Highlights
- The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom draws heavily from previous Zelda games, featuring classic enemies and familiar locations as a homage to the franchise's history.
- The game maintains the non-linear elements of Breath of the Wild and combines classic Zelda dungeon design with the Divine Beast format, upholding franchise traditions.
- Tears of the Kingdom surpasses previous Zelda games in terms of its time travel narrative, spanning the widest known amount of time in the franchise and featuring an age-spanning story that future games may not be able to surpass.
This article contains spoilers for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.A good summary of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’s relationship to its franchise is that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Being the latest entry in over 35 years of The Legend of Zelda games, Tears of the Kingdom benefits from having a lot of prior material to cherry-pick concepts from. Not only is the game a direct sequel to Breath of the Wild, but it also features the return of even more classic Zelda enemies than its predecessor, including Gleeoks, Gibdos, and even Ganondorf himself. Many of the locations referencing past Zelda games still remain, and the sky islands could even be taken as a full homage to Skyward Sword.
However, where Tears of the Kingdom most leans on its Zelda legacy is in its structure and story. Besides maintaining Breath of the Wild's non-linear elements as a call back to games like the NES Legend of Zelda and A Link to the Past, there's also Tears’ use of classic Zelda dungeon design alongside the Divine Beast format. Complete with Sage powers comparable to dungeon items, it's clear that Tears of the Kingdom is still upholding franchise traditions. That said, it did far more than recall old trends with one story element, and it may remain its most intense instance for years to come.
Time Travel Is A Regular Occurrence In Zelda Stories
Ever since The Legend of Zelda’s mainline titles made the jump to 3D, time travel has been present more often than not. With the exceptions of The Wind Waker and Twilight Princess, the former sporting a time-locked Hyrule and the latter employing a dungeon set in the past, time traveling has featured repeatedly in Zelda games' stories. Ocarina of Time only involves a few years of time travel upon drawing or returning the Master Sword, and Majora's Mask famously takes place in a 3-day cycle. In hindsight, those were just the series getting warmed up.
Skyward Sword uses Timeshift Stones as the focus of the sandy Lanayru region, allowing Link to visit pockets of an unspecified technologically-advanced past. There is also a time portal used to travel back to around when Demise was first sealed. Zelda herself needs to wait out the difference between that age and the present, but she does so in stasis. It's unclear how large these time gaps are, but Skyward Sword remains a prominent example of time travel in Zelda. After that, it almost came as a shock that the only equivalent in Breath of the Wild was Link flashing back to his life 100 years prior.
No Zelda Game Matches The Scope of Tears of the Kingdom's Time Travel
Tears of the Kingdom more than makes up for this, however, by spanning the widest known amount of time in the Zelda franchise. When Zelda travels back to the founding of Hyrule, she ends up 10,000 years or more in the past. It's there that Ganondorf's role as Hyrule’s ultimate evil and recurring Calamity is established, and Zelda's long path back to the future with the Master Sword begins as she becomes an immortal, mindless dragon.
Even after Skyward Sword expanded the period of its story across hundreds if not thousands of years, Tears of the Kingdom still blows it out of the water. That Princess Zelda lives out its entire time period, even if she's not aware or affected by it, is also a novel move for the series. While time travel has become a tradition in The Legend of Zelda, it's unlikely that future games will surpass the scale found in Tears of the Kingdom's age-spanning narrative.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is available now on Nintendo Switch.
