Tears of the Kingdom’s inventiveness is baked into its sound design

polygon.com:

In The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, the final boss is placed enticingly within your reach from very early on. You can fight him basically as soon as you finish the tutorial regions. But whenever you, as the intrepid swordsman Link, approach this hallowed fight, the game subtly warns you of what awaits without forcing you away. Instead of blockading the fight behind plot points or explicitly using a text pop-up saying that a point of no return approaches like in other games, Tears of the Kingdom relies on a myriad of subtle signals to let you know when you are approaching the end. Primary among these is the game’s sound design. As you approach the final platform and the game gives you the option to dive, the creepy choral music that pervades the Depths crescendos, as if to ask: Are you actually ready?

If you’re a weirdo like me, you may have walked back and forth down the hill to the diving board of sorts, letting the choral cues and stilted piano melody recede and rise over and over. But this sound design also saved me from spoiling the final fight before I was ready. At this point in my playthrough, I was exploring the Depths below Hyrule Castle and accidentally entered the final boss area without armor and with only four hearts. After sneaking past some high-level enemies in my undies, I knew I was entering a point of no return primarily because of the music, which kept adding layers and increasing volume. From the relative silence of the “Forgotten Foundation” section, the game adds reversed vocal samples (as pointed out by YouTuber Scruffy) and then a high-pitched, anxiety-inducing piano just before the jump. I glided down, confirmed there was a cutscene, and, completely unequipped both literally and