Kingdom. Though I am admittedly awed by the physics systems of the game and how seamless the Ultrahand abilities work with the environment, allowing players to bring out their inner engineers, much if not most of that sense of discovery I mentioned in the opening paragraph has faded. I am back to the pragmatic side of my gamer brain of checking off side-quests and consistently referring to the map and highlighting my next objective. Whether this is simply because I feel I’m retreading old waters I’m not sure, but this sensation has opened the door to another feeling, one that I never felt with Breath of the Wild: impatience.

Everything that Sterling criticized in her reviews of these games I am now overtly aware of and losing patience with. Every time I leap off a cliff hoping to glide across a treacherous body of water, my stamina meter—which I’ve already upgraded a handful of times—depletes and I fall into the water, causing my Link to drown and respawn all the way back to the top of the cliff. Every time I hope to take a shortcut by climbing over a hill, I come up just a hair short and my Link falls all the way back down with a few hearts taken from his life. Every time I get surrounded by a group of Bokoblins and don’t want to use one of my better weapons during the fight, I inevitably have to because God forbid a sword that has the word “sturdy” in its title be a little less brittle.

One of the primary functions of the Ultrahand is the ability to move and attach objects to one another, allowing players to build bridges out of just a few slabs of wood, or fully functional vehicles with the use of ancient technology known in the world as Zonaite. A quick search on YouTube shows the vast array of truly impressive things players across the globe have built; everything from motorcycles to flying saucers right out of a sci-fi movie. I myself was so excited when I finished my first, albeit crude, fan-powered car. What I wasn’t excited to see was that as soon as I began driving it a battery meter showed up on the bottom of my screen, letting me know that this car had a limited time before I had to step off of it in order to allow it to recharge.

You can extend the charge life, sure, by defeating a bunch of the Zonaite robots around the world, each of whom will drop a Zonai Charge, which you can consume to add a little sliver to the charge. Don’t get it twisted, though, because once you consumed a number of extra charges and hop back on your vehicle, those extra charges are only temporary and unable to recharge like your original—so once you’ve used them up, you’re off to fight more robots if you want more than just one measly charge. This is made worse when you know that there are actual Zonai Batteries you can find, which act like a battery pack that don’t use up your main charge, but each battery—which are somewhat of a rarity to find—have a laughably small amount of charge themselves, making them almost pointless to attach to your creation.

It’s not just the charge that’s temporary, either. Created vehicles themselves will only exist for a certain amount of time. I was appalled after I excitedly hopped on to my first makeshift blimp—comprised of a handful of air balloons and wooden planks—only to see that each ballon started flashing an ominous green light after a minute, which eventually led to them “popping” out of existence one by one. I built a fan-powered hovercraft that I was looking forward to traversing around the sky islands with—and had even saved up enough batteries to keep the thing afloat awhile—only to tearfully watch it blip out of existence, as if Thanos had snapped his fingers, no more than a minute later.

It was also upsetting to see that after carefully parking my rad motorcycle outside of one of the many campsites and venturing off only a cliff away to defeat a Hinox, that upon my return the motorcycle was gone. I understand that this might be a hardware limitation with the Switch, and it not having enough RAM to keep assets like that in memory, but it was upsetting nevertheless. It would at least be nice to have a GTA-like feature wherein you can save your most precious vehicles in a “garage,” but I have yet to come across a feature like that. Though I doubt something like that would even matter because it’s almost certain that you’ll lose it either way if you stray even a little from it in the open world—something that doesn’t happen in GTA.

From weapons and shields, to the stamina meter, to Zonai charges, to vanishing vehicles—everything about Tears of the Kingdom feels temporary. The feelings of accomplishment after building the perfect vehicle are quickly smacked away by the game taking it away from you. The giddiness of having fused an otherwise run-of-the-mill sword with a rare item, increasing its attack power tenfold, are tempered by the knowledge that you only have a handful of strikes before it eventually withers away. Breath of the Wild only had you worrying about the stamina meter and weapon durability, but Tears of the Kingdom adds a number of other “temporary satisfactions” that just make the experience evermore frustrating. It’s still a phenomenal game, an incredible achievement, and in many ways better than its predecessor; and maybe I could have looked past these frustrations if I were experiencing them for the first time, but the familiarity strips away that magic.