The Game Becomes a Storytelling Machine: On “Tears of the Kingdom”
This is the second essay in a three-part series on Game-World-Literature(s), commissioned by Joseph Earl Thomas.
What happens when you reach the end of your world?
Alexander the Great is said to have wept, in what would be history’s biggest-ever epiphany that ambition can be more vital to one’s happiness than the actual fulfillment of it, though the story appears to be apocryphal. Perhaps you have learned the same lesson on a smaller scale, without all the conquest and bloodshed. Or perhaps you reached a different kind of limit: the petering out of a particular ambition of your own; the frustrating failure to progress; the slow realization that the world outside will allow you to go no further. You run into a wall, one you didn’t expect, and are stumped as to what to do next.
This is a routine experience for Link, the non-titular protagonist of Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda series. In the course of his adventures across the series, he will reach the edge of the map and be blocked from progressing by insurmountable cliffs, unnavigable seas, an impassable sky. In lieu of quitting, you, player character, can turn back, attempt to fill in the spaces between the borders, scour each parcel of game space. Or, nearly as often, peel back the edges of the map and find something new underneath.
The Zelda franchise has long built games around navigating environments that coextend alongside one another: past and present, light and dark, spring and summer and fall and winter. Its most recent installment, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, expands that legacy. The game operates on three parallels, but these aren’t layered vertically. They arguably aren’t lateral either. To experience all of them at once—that is, to play the game with a knowledge of its forebears and a working Internet connection—is to navigate some incomprehensible tesseract. The game continuously stretches beyond your expectations for it, seeming to have more sides than you can hold in your mind at any given time. It is so laden with possibilities that every decision made is shaded by its alternatives. What-ifs crackle like fireworks with each minute played, and the anticipation of trying some of them keeps you turning the polytope over and over, long after you’ve put the controller down.
The first of TOTK’s parallels is purely spatial. The game takes place across three different strata: archipelagos of heavenly islands floating in the sky; a surface world most typical of the series; and a massive and murky subterranean hollow that’s less hell and more a vision of the underground as presented in the 1987 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon, teeming with monstrous hostiles and wide-open enough to drive a Technodrome through. There’s even a clan of evil ninjas hanging out down there.
If all Tears of the Kingdom had done was turn Link into Dante Alighieri with a hang glider, then that may have been enough. But that’s not even half of it. Link fights and climbs and fights and runs and fights and parachutes and fights and swims and fights and sneaks and fights his way through the three levels, but combat stays a smaller part of the makeup of Tears of the Kingdom than any other game in the series. For maybe the first time, slashing through enemies feels like a vestige of the series’ past, a component left over from the franchise’s inception in the early days of gaming, when difficulty was most easily imposed by requiring larger and faster magnitudes of violence from the player. What combat occurs happens in short bursts between the climbing and running and parachuting and swimming and sneaking. Fighting adds difficulty, yes, but this game more than any of its predecessors offers alternative forms of adversity. To the roster of action tropes distilled through a filter of Western European medieval fantasy that Link embodies—the Lone Wanderer, the One-Man Army, the Dungeon-Crawling Explorer—Tears of the Kingdom adds one more: the Engineer.
Link has always solved puzzles. Usually these consist of noticing and manipulating factors in the environment. Tears of the Kingdom grants the freedom to construct any number of solutions. The game does this with an almost absurd simplicity, when Link is simply given the ability to magically adhere things together. Logs and rocks. Sails and rafts, minecarts and spikes. The world is filled with the components of an engineering starter pack. Fans that serve as engines. Gliders and rockets to launch them; balloons and flamethrowers that inflate them. Wheels large and small and a steering mechanism that allows you to turn a stone slab or a wooden raft into a drivable car. Stabilizers keep things upright. Stakes pin them down. Drones follow enemies. Lasers and cannons fire upon them.
Perhaps the greatest feature of Tears of the Kingdom is its plasticity. If you can figure out the proper combination of materials to make something happen, there’s not a lot the game will say no to. Attach a hook to a platform and hang it from a rail to make a gondola. Put a big leaf on a stick and you have a fan that can propel your own sailcraft. You don’t even have to stretch your creativity. It has been pointed out that many of Tears of the Kingdom’s challenges can be solved simply by constructing a very long bridge, but considering that’s true for real world problems as varied as the D-Day invasion, the moon landing, and the Eliminator obstacle course at the end of an episode of American Gladiators, maybe we shouldn’t fault it.
Because Tears of the Kingdom is a direct sequel to 2017’s massively popular The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, playing it also resonates with the experience of playing that earlier game, forging connections not just with Link’s history or with that of the game-world Hyrule, but with the player’s own, real, remembered past. New tools and capabilities dropped into the old world shatter and reconstruct the player’s experience of it, leading to the second parallel, an overlaid new that’s constantly running in time with the player’s old.
“The place I knew was disoriented by this one in which we now stood, thrown awry by the anamnesis of an absent world that had formed in some strange geographical region of my mind,” Kyle Beachy writes in his skateboarding collection The Most Fun Thing of a trip to the courtyard of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, a place he had never actually been but had seen people skate in countless videos and magazines. Tears of the Kingdom toys with a similar kind of jamais vu in the player. The maps of the surface world in the two games are analogous, changed by time in some places and by development in others and by disaster in still more, but because of Link’s new powers, the way the player interacts with them is almost completely upended. Branching paths offer the player an implicit choice: approach each obstacle as a problem from the previous game or the current one, to subscribe to the old-school or the new-school.
Tears of the Kingdom evolves the entire notion of discovery, a theme that dates back to the series’ inception on the NES, taking Zelda from an Age of Exploration to an Age of Invention. Its engineering capabilities update a power fantasy that has been central to the series for three-and-a-half decades (the one that doesn’t involve fighting ten monsters at a time). Now, rather than merely unwrapping the world piece by piece, searching for the golden tickets skillfully hidden within it, you are printing them yourself, making and unmaking the world as if the deed to the factory has already been gifted to you.
Perhaps your factory specializes in very long bridges. They are useful after all, and Tears of the Kingdom magics away much of the real world load and strength difficulties anyone who’s ever had to build one out of popsicle sticks knows. More likely you will experiment, because the other options are so appealing. Need to climb a vertical cliff? You can still do that the old-fashioned way, with Link going hand over hand. Or you can glue a rocket to his shield as a type of handheld jetpack. Or you can float a hot air balloon to the top, or take a hover platform, or use stabilizers and the game’s monster truck tire to build a vehicle that will drive up sheer walls. You can still swim across a river, the same way you can still, technically, rub two sticks together to produce fire: It works, but it feels a little silly. On the other hand, you can also produce fire by lighting a Saturn V rocket, or fly across the river in a mock-up of the TIE Advanced Darth Vader flies at the end of A New Hope.
In this way, Tears of the Kingdom solves a problem nobody realized Breath of the Wild had at first. The expeditions that you, me, and everyone else who ever played that game embarked on all ended up in the same places. We may have approached them from different directions and in different orders, but at the top of every mountain we climbed and across every river we swam we found the same things: this shrine puzzle, that hidden Korok, another set of enemies sheltering in a not-at-all conspicuous skull-shaped bunker. We may arrive in different conditions and end up with different favorite moments, but there is ultimately only one set of answers. The world and its boundaries are the same for all of us. Playing the game as intended, you get one, carefully curated experience.
People would eventually stop playing the game as intended. The adventure of Link—the checkpoints and battles the game guides you into on the way to its finale—may end, but the world and its mechanics remain enjoyable to spend time in even without any more narrative closure to achieve. Some players found ways to play around the edges of what the game was built for, just as Beachy’s skateboarders would do with their built environment, turning it into a cross between a dream world and a playground for transgressions. Catapulting one of the game’s imposing Guardian enemies into the air and shooting an arrow that strikes precisely in its tumbling weak spot. Timing releases of bombs and lightning with a slow-motion dodge to turn a simple fight with an enemy into an anime overload of smoke and energy and near-instant death. Using an animation glitch of Sparkles the Horse to make the hottest dance video of 2020. Breath of the Wild became a trick shot gallery.
The miracle of Tears of the Kingdom is that it both expands the boundaries and gives players the tools to reach out past them anyway. The technomagical skills Link uses in Breath of the Wild were designed for solving puzzles and would eventually be used by some players to break the game. The engineering toolkit in Tears of the Kingdom encourages players to smash the puzzles into tiny bits and then reassemble any of a thousand solutions out of them. With so many potential options, there is plenty of opportunity to shoot out either side of the bell curve. Sometimes you will feel like MacGyver. Sometimes you feel like Wile E. Coyote. The single most pleasing outcome might be the one that you can tell is too stupid to possibly work but that succeeds anyway. It can be reassuring to know you’re spending time in a world where serendipity is possible, where the game isn’t just looking for excuses to punish you, where you too can occasionally invent penicillin by accident. This is the positive counterforce to what happens in a Wile E. Coyote cartoon, where the world conspires to make everything work out in your favor rather than to sabotage you. Some part of all of us wanted him to catch the Road Runner at least once.
Tears of the Kingdom provides a continuum of experiences, where all these varieties of solutions can live side-by-side. The invisible hand of the free market has not sanded away the rough edges on the player’s ideas yet. This game’s Link is still of an era where maybe the fifth pair of wings will prove to be the decisive set when it comes to getting your bicycle-powered airplane off the ground. He’s still making light bulb filaments out of horsehair. If Breath of the Wild made Link the master of the wilderness, then in Tears of the Kingdom, he is building the machines that might dominate it, alongside many, many more that most definitely will not. Few of them will actually explode, but many of the failures will feel like they have just exploded, in the best possible way. Your rockets will launch early and leave half your flying car behind. Your plane will take off unbalanced and immediately death-spiral. You will steer your flamethrower into an exploding barrel. (This one will actually explode.) It will be glorious. You will be left with ideas either for making it better or for rigging up an even more spectacular failure. The scientific method reigns supreme: Question-Hypothesis-Experiment-Explosion-Conclusion. Expedition gives way to experimentation, the same way explorers gave way to scientists and inventors.
As ever, technology tended toward the martial in the first days after the game’s release—flying fortresses, giant catapults, hovering laser drones and smiley face robots with flamethrower penises. There is, after all, conflict in this game, all that fighting, fighting, and fighting. Since each of his weapons will eventually break, Link is a one-man military-industrial complex, wearing through so many swords, spears, axes and boomerangs you would think there were teams of lobbyists encouraging the Hylian government to produce more of them. His engineering power being a form of ancient magic, Link is almost the only person in all of Hyrule who can build these machines. The evil ninjas Link finds mostly in the Depths pilot patrol craft and build large armored vehicles with which to stage boss fights, but their ambitions seem limited to underground research and attempted murder of the player character. One wonders how long it will take them to realize that they can monetize their contraptions and take over Hyrule through sheer force of capitalism. It’s 2024; they wouldn’t even have to hide their evil intent as long as they provided free shipping.
This, after all, is the one thing the player doesn’t get to do with all their machines and all their fighting talent: they cannot make Link subjugate Hyrule himself. Where the game’s strict guardrails exist they are holding Link’s morals in check, keeping him firmly on the path of the hero. Try as he might, his devices cannot be used to mow down great swaths of civilians. (If Link does want to elicit a strong reaction from a townsperson, then the nearest thing is to attack a humble cucco, a chicken-analogue that spawns dozens of companions that swarm and hurt Link if he abuses one for too long.) The populace of the various towns and villages and camps are, at best, minorly inconvenienced by all the lasers, flamethrowers, and explosions he can throw at them. They will only ever ask him for help, never beg him for mercy.
While all this armory lead to some fun and maybe obvious innovations in the torture of Koroks and other non-player characters through increasingly nefarious and imaginative methods, eventually players realized the game’s devices could be put toward peaceful ends too. They could build intricate music boxes that use lasers to play the theme from Super Mario Bros. 3 or “Never Gonna Give You Up,” a working scale that indicates Link to weigh the same as 10 in-game apples, or an actual 1-bit binary computer that uses lights and mirrors to toggle the bits between on and off and do simple calculations. The Saturn V we joked about before? Someone made a multi-stage rocket. You can find a trailer for a Godzilla film, created entirely in the game. “You take delight not in a city’s seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours,” Italo Calvino writes in Invisible Cities, another classic of parallelism. One group of people reached the South Pole first. We are still making improvements to the wheel.
Tears of the Kingdom is not a multiplayer game. There is one Link in each version of Hyrule. And yet it didn’t take long for Tears of the Kingdom to become a collaborative effort, a game played cooperatively online by millions, with ideas reaching out into the real world and back into the (you can do a deep sigh here if you want, that’s fine) sprawling multiverse of individual Hyrules, each with their own Links in their own worlds. This final parallel sees each Link in each Hyrule capable of communing indirectly with others to share their discoveries, as if they were all little Newtons and Leibnizes inventing calculus simultaneously. This is Jumanji stuff, a game that slips the bonds of its playing area to come alive in the real world.
In this way, Tears of the Kingdom harks back to an earlier era of collaborative single player gaming, a time when you might have taken turns playing through something on a sleepover or learned how to beat a level from your friend’s older brother who read something in an issue of Nintendo Power while waiting in line at the grocery store. The Internet has made walkthroughs and secrets more accessible but also more hegemonic, delivered most often either by companies seeking clicks or streamers hunting for views. But there are too many possible solutions in Tears of the Kingdom for any one source to provide them all, even if they do end up curating some of what they find for their audiences. If every player is encouraged to be creative, then far more people are going to wind up with something to share, and every Link can then go figure out how to manufacture a creation first spied in someone else’s version of the game. The game becomes a storytelling machine.
The Link of Breath of the Wild explores his world, and each Link throughout the world (more than 30 million copies sold, with countless save files played on each of them) will see the same one and reach the same edges. Tears of the Kingdom’s Link remakes his world, pinching the corners of his map together in ways unique to each player even as they learn how to do it better from others attempting the same thing. The game asks players to see the world in a way no one else does, but doesn’t leave them hopeless if they can’t. We are given the chance to build bridges, sometimes even very long ones, over the edges of this world into another. Because the place we’re standing now matters so much less than the ingenious and idiotic ways we managed to get there.