Tears of the Kingdom
Playtime: 37.7 Hours
Last Played ~19 Feb 2026.Bought a physical Switch 1 copy of the game a while back, and decided to give it a try once the Switch 2 came out, since the S2 upgrade was included in the NSO subcription benefit. I wasn't the biggest fan of BOTW so I had no illusions that I'd be finishing this, especially given that the game is very similar in most respects.
That said, I dropped this because I tired of the gameplay, not because I disliked the game - so I can definitely see myself coming back to this in the future when I have an itch to play an open world game like this again.
To put it succintly, this game is pretty much just BOTW 2. Obviously, the elephant in the room lies in the Ultrahand & Zonai device mechanics, but I'd say the majority of other changes are marginal or incremental at best. The story in itself kind of feels like a bit of a retcon or retelling of BOTW; the introduction of the game is basically just "Ganon is back but worse", then Zelda disappears again and you're whisked back to the same world of Hyrule with everything being destroyed again. I don't really care about the story anyways given it's minimal (and not very good besides), but I can't help but feel that it's a slap in the face to essentially revert most or all of the progress of the first game.
This "hard reset" of the world also applies to everything about the gamestate. You lose all your stamina and health, and the wider world is once again completely unexplored once you return to it. A number of characters recognize you and there is an active settlement in the center of Hyrule Field this time, but that doesn't really feel significant. Once again, you get to find a bunch of Ubisoft towers to fully scan the surface map, find and complete a bunch of shrine quests to get all your stats back (still impossible to get max hearts & stamina BTW), and visit each of the 4 regions to do their associated dungeons. Everything here is only incrementally improved from BOTW. For example, each tower requires some kind of quest to open and access it; they aren't all just boring climbs & stamina checks anymore. That said, the sheer degree of similarity to the previous entry gives me a feeling of uninspiredness - this feels more like an update or DLC than a full, standalone game.
The new stuff in this game is cool, but kind of a mixed bag? The introduction of this game has Link undergoing a number of trials in a "tutorial" sky island, kind of like the Great Plateau in BOTW. This island felt huge, but it turns out this is basically the only one in the sky of any significant size; the rest of them tend to be empty rocks more frequently than not, or just like an empty-ish platform with a shrine stuck on top of it and a couple of Zonai Construct enemies. No interesting loot, no real sense of civilization - just rocks in the sky; all told, there are maybe ~5-6 significant islands, and they all pale in comparison to the scale of the first. Meanwhile, the Depths supposedly add a really interesting new "underworld" dimension to the game, until you realize there's basically nothing there and no reason to explore it. I think I've found maybe 1 or 2 quests there - the rest of it is almost exclusively empty land with some poo-covered patches, plus a bunch of enemy camps - as if the surface didn't have enough of those already. Its geometry is also just the inverse of the surface map, too - so it can't really be claimed that the developers had to exhaust huge amounts of effort into its design anyway.
The sky & depths are meant to breathe new life into TOTK's world, but I feel like that didn't really work out given how shallow the areas are. But the new powers you get are a little bit more interesting. Ultrahand is the main one which is essentially Zelda's take on GMod toys. The implementation is really cool - you can glue objects and structures in the world together, and with the introduction of the Zonai devices, you can make them function mechanically! From rockets, fans and wheels to flamethrowers and lasers, there's a huge variety of different tools available that let you customize your vehicles and interact with the game world in completely unique ways. A really fun one is to stick a rocket onto your shield - when you activate it, you basically get to fly for a few seconds until the rocket depletes. By almost all accounts, this is essentially the core of the game - the plot, quests, etc. all essentially feed into finding reasons for you to construct different things to accomplish these tasks.
That said, in contrast to the amazing utility of Ultrahand, the other powers are kind of garbage - Ascend lets you tunnel through things, but ONLY if they're above you. The idea is obviously to give you an easy tool to warp out of the depths, or (in some situations) to let you fly through a tall column up towards the sky islands - but it has almost no utility outside of these purposes. I was constantly wondering if I'd get an option to go down, or to go in any direction, but that obviously never happened. Fuse is also kind of lame - it lets you "fuse" things to your weapons, arrows, and shields to bolster power and to add functionality, but that feels more like an inventory combine option than an actual power. Plus, Fused items generally look horrible - like something you'd find in GMod (pulling out this example again). Recall is yet another power with very limited and finnicky capabilities; it allows you to rewind time for specific objects (don't think this applies to anything living). The only uses I've found for it so far are for some puzzles, or to ride some falling rocks back up into the sky (where I find nothing on a tiny island); in most respects it's a strictly-worse version of Time Stop from BOTW. The other 4 slots on the wheel are taken up by a Camera, Autobuild (basically makes Ultrahand stuff for you), your Map, and the fucking Amiibo menu.
A big problem I have with these powers is that they don't really fluidly integrate themselves into normal gameplay. Ultrahand is kind of finnicky by design due to its customizability; you're not going to be making a flamethrower car when you're fighting a bunch of dudes, which isn't really a problem but does show off a difference in TOTK's overall design. Equipment Fusing is also only really done in preparation for combat, not really during it. Finally, Ascend and Recall (in the rare times you use them) are mostly to escape combat, but feel extremely clunky when you're trying to use them more in the heat of the moment. For example, Ascend forces you to look straight up and has a short delay before executing, so you can still get slapped by enemies. Everything feels like a once-in-a-while power; there's nothing like the bombs of BOTW (or even some of the other stuff - cryo was great for traversal) that really augment your toolkit all the time.
There's also a number of notable sacrifices in the game design - or other things that remained stagnant but should have received some attention. The big one for me is weapons - the durability system is still absolute shit, and it's somehow even worse in this game. Almost all metal weapons were "corrupted" somehow by Calamity Ganon, so they have horrible durability and stats in this game. This makes fusing essential to get good stats, but both the fused item and the base item will have issues with durability. Plus, it's embarrassing that the Master Sword can still only slap things like 20-30 times before the legendary blade needs to nap for 10 minutes (and it instantly deletes the Fused item). Caves are harder to navigate because you don't have the Sheikah bombs anymore, so you need to waste a weapon slot to fuse a rock hammer, attaching things to your arrows is a lot more finnicky than I remember it being in BOTW. It's kind of funny how poorly Fuse is integrated mechanically as well - to Fuse a material in your backpack to a weapon, you have go into the inventory and drop the item first, instead of having any kind of option to do it directly.
One thing I can say at least is that the S2 upgrade seems excellent to me. I know BOTW's performance was already surprisingly good for its time and scope, but TOTK's was rock solid for me on the Switch 2, basically locked to 60 (?) FPS all the time and feeling really smooth at a fundamental level. If there's any weird aberrations from upscaling or performance tricks they do for the upgrade, I certainly didn't feel any negative effects from it.
All in all, through my time with the game (so far), I mostly feel that TOTK is a pretty decent Zelda-themed sandbox game with effectively no substance. I don't give a shit about the story or characters, but the world was entertaining enough to keep me interested for a while and building things is honestly lots of fun when I'm in the mood. I can't confidently say that I'll never play the game again, and I'd definitely prefer to continue this than replay BOTW since I still think it's solid, but the biggest reason why I spent so much time in the game to begin with was somewhat out of desparation to find something that could really exercise the capabilities of the Switch 2. Now that we've got tons of other upgrades and a trickle of new S2 versions coming in (like Metroid Prime 4), I have less and less reason to take an interest in TOTK.
