My early hours in Tears of the Kingdom were a comedy of errors

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By Webdesk


Let me tell you about the time I got stranded on an island floating in the sky.

Like its predecessor, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom starts in some kind of training area. In this case, it’s a series of interconnected islands high in the sky where you can not only unlock your initial skills, but also learn the basics of how to use them. There are even helpful old robots around to give you tips.

It was here that I first gained access to Ultrahand, an ability that allows Link to magically pick up objects, including things that are way too big to hold, and fuse them together. It looks something like this:

One of the first and most obvious uses for this skill is building bridges. You chop down some trees with an axe, use the Ultrahand to stick them together with magic glue, then pick the whole thing up and carefully place it over a chasm so you can walk across it. It’s very simple – or so I thought.

Shortly after gaining access to the Ultrahand, I jumped off a series of platforms and landed on a fairly remote islet. All the other surrounding islands were too far away to jump to, and the platforms that took me there were now too high to reach. Perfect time for a bridge, I thought. I spent a good 15 minutes cutting down every tree around me and carefully connecting them together to make a nice straight bridge. I was very proud of the result. And then I picked it up, placed it on the edge of the island closest to me… and saw it fall off the edge into the void below because it wasn’t flat enough.

So there I was: trapped with no means to get me out of the situation. I eventually jumped off the ledge and was lucky enough to respawn on the mainland. But that was far from my only tragic flaw as I learned to deal with it Tears of the Kingdom‘s new toolset. Later I spent what felt like an eternity trying to get a metal hook flat on a wooden plank so I could use it to ride down a rail. And when I finally got it down and hung the hook over the railing… it slid right down without me sitting on it. The same thing happened later, when I tried to ride a glider to a lower area, and it kept flying away before I could jump on it.

And when I did finally getting started? I was on the wing, causing the glider to spiral out of control as I plummeted to my death.

It was frustrating and at first I thought I was struggling to understand what the game wanted of me. Every time I tried something, it seemed to end in my death. It didn’t help that the game’s controls took quite a bit of getting used to, so it took a while for all my experiments to really take off. But then I remembered something Breath of the Wild director Hidemaro Fujibayashi told me a few years ago about how the developers at Nintendo approached the concept of death and failure in the game.

“There’s actually a kind of fun to be had in falling and dying,” he explained. “You learn to be careful and careful. And we felt that gave many players the emotional readiness to take on the rest of the world. So we finally decided that we had to let them die.”

And that’s exactly what happened to me. What all those failures have taught me in the end is something that is key Tears of the Kingdom: there is always more than one way to do something. I was so fixated on getting things right that I didn’t try anything else, which usually led me to those comedic deaths.

This has helped me countless times now that I’m out and about in the wider realm of Hyrule. With a full range of Link’s abilities at my disposal, I’m able to do things that seem completely wrong, but still get the job done. For example, my favorite strategy for getting to high areas was to use the Ultrahand to piece together a haphazard structure that’s high enough to reach where I want to be, but can’t really stand on its own. I then prop it up where I’m going, watch it topple over, climb up and then hit it with the rewind function, turning it into a cumbersome elevator.

The moment something like this works feels like a hack or a cheat. It’s not the kind of clever solution that Zelda games usually require. There was certainly an element in this Breath of the Wildbut the new building mechanics and skills in it Tears of the Kingdom provide much more room for creative problem solving and often forced me to really think about new ways of approaching situations. When I first started playing I was worried, after watching trailers full of incredible in-game builds that I knew I’d never make it through, that this game would be too hard for me.

But it turns out you can still be bad at building and be successful Tears of the Kingdom — it only took a few early deaths to realize that.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom launches on Nintendo Switch on May 12.



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