My Wishlist for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is one of the most anticipated sequels to come from Nintendo in a long, long time. Following in the giant footsteps of 2017’s The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is no easy task for TOTK but the game at least has the benefit of being a direct sequel, meaning it’s already standing on the shoulders of a giant. Nintendo seems to really be hedging their bets on the solid foundation of BOTW as they make one of the oddest decisions yet with this games marketing. What is really odd about this game, is that it comes out in 50 days yet we really don’t know much about the games features or story. Nintendo is pulling a confusing yet intriguing marketing strategy by essentially having no marketing at all – fans and speculators only have a release date, and two brief trailers showing off a world that looks largely the same as in Breath of the Wild. I’ve just finished my first play through of BOTW (albeit 6 years late) leaving me with a pretty fresh perspective on this particular slice of Zelda. Normally, I don’t like to be and armchair game developer, but Nintendo really has my gears spinning with the lack of transparency for such a huge release. Since we don’t have any confirmed features to look forward to, I’m going to use my nitpicks of BOTW as a wish list for what I hope to see in the upcoming TOTK.

The one trailer that we have seen for Tears of the Kingdom showed us a lot of familiar ground, which is a bit of a concern since a large chunk of BOTW’s gameplay and appeal revolves around going out and exploring new horizons. Some of the most magical moments in BOTW are when the map is still blank and you’re making your own fun by exploring every corner and canyon of the giant world. This magic simply won’t be there for returning players if the game reuses the same map without changes to infrastructure. The trailer does show that the sky seems to be populated now with buildings sitting on top of clouds, which is a cool idea depending on how far they go with that idea. Adding the sky can essentially add a second layer to the map, which has potential to be a blast. I won’t want to explore very much of the land-based map if it’s largely the same map as before. I’d love to see a small village turn in to a bustling town. I welcome the demise of a major city, where ruins can stand as a reminder of the past. Imagine new mountain ranges where others have been destroyed – there’s a lot of possibilities here depending on how many geographical and societal changes the still unknown story allows for. If we are getting sky areas, I think it’d be really cool to have even taller mountains that can “kiss the sky” while acting as the transitional route between the two. There’s a lot you could do with taller mountains, like having unique enemy varieties and floating forts. The world feeling too familiar runs a serious risk of ruining the childlike curiosity that one feels when first playing BOTW.

Piggybacking off of the infrastructure changes, I’d like to see the actual geography change along with the buildings and locations. BOTW featured a ton of mountain and mountain-like areas, but they were void of any internal features. Mountains often have caves, caverns, or some sort of features other than just flat jagged sides that reach a peak. In reality, there’s more than meets the eyes when you’re looking at the face of a mountain. The mountains in BOTW feature small alcoves and the occasional “underground” shrine, but there’s no actual cave systems in a universe that actively references caves. The game even starts off in a shallow cave, its not like caves weren’t on the mind when they were developing the game…so where are they? BOTW features a group of rock-people known as Goron. The Goron eat rocks as their main fuel source, so of course they’re mostly miners by trade. The game shows us that the Goron have railways for transporting rocks in and out of caves, and they even have giant cannons to make new caves - yet we aren’t ever able to actually see the caves. It’s weird to me that the Goron decide to do all of their mining on the surface of a mountain. It feels like Nintendo intended to flesh out the mines a little more but for whatever reason called it a day by slapping the word “abandoned” on the mining area that would otherwise be explorable.

The very wet TLOZ: The Windwaker

There is a lot of water in BOTW but you can never really dive beyond the surface and explore what lies beneath. This game hides treasure chests underwater for you to pick up with the stasis powers, but that’s basically the end of your ability to interact below the briny depths. Previously, Zelda games have had whole entries focused on water and have even had temples set in the water (I’m still mad at the water temple in OOT). Navigating across water is a pain in the ass in this game if there’s no boats around as you need to find a creative solution to get where you need to go. More often than not you’ll be stuck summoning ice blocks to get across water in BOTW, but this can take forever depending on where you are going. The Zora people are a major plot point in this game, and I found it really out of place that their whole society lives above ground. They are aquatic beings that happen to be able to surface for a while, not the other way around. Basically, the Zora are following the same laws of nature that apply to real-life Dolphins. There are so many different environments and enemies in the seas of Hyrule, it feels like a huge missed opportunity not to have them in this game considering that water is a prominent landscape feature. Interacting more beyond the games rock and water surfaces not only allow for more ground to explore, but there’s a great potential to expand the lore and worlds of the Goron and Zora, who are probably going to be just as important to the story of TOTK.

Many open world games like BOTW offer a crafting system of some sorts. For about 12 hours in BOTW, I sort of assumed that there would be a crafting system given all the items you can pick up but not necessarily eat. These are items that would seem practical to a soldier on a journey like our hero, Link. You can basically buy everything that you need in terms of gear in BOTW, but there will be many moments where you will run out of something essential and then have to go back in to town to stock up which can ruin the pacing of your fun. There have been a few moments where I’ve run out of all of my weapons and arrows in the middle of combat, and I’ve had to resort to less than ideal measures just to escape the encounter. Sure, you can use your bombs amongst other solutions in this situation, but you’ll probably have to spam them repeatedly as they’re not too effective on their own. Some might say “just be prepared for battle” but part of the magic of BOTW is you don’t really know who or what lies around the next corner and the land is so massive that it’s not hard to slip up when stocking your inventory. I so desperately wanted to be able to combine my flint with my stacks of wood to make some arrows during the times where I ran out in the middle of a shrine or battle, and it doesn’t seem to make sense that I couldn’t. The Link we know from BOTW has been shown to be a top-tier knight, surely his training included weapon making in nature for survival? I wouldn’t want item shops to disappear, but having a decent crafting option would fit in to this world so well.

Cooking can be a little odd at first in BOTW but the discovery phase is really fun when you’re using trial and error to make new dishes. During my experimentation with ingredients in this game, there were times where I had discovered a recipe only to later forget it, so I started writing them down on my phone. This doesn’t seem like that big of a deal, but it presents a major oversight of a convenience that I expect to be in a modern game with a complex cooking mechanic. There’s a ton of dishes to be made within the game yet no way officially recall them, you just have to memorize. I think that introducing a recipie book in the menus wouldn’t be too much to ask for, especially considering that it’ll probably draw more people to explore the deep yet optional mechanic. Unfortunatley for BOTW players, once you figure out that the top-tier foods are pretty easy and accessible to make, you begin to just make easy food instead of exploring the culinary possibilities. If Link was limited to an overall cooking skill level or a cookbook, we would be able to still have tiers of recipes without ever getting the overpowered recipes early on. I accidently ruined the fun of the cooking mechanic for myself once I realized that it’s mostly pointless to make super-complex dishes. There is no skill level that limits the players ability to cook in this game. It doesn’t seem right that the most powerful recipes are also some of the most basic – even being a two ingredient recipe in the case of “Hearty Fried Wild Greens” which is the result of just throwing a commonly found radish in a pan with some common weeds. I think that it would be fun if you had to discover the recopies and then put them in a recipe book in order to cook them. I also think that adding a level system of sorts to the cooking mechanic would really flesh it out. It sucks that the complex 3-5 unique ingredient recipes tend to just cancel each other out and waste resources. Once I discovered “hearty greens” recipe, I stopped experimenting with new combos. Why waste my precious resources, when the one that is based on weeds is so overpowered? There’s a reason why most people who eat bread don’t make their own bread: It’s just not worth the hassle. I think BOTW’s cooking mechanics offer store-bought bread convenience to its player, so of course they’re not making their own bread. I hope that TOTK lets us indulge in all of our culinary desires. 

Outside of the (great) boss designs featured in BOTW, there were only about a dozen unique enemy types in this game. Each of these enemy types had colored variants, with certain colors meaning that the enemy was going to be tougher to face. Swapping the color pallet of an enemy is one of the oldest tricks in the book for game design. I found it very disappointing that a great game like BOTW would feature such a worn-out trope. For example, there are common enemies called Bokoblins who are red by default, but the blue variants are more powerful than the red and the black ones are even more powerful than the blue, extending onward for a few more colors. This pattern continues with most of the other enemies, although some do have an elemental variant which grants them special abilities.  Gaming as a whole has been doing this since the 80’s, but more often than not the practice was set in place due to the scarcity of memory, not due to the scarcity of creativity. I think it’s unacceptable when enemy variety gets boiled down to yesteryears idea of “Now he’s orange so he can take more damage”. Zelda as a franchise has so many enemy varieties, it makes no sense that there are only about twelve here. NOT COUNTING boss and color variants and most mini bosses there are 300 unique according to the official Legend of Zelda Encyclopedia. By the end of the game, I was skipping over most enemies because I’d already seen that fight play out. It’s no longer fun when Bokoblin gang no. 285 tries to attack you, no matter how many Orange or silver guys they may have amongst their ranks.

BOTW’s most controversial inclusion was that for the first time in the series, your weaponry wasn’t permanent. Any sword or weapon that you might find along the way has a set amount of damage that it can take before it shatters in to nothingness and disappearing completely. This feature really sucks when you’re new at the game and don’t have steady access to better weapons and abilities. It seems very deliberate that when you first start off, the only weapons that you can find are old farming equipment and rusty swords. The early weapons will break the quickest, since they’re the weakest. One of the first big focal points that you see after leaving the cave at the start of the game is a rusty sword lodged into the middle of a stone on an island. My first thought was “oh hell yeah, that must be Excalibur!” so that was the first weapon I collected. The reference to the world of Merlin couldn’t be any more obvious, this had to be some sort of magical sword lodged in a stone. It wasn’t Excalibur, it was a rusty piece of crap that I ended up tossing at a house once I realized that there’s not much to be done with rusty weapons. In games that I’ve played in the past, rusty tools or weapons are always able to be fixed and restored at a point down the line by visiting a blacksmith or repairing it yourself. I’m not saying link must smelt and forge himself, but it’d make a lot of sense if there was at least one person in Hyrule who could fix common weapons. I really thought that the weapon degradation system in this game wasn’t as bad as people were making it out to be, and I thought that the rust system was going to tie in to weapon degradation at some point in the game. I was very wrong for assuming these things, because these systems seem to be in place just for the sake of variety. You can technically get these rusty weapons fixed and returned to you if you allow a rock Octorok to inhale them, but the game never lets you know about that special feature as far as I can tell. Why would you be wielding a rusty sword in the first place? Of all the ways to get rid of an Octorok, wielding a sword might be the least efficient…especially a rusty sword. It would make a ton of sense if rusty weapons could be restored, as well as having broken weapons repaired - who would do such a thing? A blacksmith

BOTW has discovery around every corner, but after the excitement wears off you quickly realize that there’s usually only one of three things that happen when you explore somewhere new: You find a shrine, a Korok, or weaponry. The problem with finding random gear is that its unlikely to be usefull to you right when you need it due to the scattered “go anywhere” approach of this game. It’s easy for a linear game to drip-feed level appropriate equipment to players, since you can place all of the better stuff at the end. BOTW doesn’t have a linear approach to play, so the random equipment you find varies wildly in quality. In BOTW, you can easily stumble upon an endgame level item before you have any idea what to do with it. The opposite seems more true as you level up, too. I found myself increasingly more unsatisfied with the contents of random chests as I became more powerful in the game. If Nintendo could find a way to tie rewards to progress while still keeping it open, I’d probably search every inch of the map. I climbed the highest peaks that I could visibly see, and I’d often hope that there was some awesome gear up there only to realize that I’ve spent 25 minutes climbing for next to nothing. If you’re going to have such a huge area to explore, it’d really help to pay off exploration in more unique ways. I think that having unique NPC’s, random encounters, and exclusive enemies could serve as a great reward for those who are thirsty for exploration. Imagine how fun it would be if you could only find ____ at night time, above a certain elevation? I’m all for the idea of “maybe the journey was the reward?” but that sentiment wears thin after you’ve had so many experiences. If TOTK has a similar “open reward structure”, I’m probably not going to want to explore as much…and isn’t that most of the fun in a game like this?

A lot of the exploration in BOTW involved climbing up and over things, and it can be very tedious when you’ve not yet unlocked Revali’s Gale to help you out with your travels. You can speed up the process with upgrades to your stamina and get help from potions, but that just makes traveling upwards even more involved. For those who don’t know: a hookshot is a recurring item in TLOZ games which essentially acts as a grappling hook, allowing players to reach new areas during adventure. I don’t think that the combination of Revali’s Gale and the glider are nearly as convenient as the hookshot could potentially be. In BOTW, Stamina alone doesn’t cut it in every situation! For example, there are plenty of times in this game where I’ve fallen off a cliff or mountain, only to have no stamina left to save myself – a quick hookshot to the mountainside could be the difference between life and death. It is strange to me that the hookshot wasn’t included in this game when a large chunk of this game’s purpose seems to be “Hey see that? Yeah go climb that”. The hookshot has always been your climbing buddy in the Zelda games of the past. Climbing or trying to climb during rain just sucked in this game, and so does the thunderstorm mechanic. I think that the best way to make the often game-haulting rain become less of a burden would to be having a hookshot available at one point. Climbing up slippery cliffs would be no problem with a quick hookshot! I’m not saying that shrines/temples need to be designed around the hookshot, but it certainly would have its convenience. Climbing was the only time that I would get bored during the 100 hours that I played BOTW, and I spent a lot of time climbing. I’m sure some fear that a hookshot would be to powerful, but there are easy ways to limit it from ruining the climbing mechanic. Adding this tool to the game adds a whole new layer of potential to puzzle solving and traversal, so I really hope it makes a return in TOTK.