Tears of the Kingdom’s ending is its own kind of tragedy

polygon.com:

[Ed. note: Spoilers follow for the ending of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.]

Tears of the Kingdom ends with everything back where it began. Ganondorf is defeated. Zelda returns and retakes her place on the throne. Link even regains his arm. The motley crew of helpers that he assembled on his journey comes together to pledge fealty to the crown. Zelda vows to dedicate herself to maintaining peace in Hyrule.

Of course, we know that she won’t succeed. The inevitability of a new Legend of Zelda game, a new iteration of Ganon threatening the princess and the world and being stopped by Link, is so obvious that it’s been canonized within the fiction itself. The three are locked in a cycle of reincarnation, driven in-universe by mysterious divine forces, and out of universe by the franchise’s ever-growing popularity.

That cycle is the great tragedy beneath the entirety of The Legend of Zelda’s narrative. And yet, Tears of the Kingdom’s ending acts as if preserving things entirely how they were before is a grand victory. To win is to return to the status quo.

But The Legend of Zelda’s status quo is running thinner every year. When Tears of the Kingdom was first announced, a peek at a short-haired Zelda in the trailer had manypeoplewondering if Nintendo would use the sequel to finally introduce a playable princess. Instead, her story is the same as it ever was. Even the Master Sword is given more agency. In the scene where it appears to her in the past, Zelda says that it “traveled through time to find me and recover [its] strength,” implying an intentional journey, while she was simply “sent” back by forces unknown.

When she returns, of course, she returns to the throne. In being stranded in Hyrule’s early years and