Tears of the Kingdom refines Zelda's open world approach, it just took me time to see it

This piece contains spoilers for the approach to the first dungeon in Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.

I can see now that I came to Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom excited but slightly nervous. I think I was unable to easily put into words exactly what I hoped for from it. This is because I loved Breath of the Wild, but I didn’t always like it. I knew Zelda had to change and I really admired the way this ingenious, generous, agenda-shifting game rethought the basic template. I would play it for hours on end. But maybe there weren’t quite enough of those hours where I genuinely felt I was playing a Zelda game.

Five or six hours into Tears of the Kingdom, though, something happened. I suddenly realised that, while I was clearly playing a game built on the foundation of Breath of the Wild, I was also playing a game that was starting to feel like Zelda. Easy to say, but hard to actually explain. I still don’t have the words easily to hand. So instead, I’ll return to the point at which I started to feel this way, and we’ll see what happens.

Actually, let’s start a little bit before that. Those first five or six hours of Tears of the Kingdom were fascinating, entertaining, and sometimes genuinely thrilling. Exploring the initial sky islands offered both a tutorial in new powers but also a seriess of epiphanies as the sheer potential of those powers became clear. There was comedy: I slowly pieced together a bridge with Ultrahand and immediately dropped it into the abyss. There was actual wonder: I steadily worked out that, if in doubt, I should fire up Ascend and try swimming through a bit of rock. There was more comedy: I used Fuse to make a weapon so devastatingly heavy that when I used it, the centrifugal force spun me into space.

This stuff was great, but it felt like Breath of the Wild with a bit of a makeover. It felt like Nintendo’s sublime sandbox, providing space for the imagination and a gentle, all but concealed nudge to get the imagination moving. When I got down to Hyrule, this feeling continued. I spent the next few hours happily sandboxing: unlocking towers, completing shrines, just moving the camera and picking points on the horizon.