This is Part 3 of a four part series on The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Normally I can squeeze everything I have to say about a game into one, or at most two blogs, but this one obviously left me with quite a bit more to say. Here's Linksto Part 1 and Part 2, and I would certainly recommend reading at least Part 1 first. Part 4, with a focus on story, world, and other various thematic thoughts should be coming in the near future, so stay tuned! Hopefully it doesn't balloon into a Part 5!
Part 3 is mostly focused on my thoughts on the overall difficulty of the game, and some specific Temples and other focused story sequences. As such, that means spoilers for some scenarios, but not for anything explicit about the narrative, or puzzle solutions. However, when Part 2 went on too long, I was left with a story that I couldn't figure out where else to include, so it's following after this paragraph. Think of it as Part 2.5.
I have a story to tell, of what I now refer to as Garland Quest. From very late in my time with Tears, it revolves around some good old fashioned vehicular nonsense. It begins in Gerudo Town, with Link volunteering to aid in some classes for the young adults amongst the Gerudo, to help them get used to talking to men (Voe as they say it). Given Link is about the least imposing man in this world (I think being in stasis for a century stunted his growth, as he's supposedly an adult by Tears (my alternate ~Queer Take~ is he's a trans man, but that's a topic for another day)), he's perfect for the job. Anyway, one of the students mentions something about an item from a village way off to the east, that can apparently help bring people together, so Link takes it upon himself to get one for her.
To be clear, this isn't actually a capital Q Quest. This is just dialog that plays, and then I was the one that actually took it upon myself to go do this. I was not expecting any significant reward, even before I realized the true extent of what this would entail. I should also note that not all of these screenshots are from the Garland Quest itself. Some are from much earlier in the game, and some I took after the fact, once I realized I was going to write about it. Nothing wrong with a little re-creation to illustrate what happened.
I wasn't sure which eastern village to check first, so naturally the correct one ended up being the third one I went to, which is when I remembered the kid selling ring garlands. A bunch of ruins landed around Kakariko Village during the Upheaval, including a ring shaped one that's still floating, just above the village. As it became something of a landmark in the area, one of the local kids started making ring shaped garlands as souvenirs for passersby. Only five Rupees each, I'd be practically losing money if I didn't buy one at that price!
More to the point, this garland isn't an item that Link can stow away in his inventory. It's an object that can be carried, and attached to things, so I suddenly had a head scratcher on my hands. Kakariko wasn't literally as far away from Gerudo Town as it physically could be on this map, but it was darn close to it. My first thought was to fly it over, but I knew a glider couldn't make it anywhere near far enough, and if it fell apart in midair, I'd most likely lose track of the garland as I plummeted. Then I'd have to start over. Yes, I had my “Flying Platform,” but without proper altitude control, I'd run into trouble trying to get back down by the time I reached the desert.
So, I decided to take it by ground the whole way. I used a slightly modified motorcycle design from a schematic (I replaced the laser on the front with the garland), as I had actually attached a garland to it much, much earlier in the game, and saved the schematic. I thought it looked pretty. My vehicle now freshly adorned with a pretty ring of flowers, off I went on a leisurely drive.
Before I continue, I should say that I had decided upon two rules for Garland Quest, that I would do my absolute best to adhere to. The first is that after my initial motorcycle, I would only use objects and Zonai Devices found in the world to assist. No pulling out capsules from my inventory. Second, that I would not only do everything in my ability to take the starting motorcycle as far as I could, that anything else added on would also continue the journey for as far as possible.
With those rules in mind, I stuck to the roads, and didn't run into any trouble until I reached the canyon that connects Central Hyrule with the Gerudo Desert. Here though, the path got rougher, and the small wheels that had good speeds on good roads weren't really cutting it, so I had to change up my strategy. Luckily, the canyon provided.
That's how I ended up with my motorcycle attached to the top of this monstrosity. For as ridiculous as it looks with all these wheels, the fact that the outer front ones weren't properly aligned actually made it easier. It created an almost walking motion, which allowed it to climb up those “steps” that are like mini-waterfalls. I should also say, again in another attempt to make this harder on myself, I intentionally chose the more difficult path through the canyon. I could have taken the upper route, which is a more consistent path, but has enemies to deal with. As opposed to the way I went, which was partially flooded.
It went well at first. This beast of a machine climbed better than I imagined, and I think could have made it even further if the water didn't get as deep as it did. Unfortunately, I had to leave the beast behind, as buoyant it was not. Instead, the motorcycle was connected to a boat of sorts. To be clear, that lowest section of the “boat,” with the wheels? That broke off almost immediately in the water, but at least the motorcycle (and garland) stayed on, even if they were mostly below the surface.
One problem I had not foreseen, despite going through this canyon before, was that it's only partially flooded, not entirely. Of course that sounds better, right? It would be, if the reason for the partial flooding wasn't the giant piles of debris blocking the path. Sadly I neglected to take any more screenshots in the moment, so I hope this image I took after the fact will suffice. There weren't any more Zonai Devices lying around, and since this was a canyon, my only other option was to turn back, going all the way through the river again, and take the high route this time.
BUT! I had an idea. To use what I call the “Recall Method.” Recall's main use is to send things back along whatever path they took, but clever thinking can bend the rules of what that means. For example, using Ultra-Hand to lift something in the air, and holding it there for a handful of seconds means that when it's Recalled, it'll float in that spot for that same length of time. So while this debris pile was too high to simply lift the vehicle up and over, it wasn't so high that I couldn't use the Recall Method to keep it aloft after I climbed to the top, so I could grab it again, and carry it over.
The rest of the canyon was relatively short, but rough enough terrain that carrying it ended up being more efficient than trying to drive it. At least until reaching the desert sands, which slows down Link too, without sand shoes equipped. Which I had at this point, but the idea of this was to use the vehicle, not carry it, unless there was no other choice.
Next I tried using a sand seal sled to pull the motorcycle, but I'm afraid the weight was a bit too much for the tusked friend, so I was back to assembling my own transport, because I wasn't going to abandon the bike at this point. As sleds work best on sand, I was still going that route, just propelled by machines instead of a blubbery critter. I don't quite remember if I was able to find a loose sled lying around, or if I relented and pulled one out of a capsule. Regardless, the vehicle became a sled, and at this point it was easy (sand) sailing to Gerudo Town.
Upon reaching the entrance to town, it was now finally time to bid farewell to the vehicle, and just take the garland with me. It carried me across a lot of terrain, and I carried it over that big pile of rubble, and though it was sad to say goodbye, it had performed admirably, which is all I can ask of a vehicle. While in town, I lugged the garland by hand, as people tend to freak out when Ultra-Hand is used near them, which is understandable. Now, it was just a matter of waiting for class to start, so I could show the garland to the student in question, and Garland Quest would be complete.
Except...when I talked to her, despite having the garland right there, nothing changed. Same exact dialog. Now, after going through all of that, I wasn't going to give up, so I paused the game, and looked up a guide for this.
It turns out the garland needs to be Fused to a shield or weapon. In other words, I could have just Fused it to my shield back in Kakariko Village, and fast traveled, thus avoiding that entire misadventure...
But if I had done that, I wouldn't have this story to tell, so really, the journey is the reward. Or as I liked to think throughout the game, “half the fun of adventure is not knowing where it'll lead me.” I genuinely don't know if I got that from somewhere else and it just resurfaced in my brain during this game, but it fits.
Also, if anyone is curious, there's no reward for doing this, other than helping out in the class. I don't mind that, but other people reading this might. Just saying.
So now, as a part of me seems determined to cover every last bit of this game worth writing about, here's something that I feel was a big part of makes a lot of Tears' systems work, at least for me. The game's difficulty.
Something that surprised me about Tears as a whole is how difficult it can be, particularly early on, but even fairly far in. For one thing, leaving the tutorial does not give Link the paraglider, and me being the person who gets sidetracked easily, I went around exploring for a couple hours in Hyrule before actually doing the quest that grants the paraglider. During that time, I was genuinely wondering if the devs had just decided to remove it altogether, in an attempt to make players rely more heavily on building vehicles and other contraptions. There was a while where I really thought that they wanted people to pull out a glider Zonai Device to glide instead of just using the paraglider like in Breath of the Wild.
Never mind that, having gone and rewatched the pre-launch trailers, the paraglider is literally in one of them, and I had seen that trailer. I just must have forgotten. But during that time when I was attempting to explore without it, I was running into some trouble trying to fight the enemies I came across. Or, to be brutally honest, a lot of trouble, particularly against the Battle Talus not too far from Lookout Landing (the closest thing to a hub Tears has). A stone goliath, with wooden platforms built atop it for Bokoblins to ride along, shooting arrows at anyone dumb enough to fight them (me). I was really determined to beat that thing, but even after my best attempts to get atop it (including a ramp and possibly the first time I tried the Recall Method), I just kept dying. Eventually I had to give up.
As an side, for anyone looking to fight a Battle Talus on foot, don't forget about Ascend. It's a lot simpler to just pop up through the platform, even if it moving around can make it tricky to line up.
I don't remember if this was the case in BotW, or to what extent it was, but while Tears will let players go deal with the four “regional disturbances” in any order, there is a very strongly suggested order to do them in. Both in terms of dialog and other NPC things to subtly push players along a path, but also in the difficulty of the enemies in the world. That Battle Talus was directly along the path to Death Mountain and the Zora Domain, but I don't recall seeing one on the opposite path the game wants to send Link down.
The enemies more or less on that suggested path (initially northwest toward Rito Village), feel balanced for just starting the game. The ones in basically any other direction? Mini-bosses aside, there may as well be a Lynel waiting around every corner, for how tough the Bokoblins and Moblins are out there. Okay, that's an extreme exaggeration, but when resource strapped, and lacking any sort of high defense armor early on, I was rebuffed in a way that made me decide to just (more or less) go along with the story in the early hours.
Don't get me wrong, the suggested path still allows for tons of exploration, because Hyrule is as massive as ever. Tears is still what BotW was at its heart. A game about cresting hills and having the view take my breath away, then spotting something in the distance that I just need to check out. And I will say, going from the Wii U version of BotW to Tears on the Switch, even if the Switch is an old piece of tech at this point, I do think it's a pretty noticeable difference in the visual fidelity between them. Looks nicer, and even if the framerate isn't perfect, at least now it's usually only Ultra Hand that causes dips, as opposed to BotWii U, which could drop frames if I looked at it funny.
Exploration isn't just for seeing the sights, even if I know I would play a game in a world of this size with zero combat, assuming it was as beautiful and breathtaking. At its core, Tears is a resource management game, and there are a ton of them. Everything from elemental fruits, to enemy horns, ingredients for food, foods for healing and other buffs, resources to upgrade Link's Zonai battery, Zonai capsules, materials to Auto-Build contraptions, and even the orbs for upgrading health and stamina. Some of these things literally do grow on trees, or at least bushes and other plants around the world, but some obviously require fighting enemies, some require delving The Depths to mine, and those orbs require completing shrines.
Tears does feature “one hit protection,” thus meaning that even if an attack would do more damage than Link's max health, if his health is full, it'll instead take him down to a quarter heart. I'm not sure if this is true of all attacks across the game, there may be times when a super overkill hit on Link could be instant death, I don't know. Either way, this does allow for a tiny sliver of help when fighting tough enemies early on, but it's still disheartening to have that keep happening, and run through healing items so quickly. Never mind how awkward it is to pause and heal after every hit.
Thus making those shrines as important as they were in BotW. Four orbs means either another heart, or another chunk of a stamina wheel. Both are important, but as Link's health can be upgraded way more times than his stamina, I ended up maxing stamina much earlier on. That's also one of those things where the stamina appears as a series of circles, and each upgrade is only one arc of a circle, so it bothered me when they weren't complete circles. At least each health upgrade is a full heart, which never disgruntled that part of my brain.
So yes, despite feeling like more health was more important early on (especially when Ascend and Zonai Devices make climbing feel a tad obsolete at times), I still focused more on stamina. Not entirely so, I alternated between the two at times. It's just hard to resist the allure of stamina.
Anyway, while the shrines in BotW initially felt kind of revelatory, eventually they ended up feeling a bit rote. Far too many of them were just a “combat challenge” against a single ostensibly tough enemy, but as I recall (thanks partly to re-reading what I wrote in 2017), only one of those was actually fun. And the game had twenty of them.
I'm happy to say that the “fight a single enemy” shrines are no longer here as filler in Tears, even though there's significantly more shrines. Which isn't to say all of the shrines are great. A lot of them feel like they exist only to be tutorials for different Zonai Devices, or other mechanics. It's nice to have those, but they end up feeling super simple and quick when it's something that I already know. Of course, that's the sort of thing that will vary from person to person. The rote, “oh I already know this” shrines to me may have been “aha!” moments for others, and the reverse is true for ones that I didn't know the trick going in.
There's also quite a lot of shrines that are “Rauru's Blessing,” where inside the shrine is just a chest and the upgrade orb. The idea is that the puzzle is either getting to the shrine itself, or carrying a big crystal to the right spot, which then becomes the shrine. In many cases, these puzzles are really cool, and worth doing even if they didn't come with an orb and chest to loot. But I still wish there were more shrines with more elaborate puzzles within. Most are only two or three puzzles, as opposed to feeling almost like mini-dungeons. There's a few like that, but at least in my memory, I think there were more larger shrines in BotW. Of course, I know as well as anyone how much faith to put in memories, so who knows.
My favorite type of shrine in Tears, however, are the ones that take away all of Link's gear. Weapons, armor, resources, all of it, and task him with defeating enemies using only what can be found in the shrine, and his arm abilities. Health and stamina are unaffected, but that's it. It's all weapons and equipment OSP, or “On Site Procurement,” for the non-Metal Gear-heads out there. These are a great distillation of what makes playing Tears so much fun. Problems can't be solved by just pulling out one of the hundreds of things stuffed into Link's bag, they require carefully studying the environment, and putting some thought into how to tackle the situation.
They tend to be themed as well, which maybe means they're also meant to serve as tutorials of sorts. Or perhaps more accurately tests to see how well players can utilize certain aspects of the game that they might not have otherwise engaged with. Like how to use the autonomous Zonai Devices to aid in combat, or simply dropping heavy things onto enemies to crush them. Regardless, these shrines manage to both feel tightly designed, but also still built to be tackled in different ways, allowing for that freedom that makes these games so much fun.
It's also cool because the devs must have realized how much people liked Eventide Isle in BotW. Eventide was great (and is smartly different in Tears), but it was only one island tucked away deep in a corner of the world that many people may have missed. So instead that fun challenge was sprinkled around in shrines across Hyrule. They're also a bit more reasonably sized than Eventide, as in my blog from 2017 I did note that I had to rush to get through it because of a real world time constraint I found myself in, and Eventide disabled manual saving.
Honestly, I wish there were even more of them, and while writing about them now, I think it'd be nice if there was a simple way to pick them from a menu to replay. I'm pretty sure the shrines reset after leaving, so I could revisit them, but I'd have to look up which ones were which. There's 152 shrines in Tears, and the descriptors alongside the gibberish names don't exactly make it clear what was in the shrine. Anyway, these were consistently really fun challenges, and some of them were difficult enough that they took multiple attempts. Even ones I found pretty late in the game, after I had already upgraded Link's health a lot.
Considering both my general experience with the back half of Tears, and also how fun the OSP shrines are, it kinda got me thinking something that might be controversial...
The thing is, part of me wishes Link's ability to stock up on things was...more limited? Okay, hear me out here. A lot of my time with this game, particularly before I hit the hundred hour mark (halfway in, naturally), it was pretty difficult. Crucially, in a fun way. I know the limits of the weapon and shield inventory combined with how fragile many of them are rubbed a lot of people the wrong way in BotW, but I found that to be a key component of why the combat worked, and went on to not work as well late in the game after I had upgraded my inventories to hold even more.
So, I went into Tears knowing that, and decided to play without upgrading them...that much. I got one melee weapon slot because I wanted the inventory to be an even ten in the menu (not realizing that later the Master Sword would have its own slot, and thus make it an uneven eleven), and I got one or two bow and shield slot upgrades. Mostly just to watch the fun dance animation a couple more times.
Even without upgrading that stuff, the only times I actually found myself low on weapons or shields was after the hardest, most grueling battles in the game. I'm talking stuff like the Lynel coliseum down in The Depths. That encounter, like the first time I ever fought a Lynel in BotW, really stuck with me. I'd done several of these coliseums, that pit Link against increasingly difficult waves of enemies before getting a reward at the end (I think always a special piece of armor from a previous game). They're all just different variants of one enemy type in each coliseum, and until that point I had only seen ones with manageable enemies like Bokoblins, or Moblins.
Luckily the Lynel one “only” sends out a single Lynel at a time, but even in Tears with new enemies like the draconic three headed Gleeoks, and the panic-inducing Gloom hands, Lynels still stand atop the rest as the hardest foes in the game. Gleeoks have an exploitable weak spot, and even though I feel like I never figured out the “intended” way to fight Gloom hands, they can be outsmarted by just climbing up high and throwing bombs down at them. But Lynels? I couldn't find any trick to make them easier. They can still be sneaked up on, and mounted for a handful of free hits to the back, but otherwise Lynels just require a good handle on the core combat, and weapons with high enough damage to actually whittle them down.
Fighting Lynel after Lynel, with no break in between, AND they were Depths Lynels that do Gloom damage. My max health decreased with each hit, it was the most brutal fight I've ever had in a Zelda game. Despite being so stocked on food that at various points I maxed out that part of the inventory, I didn't have nearly enough Gloom healing food to deal with it, so eventually I was down to literally one heart, three or four Lynels into this fight.
There I was, pulse pounding, solely focused on my enemy, dodging or parrying every attack, somehow surviving despite knowing a single hit would be the end. Then with a well timed dodge and a flurry of hits, I dealt the final blow! The rush of relief was incredible, one of the best I'd felt in years. I'd conquered the Lynels! Down to the most skin of my teeth victory in any game I can think of, at least since I beat Sif in Dark Souls with literally seven health left. So I let out a sigh, but then...
Another gate opened, and out ran the actual last Lynel.
I froze as a gut-wrenching chill washed over my body.
The horror I felt as it charged toward me, massive sword already swinging.
It wasn't over yet.
I gave it my all, I really did, but I wasn't able to beat that final Lynel without getting hit. So, as the game was loading, I took a moment to rethink my strategy. I was playing well enough, so all I really needed was to cook some more Gloom healing food, then I'd be all set, only to realize it actually checkpointed at that last Lynel! And for whatever reason loaded me in with more health. Not a ton more, I think it was at most five hearts, but this time I was resolved to win.
After another thrilling duel, victory was mine! The final Lynel was slain.
That was a case where by the end I was down to only a single shield, because though I didn't think it at the time, now I feel like even attempting to block Lynel attacks is a fool's errand. They hit so hard that most shields break after only two or three hits, so the shield should only be an absolute last resort, or used for parrying.
That fight may have drained a lot of my shields and melee weapons, but had I gone in there with like twenty shields or something, that probably wouldn't have been the case. So, in a similar vein, the fact that I can carry hundreds of just about anything else, means that as long as I remember to pick them up along the way, they may was well be infinite.
Take brightbloom seeds as an example. Early on, they're a vital, and rare-seeming resource that are essential for traversing The Depths. At a point I had well over a hundred of them, and another hundred of the giant variant, which meant I realistically didn't need to worry about running out. I could just throw them around willy-nilly. I don't know what the limit on these things should be, and I'm sure for every sicko like me that wants this game to be harder, there's dozens if not hundreds more that would disagree, but it removed tension that I think was part of what made The Depths special.
I know one response would be to simply stop collecting brightbloom seeds, and let me say, I did. At a point I realized I wasn't going to run out, so I stopped picking them up, and guess what? I didn't run out of them! I know there are ways for players to self-impose restrictions on themselves, sort of how I did with my Garland Quest, but I do feel like at least an option to create tighter limits on the inventory would help encourage even more exploration of every last mechanic the game has to offer, and help prevent people from just relying on a few different tactics.
I didn't play the DLC for BotW, but I do know part of it was a harder difficulty mode, though I'm not exactly sure what it did. All I remember is reading that enemies had regenerating health, which seemed like too much to me at the time. And considering that some of the silver variants in Tears already feel a little too healthy (particularly the Bokoblins), I still don't know that it seems like a compelling difficulty modifier to me. It would make me want to avoid enemies more than actually engage with them.
If it were up to me, I'd focus Tears' hard mode more on limiting things like the inventories. At least in terms of balancing for Link himself, I wouldn't begin to know what to do with the enemies. I'd assume that since the game goes up to silver enemies, then gold, or maybe even platinum could be harder still variants? Which of course would also mean more powerful horns to loot from them.
Now, while I sometimes find it difficult to concoct good segues from one topic to another, it's finally time to get to one of the core aspects of every Zelda game: the dungeons. Or to use the term Tears uses for them: Temples. For those who care about spoilers, I'm not going to discuss specific puzzle solutions, but for those who want to experience the game, play the game. I'll be mentioning stuff from the Water, Fire, and Lightning Temples, plus more specific stuff in the lead-ups to the Water and Lightning Temples. I think this game should be experienced on its terms, so don't say I didn't give due warning!
Anyway, dungeons, Temples, Divine Beasts, whatever each game calls them, they've long been one of the pillars of the franchise. Going all the way back to the original on the NES, which is part of why the Divine Beasts in BotW were disappointing. They had good puzzles to solve, but all four of them had the same aesthetic, the same gimmick (being able to move the Divine Beast to alter the level for puzzle solving/traversal), and had a variant of Blight Ganon as the boss at the end. Individually they weren't bad, but they were way too samey, and all too short.
So I'm very happy to say that Tears' Temples address just about all of those issues with the Divine Beasts. They're all unique aesthetically, and each has a bespoke boss that's completely different from the other Temple bosses. Most of them are still shorter than I would like, but Tears has more in the lead up to each Temple that feels like an extension of the Temples themselves. The game just doesn't put the title for the Temple on screen until Link has crossed the threshold.
As an example, let me compare and contrast the Water Temple of Tears with the Vah Ruta Divine Beast from BotW. In BotW, the arc of the Zora Domain section of the game (which is the suggested first Divine Beast) involves finding electric arrows to open a way into the Divine Beast, and then entering it and solving the puzzles to get to the boss, and so on.
In Tears, the Water Temple is actually the third in the suggested path, but the second I did. Partly because Death Mountain is always a little intimidating to me (the name doesn't help), but mainly I felt a need to go check in with the shark BF, Sidon. And for as much as I expected there to be a difficulty jump by doing these “out of order,” now that I had actually opened up a Great Fairy to upgrade my armor a little, I was able to keep going. Eventually I trudged my way through the Mario Sunshine sludge covering the region, and got to the Zora Domain.
I won't detail every last step, as it'd involve spoiling a really cool environmental puzzle, but even just the lead up to the lead up to the Temple feels better and more involved than the more focused sequences in BotW ever did. To be blunt, it's a better overall mix of the more open-ended design of these most recent Zelda games, and the much more linear/entirely scripted style of the older games in the series. When I say “entirely scripted,” I mean that there was always room to explore for heart pieces and other goodies, but at least in the older 3D Zeldas, there was a core story progression that can't be deviated from. At least without using glitches or speedrun strategies to sequence break the game.
Tears is still a massive, very open ended game, but I really enjoyed these more focused parts of the story. Some puzzles to solve, an ancient area to delve into to get an item equivalent to get up to the Temple itself, and some quality time with my favorite fishy friend, Sidon. Once the two of them are ready to ascend up to the Temple, there's an area that actually took me longer to get through than the Temple itself!
Part of me wants to be a stickler and say the Temple doesn't start until it says “Water Temple” on the screen, but that feels like a disservice in this case. Going by that definition, I'd say the Water Temple was one of the weaker ones, as it's pretty small, and even though the puzzles were individually good (one or two definitely took some tinkering to solve), it's still kind of tiny. But if I'm thinking about the lead-up to the Temple, that might be my favorite lead-up in the game. Link and Sidon actually split up during this, as they enter one of the low-gravity areas amongst the skylands. Link can jump higher, things fly further, and of course all the various physics relating to Zonai Devices and other things in the world get floatier too. For a while, it almost turns into a platformer, with Link navigating up and around all these dozens of floating bits of architecture. There's fun encounters with enemies too, though those are all optional, just for getting chests with extra goodies.
Eventually Link and Sidon meet back up at the entrance to the Temple proper, which brings me to my complaint with the Temples. They effectively all follow the same formula. There's a way to the boss locked by four or five things, that Link and his compatriot (a different NPC joins up for each) are free to complete in any order. Which, to be frank, is basically the same as the Divine Beasts.
I'm sure the dungeons in older games are similarly “rote” and “samey” if they're picked apart from a game design perspective, but they at least did a better job of hiding it. Entering a dungeon in one of those games felt like just about anything could be lying in wait. Even if “anything” meant getting about halfway in, then finding an item used to solve the puzzles in the back half as Link searched for the Boss Key.
Don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed all the Temples in Tears. Particularly the Fire Temple, which definitely took me the longest to complete, and to me most closely resembled what I remember loving from dungeons in older games like Wind Waker and Twilight Princess. Its interlocking minecart rails were really fun to traverse, and made the whole thing feel elaborate in a way the other Temples didn't quite, even if they all had their fun gimmicks. It felt almost labyrinthine, and I kind of managed to get a bit lost in it, in a good way. It definitely took me a lot of effort to navigate my way to the last of that Temple's objectives, and it concluded with a really fun boss fight. Not the hardest by any stretch, but it's built around use of a specific ability in the boss room in a way that's both mechanically neat, and also visually cool.
The Lightning Temple I actually thought at first might be a traditionally built dungeon, because it sees Link and Riju (the head of the Gerudo) moving through linear puzzles for a bit before getting to the core of the Temple, at which point it goes to that same flow of activating four things to get to the boss. The Gerudo section of the game does get me thinking about the one more focused sequences of the game that I did think was disappointing.
The short version that doesn't spoil the story is that Link eventually finds himself having to help defend Gerudo Town against waves of mummified Gibdo. The main point of this involves deciding where to place squads of Gerudo soldiers (the tallest buff women in Hyrule) around the town along with their giant cannon, but crucially there aren't enough to fully cover each entrance. So, given that a core component of Tears is building contraptions, my immediate thought was to build defenses. On the suggested path, this is the last of the four “regional disturbances,” and also the last one I did, meaning by now I had a huge assortment of Zonai Devices in capsules, and I wanted to make good use of them.
But, my excitement didn't last long, as my next thought, as I scoped out the town was, “will the game actually keep everything I build in the world, or will it just disappear?” As cool as it would be if the game remembered every little thing Link ever built, obviously it doesn't. How much of that is technical, and how much is design I can't say, though given the Switch I'm inclined to say it's more technical. Anyway, I decided to make a hard save, in case my fear was correct, so I could reload and not waste my Devices on literally nothing. I don't mind throwing away a brightbloom seed when I have hundreds of them, but I do mind throwing something away if I only have ten.
Considering the Gibdo are weak to electricity, my plan was to combine the roomba buddy Zonai Devices with the electric sparking ones. They would chase after the Gibdo, and weaken them, if not outright destroy them. So, I set some up at one entrance to town, some other defenses at another, and some more at the third, but then I went back to check on the first entrance, only to find that my fear was correct: The game didn't remember what I had built, and they were gone.
Disappointed, but not surprised. Instead I reloaded my save and defended the town with the troops I positioned, and my own combat skills. To be clear, this sequence isn't bad by any stretch, and I bet if I had gotten to this part sooner it would have been a tense, really fun struggle to actually manage, but my being overloaded with electric things to fuse to arrows, I didn't even need to rely on Riju's special power. Almost as if this game's lack of resource limits allows some of the challenge to be trivialized!
Again, it feels like a missed opportunity to have a game with such an emphasis on building not have building defenses be a particularly viable approach here. And I don't know why exactly that stuff disappeared. Is there a limit to the physical space between Link and the creations? Did I create too many individual things? I don't know, but I feel like I've been further away than I was here, and still had things persist, so I can't say. Maybe it's a mix of things, or maybe since Gerudo Town is a denser area than the average empty field, it has stricter limits than other areas.
I will say, compared to the terrible forced stealth sequence in the Gerudo section of BotW, this was way better than that. In fact, there weren't any forced stealth sections in Tears! The closest thing I found was an entirely optional side quest to infiltrate the Yiga Clan (yes, the very same place as that infamous stealth bit I always complain about). But rather than sneaking around enemies without being seen, this requires Link to assemble a full set of Yiga Clan clothes, and use them as a disguise to join the Yiga, thus learning their secrets. It's a fun bit, but I wish the Secret Earthquake Technique I learned was actually useful in combat. It doesn't seem to do any meaningful damage, which is a bummer.
I could go on and on, but for the sake of keeping this...from getting too long, there's really only one last thing adjacent to the Temples that I want to say. Which is that, as far as I can tell, all the Temples just exist in the world, and they can be reached prior to doing the quests with their respective NPCs. Can they be completed? No, but there was one in particular that I managed to stumble upon MUCH EARLIER than the story wanted me to, and even if I couldn't do anything with it, it was still a neat thing to find.
Even if I wish Tears remained challenging throughout the later parts of the game, despite it being my own doing by accidentally hoarding items, I still appreciate that as much of it is as challenging as it is. Part of me also wants to lump in fully upgrading the best armor in the game (for at least the chest piece, I dunno that my short-shorts with boots are the most defensive bottoms, though I did fully upgrade them), but I cannot imagine beating Lynels without it. I mean, I can, I have a good imagination and it would simply mean just not getting hit. Armor at least, since there's so much of it, can be easily swapped out to change the difficulty of a situation.
While Tears' Temples still aren't quite up there with the my favorite dungeons in the series (Twilight Princess and Wind Waker), they're still a marked improvement over BotW, and pretty great in their own right. Besides, at a point this sort of comparison is just recency bias vs. nostalgia bias, and what difference does it really make when it's all good?
As always, thanks to anyone who read all the way to the end, and look forward to the finale in my thoughts on Tears of the Kingdom! With the end in sight, I'll be finally tackling the ~Queer Thoughts~ I have with this game's strange fashion choices, deep spoilers on what happened in the narrative, and closing thoughts on the experience as a whole.
Have a good day!
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