I recently stumbled upon a question: “Is Tears of the Kingdom better than Breath of the Wild?”

For a few seconds after reading it, I felt like closing the laptop lid and forgetting about the whole idea of writing this. But I had an opinion, and feeling proud of it and the product that made me feel the way it did, I wanted this to happen.

Let me try to explain. To say that “Tears of the Kingdom” is a better game is true, but to say that “Breath of the Wild” is a lesser one because of this, is wrong.

“Breath of the Wild” was an innovation that resulted in “Tears of the Kingdom” as an evolution of that concept. Neither of them is more important than the other.

I started with Breath of the Wild all that time back in 2017., feeling overwhelmed by it, stumbling over every clumsy step I took in its world, until one day, I wasn’t stumbling anymore. It was too much of a game for someone like me, something different from anything I ever played before. That feeling was something I had not felt since the third grade of primary school when my dad got me The Legend of Zelda – A Link to the Past for my Super Nintendo console. It was unlike anything I had seen up until then, and after a brief period of disappointment in how boring and slow it was, it finally clicked and marked the beginning of something beautiful. I finished the game seven times in a row that year, my dad about two times, and every kid on my street at least once. It was a game that everyone loved, regardless of what they normally played, and it was a game that transcended established genres. It seems remarkable to have the same title offer me that once-in-a-lifetime experience twice! But Breath of the Wild made me feel like an insecure kid again. One that eventually got good, and finally conquered it. It gave me the foundation to start Tears of the Kingdom in the right frame of mind:

“It’s not a game!” I say to myself every time I put it down after playing for a couple of hours, “It’s an epic adventure simulator”. During the time I spend in Hyrule: I am Link! Every cinematic experience is my own, and in an ironic twist, I consider this game built on last-gen tech, more of a VR experience than any current-gen technical marvel that exists at this moment.

I am not saying there are no places for improvement, certainly there are a few. For example, the same story moments repeated with every new champion recruited, giving us that old-school feel of reused assets. But I understand that it is a “lesser evil” we must accept in light of some limitations of freedom that the game suffers from. That ironically being: the open world it gives us.

“Limitations of freedom”… that’s a strange sentence, but I’m not about to rephrase it as it still seems like the most accurate description of such a problem. Open-world games have that issue when truly being open, as they can not limit where you want to go next. Such a story needs to be more flexible, vague, and often so, like I already stated: repetitive.

And this is something we obviously won’t get around, so why not accept it? It seems like a small price to pay for this kind of progress. At least for now. Nintendo is the master of innovation, so it would not surprise me to see them tackle the way we perceive stories in the next link of this chain of evolution.

Since its release, it has been analyzed, praised, and even criticized in every possible way, so I won’t repeat what has already been said. Instead, I would like to express out loud what its existence has meant for me:

In an age when gaming has become mainstream as game companies have started adapting their IPs to the lowest comment denominator (the Final Fantasy series being maybe the best example), many people like myself have been losing hope. It seems more with every new game year that this media is losing its way. Gaming has become a very lucrative business model, so this way of thinking is not surprising. But it has also pushed gaming in a direction that the evolution of future titles only means better graphics and more fps, or whatever new attribute of esthetic value takes their place when they max out. It is either this or the indie route for concise artistic and creative results, often sacrificing other important qualities in the lack of sufficient resources. Even though it is technically evolution, in my opinion, it’s not true progress. I miss the time the truth was somewhere in the middle. Thankfully, for whatever reason, Nintendo stays true to its beliefs and pushes forward, refusing to accept the times. Even though it is a much harder path to walk on, Tears of the Kingdom has managed to do so again and stands as a shining light for those of us who are for some strange reason, just a little bit different from the rest.

Thank you, Nintendo. May your vision prove more than an evolution of Zelda. May it also be, and always stay, a correcting path forward.