This article is part of a directory: The Legend Of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom - Complete Guide And Walkthrough
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The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is an immersive sim. Strange as it is to see Link and Ganondorf lumped in with the likes of Corvo Attano and Andrew Ryan, the new Zelda shares design principles with all things 0451. Tears of the Kingdom rewards player experimentation and lateral thinking. It encourages multiple playstyles; if there’s a problem to solve in Tears of the Kingdom, there are roughly one million ways to proceed. Breath of the Wild already incorporated this design, but TotK doubles down on the kind of creativity that makes games like Dishonored and Prey sing.

Meanwhile, Arkane, the developer behind Dishonored and Prey, got the worst reviews in its history with Redfall, a vampire looter-shooter that watered down those elements to make something more ‘mainstream.’ I put mainstream in quotes because with 10 million copies sold in three days, the eccentric Tears of the Kingdom is significantly more mainstream than Redfall. But it achieved that success by taking the path less traveled, not the path less interesting.

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Obviously, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom owes much of its success to the four words at the beginning of its title. It’s a sequel to a beloved game in a wildly popular series. Redfall is a new IP and it’s hard to know what will make an impression in a crowded market. Arkane has made great games that didn’t sell all that well, so the studio making a mediocre one that performs poorly isn’t all that surprising.

A Korok being crucified in Tears of the Kingdom.
Image: 5os4ku

But, Zelda's not just outperforming Arkane, it's selling better than any Zelda game ever has. In a few days, Tears of the Kingdom sold more than a third as many copies as Breath of the Wild did in six years. It has already blown past the lifetime sales of every other Zelda game.

Mechanically, it’s an odd game. It lets you fuse multiple sticks together to make one extremely long weapon, crucify Koroks, build working engines, or tape a bomb to your shield and ride it into a lizard person’s head. Compared to Breath of the Wild, which was already the most mechanically expansive title in the series, Tears of the Kingdom is a wide open field of possibilities. It arrives at a time when the triple-A space is largely winnowing down to just a few kinds of games with well-honed, but narrow mechanical possibilities. Plenty of developers deliver pretty, but safe games — like Woody in his plastic at Al’s Toy Barn. But Tears of the Kingdom feels like it was made for the Sids of the world, for players who can’t wait to fuse a baby’s head to a spider’s body.

This isn’t to dunk on Redfall or other games — like Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, Marvel’s Avengers, Anthem, and Gotham Knights — that are pursuing mainstream success and financial stability. Those are understandable goals. But, Tears of the Kingdom suggests that those aims may be better achieved by pursuing something weird and wonderful that feels unlike anything you’ve ever played, rather than something that you’ve already seen achieve success. This new Zelda being a behemoth is an invitation for other triple-A developers to find the things that make their games unique, not the edges they can sand off to make them palatable for a mainstream audience. The current generation of players have grown up with user-generated content in games like Roblox and Fortnite. They can handle things that are a little off the beaten path.

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