There are 120 Shrines in Breath of the Wild. There are 900 Korok Seeds, and the reward at the end is poo. Literally. Early reports suggest that there are the same number of Koroks hidden across Hyrule in Tears of the Kingdom, and 32 more Shrines in the sequel – my guess is that those are in the sky. That’s a lot of things to collect, even if they do level up Link by deepening his pockets or fueling his stamina bar. The trouble with Tears of the Kingdom is, there are loads more things to collect now, too.
We’ll start with the most egregious, and the most similar to Breath of the Wild’s offerings: Zonaite. My colleague Eric Switzer has already detailed just how much of a grind it is to find 900 of the mineral deposits, and the insufferable waiting to transform them three times at different vendors until they finally become one extra charge for your Energy Cell. While the resource itself is not difficult to find, especially in The Depths, the process to convert it to battery power is laborious and time consuming.
However, it has precedent. Tears of the Kingdom iterates on Breath of the Wild in many ways, and the primary manner is through its abilities, most notably Ultrahand. It has almost replaced the stamina bar as Link’s most powerful resource, and the one you have to manage most carefully in order to explore and progress. Cliffs you can’t climb? Build a ramp. Gaps you can’t jump? Build a bridge. Enemy you can’t defeat? Build a fully-functional mech with lasers and wheels. Grinding Zonaite to get more Energy Cells is just like grinding Shrines to increase your health or stamina, except far less interesting. I’m not a huge fan, but at least it makes sense, unlike all the checklists to come.
After making your way to Rito Village, you meet Penn, an investigative journalist for the Lucky Clover Gazette. He’s got a beak for a story and is in search of a scoop, so you’re off to investigate every Stable in Hyrule! It doesn’t matter if you’ve already been there! Go again! And do a nice little quest!
These quests are actually quite varied and fun, but checking Stables off a list got old quickly. Even with the ability to fast travel to most of them, it felt like I was being forced to explore, rather than being given the freedom to do so. There’s no better way of putting it – it just didn’t feel very Breath of the Wild. I haven't even mentioned the whole ordeal of having a literal gachapon machine distributing Zonai machinery in return for your various severed limbs of defeated enemies – I'm not sure why it's there, but it's another grind-based mechanic that I could do without.
There are two more checklists that serve even less purpose: hunting Bubbulfrogs and exploring wells for Fera. While I like navigating the ins and outs of Hyrule’s surface as much as the next person, these feel like tick box exercises with meagre rewards. Kilton and Koltin will eventually give you a full set of Mystic Armour for collecting enough of the 400 Bubbul Gems available, while Fera will just give you plain old Rupees. Tears of the Kingdom’s 58 wells are exciting and interesting in their own right, but it feels like Nintendo doesn’t trust you enough to explore them off your own back. Or it doesn’t trust its own developers to lead you there without another collectathon quest.
This means that, by the time you’re hunting for the murals writ across Hyrule’s landscape for Impa, you’re thoroughly bored of being sent here, there, and everywhere for this, that, and everything. These ancient drawings not only look really cool, especially when you’re hurtling down from a sky island, but serve narrative importance. The flashbacks to Ganondorf’s rise to power that also tell of Zelda’s trip to the past are intriguing and play to Tears of the Kingdom’s strengths: its story. These memories are also far easier to find than Breath of the Wild’s version, which I appreciate greatly, but when they’re one of five different checklists you’re meant to be ticking off, it feels like a grind.
I’m sure there’s an optimal route to check off everything in one winding sweep of the map, but that’s not what modern Zelda is about. Modern Zelda is about finding your own way and exploring off your own back, not being pointed to thousands of locations and being told to go there for a small reward. I don’t want a handful of Rupees for jumping down a well, I want there to be something cool and interesting at the bottom to tempt me down there. Breath of the Wild lured you across its landscape with a carrot on a stick, the promise of finding something cool was enough to keep you climbing. Tears of the Kingdom has replaced the carrot with a Rupee, and the stick is held by another merchant NPC. The exploration used to be a reward in itself, but Nintendo doesn’t trust its reiteration of Hyrule to capture that magic any more. It’s a shame, because money is even less magical than tired old towns.