Episode 151 - Sacred Octopus Stick - The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

Expand-a-band-band, podcast stash! Welcome back to the podcast! We took a bit of an extra long time with this one, but if you’ve played this game, I imagine you’ll understand why. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is a massive open world game and the sequel to Breath of the Wild, the game that some people said redefined what open world games should be. To an extent that is true, and we have already seen a lot of its impact on the genre, but Tears of the Kingdom adds a pretty significant amount of innovation on top of that, and some of that stuff is going to be hard for developers to replicate. And all of that while reusing the same ground map as Breath of the Wild. Tears of the Kingdom is huge, yes, adding large new areas to explore and containing thousands of discrete goals to accomplish from quests to shrines to dungeons and collectibles, but its most defining feature is a more fiddly one, specifically the new abilities that let you manipulate the game’s physics system on an entirely new level than Breath of the Wild was able to pull off. Ultrahand, Recall and Fuse let you use the game’s environment more or less to your whims, building contraptions with prepackaged device spheres to do anything from driving a car across Hyrule to making an enemy-seeking robot, shoot arrows imbued with an absurd number of item specific properties and move objects back and forth through time, opening a ton of possibilities not just in combat, but in traversal and puzzle solving. Meanwhile Ascend makes you entirely rethink the way you look at the game world, the effect of which isn’t dissimilar to Red Faction’s destructible environments way back in the PS2 era feeling like a revolutionary upheaval of game systems. The experience of playing this game is somehow very different from playing its predecessor, but with a familiarity that makes it feel simultaneously very comfortable but also tricking you into maybe not being as blown away as you could be. We’re going to be talking about our exploration of the mechanics and how our experiences differed in how and when we realized we could take advantage of our new abilities, the inclusion of new enemies and dungeons that felt significantly different from each other and from Breath of the Wild, and we confirm that the Ganondorf we are talking about is the shirtless sexy Demon King one. Thank you for joining us this week, and apologies for the late release! Tears of the Kingdom is probably going to be one of (if not the) most talked about games this year, and we aren’t exactly early to the discourse, but I hope you enjoy the episode. I’m not kidding when I say Ascend has changed the way I view games, with me thinking I can travel vertically in everything I play now. It’ll be a while before the effects of this game wear off on people. What did you think? Was the game worth the wait since 2017? Did the game make your Switch catch on fire? Let us know over in our Discord or in the comment section! Next time, we’re entering into the very well named and not stupid at all “Spooktember in July” where we’re going to be talking about Resident Evil VIII (or Village, or 8, I suppose) so we hope you’ll join us for that.