I wish the Yiga Clan weren’t such silly geese in Tears of the Kingdom

polygon.com:

I love a good villain. Heroes save the day, but antagonists are often the ones who drive the plot forward. While Link and Zelda are reacting to Ganon’s plots, he gets to go wild unleashing things like the Calamity and the Upheaval. But having the same big bad gets a little stale, and Ganondorf is truly the most prolific boss in all of the Zelda games, only occasionally yielding ground to a secondary antagonist, like Zant.

Which is a shame, because I like a little bit of variety in my villains. There’s an excellent, untapped source of boss fights in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, but they never really quite get to shine.

[Ed. note: This article contains spoilers for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.]

The Yiga Clan first show up in Breath of the Wild, posing as common travelers on the road, only to reveal themselves in assassination attempts. They show up in the background throughout BotW, attempting to assassinate Link and Zelda and leveraging an informant in Kakariko Village. Link later infiltrates their HQ and bests Master Kohga, their leader, sending him plummeting into a pit in a cutscene laden with foreshadowing. Kohga isn’t exactly a dignified foe; you simply interrupt his Sheikah Slate casts and bonk him on his silly li’l noggin.

After dispatching Kohga, Yiga agents will show up randomly in the overworld to try and get some revenge, but we don’t learn too much about them otherwise. So when I found my first Yiga outpost in Tears of the Kingdom, I was beyond psyched. The idea of a Sheikah splinter ideology, opposed to our heroes but using the same powerful tools, is fascinating. There’s a lot to explore there.

At first, it looked like the Yiga Clan might have been able to