There’s no wrong way to play Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
With abilities that let you rewind time, no-clip through ceilings, craft a litany of makeshift weapons, and construct vehicles that would make Rube Goldberg drool, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdomcan be a bit overwhelming.
Our advice? Embrace the chaos, and enjoy the fact that there’s no wrong way to play this slapstick comedy of a game.
Throughout the two-week review period preceding Tears of the Kingdom’s release, my co-workers and I spoke constantly about the ways we solved certain puzzles, battled specific bosses, or navigated particular stretches of terrain. Where one of us fought the Water Temple boss several times to no avail, another discovered a Fuse combination that made the fight trivial. One of us crafted an elaborate rocket barge to reach a high-altitude Sky Island, but another used Ascend to swim up a massive stalactite hanging off the bottom of the rock.
At first, we worried that we were missing “the” solution, and had somehow sequence-broke, or cheated. I myself returned to a white whale-esque Shrine several days in a row, tortured over a treasure chest that was just out of reach, confident in the fact that I was missing some intricate detail that the game was trying to teach me about the Ultrahand ability. One day, I said screw it, concocted the jankiest machine possible, and opened the chest.
Was it the intended solution? Irrelevant. In Tears of the Kingdom, “intended” solutions are just one path and, ultimately, the ends justify the means. I recently spoke to director Hidemaro Fujibayashi and producer Eiji Aonuma, and they admitted as much. In fact, Ascend, one of the game’s most god-like abilities, began as a developer cheat.
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