Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is a playground for goblins

polygon.com:

Nintendo is just daring us to break The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.

I had many questions going into a recent hands-on demo with the upcoming open-world adventure — How much has Hyrule changed? What role will the Zonai tribe play? Where the hell has Tingle been? —but my prevailing curiosity was this: What did Nintendo itself learn from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild? Which tenets did it credit with the game’s runaway success, and which ones did it build upon in the sequel? As it turns out, based on 90 minutes with what promises to be a massive game, Nintendo really enjoyed Breath of the Wild’s propensity for spiraling joyously out of control. And the company is even happier to abide chaos in Tears of the Kingdom.

A quick note about me: I can be a bit of a goblin. If a game allows me to peek behind its curtain, I will do so immediately. If a game is promising me freedom of choice, I will exploit that freedom as soon as I can. If a game challenges me to take advantage of its interlocking systems, I will find the spaces in which those systems don’t quite coalesce, and do my best to emphasize the inconsistency. Simply put: I like to cause mischief.

So it was with little hesitation that I fused an explosive barrel to my shield within the first 10 seconds of my demo last week. Once a Bokoblin obliterated himself and five of his friends with an errant swing of his club, I nocked an arrow, opened my inventory, fused a bomb flower to the tip of the projectile, and promptly shot a Hinox in the pupil with my makeshift grenade launcher. He didn’t die, so I stuck an ancient flamethrower to the tip of a rusty sword, and lashed him from afar with my newfound flame whip. His health was dwindling, and all it would