During the first hours of Tears of the Kingdom – one of the most anticipated video games of the year, which appears Friday, May 12 on Switch – the brave knight Link is invited by the venerable Impa to settle aboard a makeshift hot air balloon. As the duo soar through the air, the player discovers a giant pattern, cropping up like a crop circle among the grass. ” In this picturesaid Impa, you must identify the detail that solves its riddle. »
So it is in Tears of the Kingdom as it has always been in The Legend of Zelda : the world is an enigma and this one invites us to gain height to better examine it. It’s up to the player to crack the secret code, which, like traces betraying the presence of buried sites from the sky, governs its immemorial history. By summoning the myths of cyclical time, cataclysm and eternal return, the plot of Tears of the Kingdom perpetuates the tragic scope of the series, in addition to offering a very beautiful role to its eponymous princess.
But, as in Breath of the Wild, the essence lies in the bucolic fugues of the player in the heart of a disproportionate territory, where the call of discovery competes with an endless succession of discoveries. The 2017 phenomenon was seen as the revival of open-world video games, crystallizing the association between a freedom of exploration and a science of playful epiphanies. All the discoveries we made there, although guided by the discreet hand of Nintendo’s designers, seemed so clear to us that they gave the impression of arising from our own inspiration.
It is this ambitious and delicate experience that Nintendo is now trying to reiterate by digging the furrow of the record success of Breath of the Wild (more than 30 million copies sold to date) including Tears of the Kingdom constitutes an almost identical sequel: same kingdom of Hyrule, same graphics, same systems of breakable weapons, resource collection and cooking by the fireside, same melodious sound effects on fleeting refrains. When at the end of a superb introduction located in the air the player dives towards the surface of Hyrule, it is a bit at home that he lands.
The art of amalgamation
However, Nintendo is operating a small revolution by replacing our special abilities with four ingenious new powers. Using Infiltration, Link crosses vertically the ceiling or the rock, according to spaces that give pride of place to secret cavities. Thanks to Retrospective, which reverses the temporal trajectory of objects, a platform in free fall turns into an elevator, or an enemy projectile is seen returned to the sender. With Amalgam, Link merges his equipment with scattered objects to create tools as clever as they are unusual: an electric lance, a rocket shield or even an explosive arrow with a homing head. Finally, the Emprise power – the most remarkable of all – allows machines to be built from spare parts that the player manipulates with disconcerting naturalness.
On these aircraft, these caterpillar cars and these floating machines which are discarded as quickly as they are made, the crossing of Hyrule becomes a walk, delightful but capricious, where each experience gives rise to as many disappointments as victories. Eyeing the side of the sandbox building game way MinecraftNintendo solicits the creativity of players and ensures, even more than for Breath of the Wildyears of viral advertising within its online communities.
This orientation is however far from being free, insofar as these new powers are the base of an original playful proposal that the game declines with bewildering inventiveness. Throughout the fifty hours that lasts at least Tears of the Kingdom (which has enough to amaze us for three times longer), the player visits sanctuaries resembling dry gardens offering short and exciting puzzles, then emerges with the heart to put these experiences into practice on the real scale of the kingdom. . Varied, the game thus exploits all the ludic extent of its prodigious powers.
Whether Breath of the Wild brought to its climax the pleasure of exploration that shapes The Legend of Zelda since its origins, Tears of the Kingdom sublimates the technical side of the series with unprecedented tactility. You have to have rescued a horn player stuck in a crevasse after having weighted down his cart with fans and balloons, or tinkered with a precarious roof above a bramble barrier in the rain in order to set it on fire, to understand that the epic adventure can also be that of practical invention.
An epic as a healing
An ingenious hero, Link (and by extension the player) is acclaimed throughout the kingdom as the herald of a rediscovered link between the different tribes: the volatile Piafs, amphibious Zoras, robust Gorons, amazons Gerudo, as well as the ancestral Zonai – guardians of a celestial Atlantis whose floating remnants have reappeared above Hyrule. As always, it’s up to us to piece together the scattered pieces of this tattered world in order to restore it to its former grace, this time by preventing the rebirth of a ghastly living mummy as a Demon King. To do this, we navigate between three distinct levels: the floating islands of the sky, which are like small worlds Super Mariothe ever lush surface of Hyrule, and the gloomy depths of the realm – subterranean expanses worthy ofElden Ring where Link must gradually shed light.
Of course, all the pleasure of the game consists in jumping (very literally) from one stratum to another, abandoning oneself to an exaltation which is matched only by the extent of this world steeped in comical encounters, rustic villages and fantastical stories – a world where you could see yourself living. Nothing can stop the incessant movement of Link, a true ludion: in the same momentum, he takes off towards the top of an island in the firmament to better fall in a paraglider into the abyss of a crevasse, sinking kilometers underground. To this intoxicating loop must be added ever more spectacular revelations: here, a leap of faith in the eye of a hurricane, there, a puzzle of levitating rocks forming the image of a tear, and sometimes whole nights spent following white rabbits or hunting dragons. It is in these hallucinated dives that we learn to heal the world.
The opinion of Pixels in brief
We liked:
- a sequel that builds on the peerless foundations of Breath of the Wild to better transcend them;
- original game mechanics creatively exploited across a staggering variety of situations;
- a game-world with inexhaustible adventures.
We didn’t like:
- getting tangled up in the selection interfaces and getting lost in the inventory catch-all;
- a handful of rare but frustrating misfire sequences.
It’s more for you if…
- you haven’t had enough of your hundred hours on Breath of the Wild ;
- you have the soul of an adventurer, the logic of an inventor, the endurance of an extreme sportsman, the look of a landscape designer and/or the heart of a hero.
It’s not for you if…
- you’ve had enough of your hundred hours spent on Breath of the Wild ;
- you are allergic to the wacky and naive universes of Nintendo.
Pixel’s note:
7 tears (of joy) out of 7.