Tears of the Kingdom devs hoped to deliver an Eternal Sunshine moment
Tears of the Kingdom whisks players back to the sprawling iteration of Hyrule introduced in Breath of the Wild for another open-world adventure, but this time things are a little different.
Floating islands drift overhead, beckoning players to explore the heavens; vast chasms have appeared across the land, unleashing a horrifying Gloom upon Hyrule; and a near-fatal encounter has granted Link strange new powers that allow them to manipulate ancient relics, alter the flow of time, meld through objects, and build crackpot contraptions.
It's a sequence of events that means this version of Hyrule feels both immediately familiar and distinctly fresh, and according to franchise producer Eiji Aonuma and director Hidemaro Fujibayashi–speaking to The Verge–that was precisely what the dev team set out to achieve.
After the success of Breath of the Wild, which has sold almost 30 million copies worldwide, Fujibayashi and the team received messaged from fans saying they wished they could erase their memories of the game and start all over again.
It'll be a familiar sentiment to anybody who's found a slice of media–be it a novel, movie, video game, or album–that resonates profoundly. The desire to experience something we adore through fresh eyes is an irresistible notion, and Aonuma and Fujibayashi set out to instill a sense of tabula rasa by handing players new mechanics that would let them see Hyrule from a completely different perspective.
"In developing this game, one of our main goals—especially for fans who have played and put a lot of time into Breath of the Wild—was for them to feel the same kind of excitement and to be just as moved by Tears of the Kingdom as they were by Breath of the Wild," says Fujibayashi. "We really wanted to
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