168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Legend of Zelda: Tears o𒆙f the Kingdom offers a positive vision of what video games could be. With the six-years-in-the-making sequel to 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Breath of the Wild, Nintendo has its priorities straight. Its aesthetic is evocative, but i𝔉t isn't chasing top-tier graphical fidelity. It offers a fam﷽iliar, yet new world to explore that leverages player expectations against them, hiding fresh secrets in places we thought we knew well. It's a butterfly bursting from its cocoon after more than half a decade of gestation — though it and Breath of the Wild share a common caterpillar core, this is where Nintendo's new take on Zelda takes flight.

And I do mean that literally. With the introduction of the scattered Sky Isl🦄ands floating above Hyrule, Tears of the Kingdom spends much of its time in the air. Whether above, or in the Depths below, TOTK’s three tiers offer entirely different experiences of exploration. In the air, you’re trying to muster the power of the Zonai technology — recurring itemღs like fans, sleds, wheels, steering sticks, and rockets which Link can combine together — to bridge the gap between the islands. This offers some of the game’s best puzzles, as you attempt to float just a little higher. In the Depths, meanwhile, your focus is on creating light, activating Lightroots and chucking Brightbloom seeds as you attempt to navigate the dangerous landscape.

Link riding horseback across a field in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

Air and caverns provide Tears of the Kingdom’s biggest expansions, but its mechanical changes are where its refinements shine brightest. After Breath of the Wild was met with near universal acclaim, there was one thing that the game's haters🌠 pointed to as a source of their discontent with the beloved game: weapon degradation. Whereas in previous Zelda games, Link got item💛s and could use them endlessly, Breath of the Wild made everything break. Even the Master Sword, the legendary blade that seals the darkness, would quickly run out of juice like an RC car on Christmas afternoon. So, did Nintendo cave to the discontent and get rid of this system?

Nope. But, like a good improv performer, the Zelda team took its audience's suggestions and incorporated them into the sketch. Instead of eschewing weapon durability entirely, Tears of the Kingdom made the system more interesting. In Breath of the Wild, Link could use the weapons that he found until they broke. Tears of the Kingdom introduces the Fuse system, allowing you to combine any item 🔴in your inventory with any weapon. They still break eventually, but I was never annoyed by that because it was an invitation to try a new combination. As Eiji Aonuma said , you could combine a Keese eye with an arrow to make a homing missile that zeroed in on the closest enemy. Ice, fire, electricity, and explosives could all be glued onto swords, spears, shields, andꦍ arrows and each time there were new results.

Tears of the Kingdom built on Breath of the Wild, literally. It introduced a system that let you create your own structures with the Ultrahand ability, which did what Fuse did for everything besides weapons. You could slam wheels on a wooden plank and — VOILA! — you had a car. You could build a big wagon, or a mech, or . Well, I couldn’t build that. But part of the joy🌠 of playing Tears of the Kingdom is seeing what messed-up antics the game’s most creative plaꦑyers are getting up to online.

Like Elden Ring before it, Tears of the Kingdom makes the argument that asset reuse is not necessarily a bad thing. The map is largely laid out the same as it was in Breath of the Wild. Kakariko Village and Gerudo Town and Goron City are in the same locations they were in six years ago. Would it be cool to explore an entirely new open-world Hyrule? Sure, but as in the Yakuza series, the return of old locations piques your curiosity — you want to see how they've changed since your last v🍎isit and how they've stayed the same. Kakariko Village now has ruins scattered around it, one of which you can't explore until late in the game. Zora's Domain has been tainted by a strange black ooze falling from the sky. The Divine Beasts have disappeared entirely, replaced with new structures that mu🃏st be sought out in the four regions of the map.

Familiar locations from Breath of the Wild as they appear in Tears of the Kingdom

The game is able to be as mechanically innovative and ambitious as it is because Nintendo didn't have to start from scratch. Instead of building a brand new Hyrule, Nintendo took an additive ❀approach, arraying an archipelago of floating islands in the sky, and the eerie cavernous Depths below the ground. The Zelda team burrowed into the Hyrule it had established in Breath of the Wild, adding tons of explorable underground locations. Just about every village or stable has at least one well that you can drop down into and explore. Instead of adding another inch-deep ocean, Nintendo added depth to the sea that was already there.

That may strike some players as unambitious, but Tears of the Kingdom is 💖the best kind of iterative game. You might be exploring a Hyrule that is largely the same, but when Link has several entirely new ways to interact with the world, the world becomes a fundamentally different place, too. It offers a better path forward for the games industry. Here, bigger is better applies not to the scope of the map or the number of polygons i🅠n the character models, but to the scope of the possibilities at your fingertips.

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