This article contains spoilers for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’s Master Kohga of the Yiga Clan and Trail of the Master Sword quests.
Zelda games often ask you to think about depth to solve puzzles. Across the series, dungeons ha🥃ve required you to hit a switcဣh on the third floor that unlocks a door all the way down on the first floor. In the 2D games, this process may involve dropping a key through a hole in the floor then using it on a door down below.
As common as that dynamic has been, it's rare to see it extended beyond individual dungeons and out into the overworld. But that's exactly what 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Tears of the Kingdom does, and fairly often, too.
Much has been made about the three levels of the game's map. The story begins beneath the surface, as Link and Zelda explore the tunnels below Hyrule Castle. Their actions there cause the Upheaval, sending Link to the Great Sky Islands. Once you’ve completed the tutorial shrines, Link skydives back down to the ground, where we spent the entirety of Breath of the Wild. Early on, the game is showing you that each of the three layers has an important role to play.
This means that when you're attempting to solve any challenge, you may need to consider your relationship to the other layers. Do you have enough Zonaite to build a machine? If not, head to the Depths. Does that machine need extra juice to accomplish the task at hand? Head to the sky. The various layers are bound together like the cover and pages of a thrilling novel.
Puzzles also rely on this understanding of interdependence. The Master Kohga of the Yiga Clan quest sums this up perfectly. That quest is tricky, but it's an example of the story's critical path pushing you to think outside the box. For most of the quest, you find the chasm closest to where you need to go, dive down it, and follow a series of statues until you reach the Yiga mining operation. But the final leg takes you into an area that doesn't have a chasm on the surface. If you find the closest one and follow it, you'll hit a deadend where the last statue has been overturned into a wall. If you're used to thinking about each area of the map separately, this will really get you stuck. It’s one of the only times I’ve had to look up a guide.
But if you mark the statue on the map, return to the surface, and search the area around that waypoint thoroughly, you'll eventually find a chasm hidden in Rito Village, which will take you where you need to go.
Finding the Deku Tree, similarly, forces you to think about how the maps relate to each other. You can try to access it from the mainland all you want, but you won’t reach Korok Forest without a delve in the Depths. If you're not paying close attention to the main quest and are seeking out every interesting landmark on the map instead, this lesson may come in the form of a labyrinth. These miniature dungeons begin on the ground, ascend to the sky where you solve an aerial maze, then task you with skydiving all the way down to the Depths for a boss battle. It’s a literal vertical slice of what the game has to offer.
I 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:wrote recently about how it will be interesting to see if GTA 6 has a large underground area after 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Elden Ring anꦺd Tears of🧸 the Kingdom have expanded their maps with subterranean environments. But it will take a lot to match TOTK’s approach, which imagines the sky, ground, and the depths of Hyrule as one contiguous space, a puzzle box the size of a world.