Rolled credits after a ridiculous 185 hours.
What an incredible experience this was. Genuinely feels like the development team went for broke and tried to put
everything in the game. Which is such a departure from how minimalist Breath of the Wild was in all fronts. But I think both games really compliment each other really well. Tears of the Kingdom feels like the "second half", the "after the master sword pull" section that Zelda games tend to have but Breath of the Wild was missing. Breath of the Wild is clean, cohesive and very pure in that it has a vision that it stays true to throughout. Tears of the Kingdom is complex and dizzying, pulling in ten different directions at once at all times.
What's amazing to me is that, despite the breadth and the ambition, it tends to nail nearly everything. I do have a few complaints, but a lot of them amount to, "I wish there was more *", which is pure gluttony at best. Other things just wind up not mattering. Like, I really dislike the story, but when everything comes to a head, the art style, the music, the gameplay, the events playing out in front of me, there's a sensation pure emotion that blows away most things I've experienced with stories and characters that I actually liked. It's just phenomenal. Amazing that it could impact me this much despite me not particularly being invested in that side of things.
The crazy thing to me is that, as all-encompassing and definitive as Tears of the Kingdom feels, it's only just scratching the surface of what the team can do with the concepts they've developed. Aonuma has implied that the freely traversable world of Breath of the Wild was an idea that had long gestated at Nintendo, but was only able to be realised as technology progressed. What's clear to me is that the ideas in Tears of the Kingdom, and the ideas
in the series as a whole are still waiting for technology to catch up. This has long been a series where the player manipulates light and shadow, water and fire, wind and time. I think back to Ocarina of Time and remember the very first dungeon in the game expecting me to burn spiderwebs by lighting wooden sticks on fire and carrying that fire over, or to break a web by falling onto it from an appropriate height. This stuff felt
tactile in a way that puzzles in, say, Resident Evil just didn't. They weren't systemic, but they felt that way.
And now they are that way. But not all of them. Water, light, these things are still fudged, and we're further still away from making the "collapse the three pillars and make the top floor fall into the floor below" thing from Link's Awakening a "reality". Let alone the combination of these things and the cause/effect of the player propagating across the entire world in the way I envisioned in
my open-air dungeon concept. I genuinely think Zelda stands to gain more from tech advancement than any other series I can think of, because simulation is a core part of the gameplay. That wasn't immediately obvious when we were just burning bushes and bombing walls in 1987. But it is now.
I'm sure this is contrary to what a lot of people think, but for me, the future of the series shines so bright. It's never been brighter. Hope I live long enough to see it develop further.