Nintendo’s biggest game of the summer, and perhaps the entire year, was “The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom,” a sequel to the hit “Breath of the Wild” that launched with the Nintendo Switch in 2017. Players once again take on the role of Link as he searches for Princess Zelda and protects the kingdom of Hyrule from a revived Ganondorf and his armies of monsters. 

Upon first starting the game, one wouldn’t be faulted for thinking it’s a carbon copy of its predecessor. For better or worse, “Tears of the Kingdom” follows the same formula as “Breath of the Wild”: solve puzzles and combat challenges in shrines to level up, take on a handful of dungeons to get helpful abilities and then go fight the final boss, with a heavy amount of exploration and side quests thrown in for good measure. At times, yes, it does feel like an extension of the first game, but that isn’t a bad thing. “Breath of the Wild” was an incredible game, and Nintendo, with “Tears of the Kingdom” is giving us more of what we liked while adding some genuine improvements to the abilities and core mechanics. 

One of the main draws for this game was the inclusion of the sky islands, a series of floating islands high above Hyrule that you can freely explore and then dive back down to the mainland without a loading screen. Purposefully absent from the game’s advertising, however, was an entire map underneath the Hyrule we’ve already explored called the Depths, filled with surprises to discover. 

The standard abilities from the previous game are replaced with powers from an ancient race called the Zonai. Being able to rewind the trajectory of any given object or fly through any obstacle above you, such as the entirety of a mountain when you’re lost deep in a cave, feels like being given the tools the developers used to make the game. It allows for a sense of freedom that might make other open-world games feel lacking if you play them too soon after “Tears.” 

“Tears of the Kingdom” is a game you can spend hours playing without realizing it. All the new ideas are enough to set it apart from “Breath of the Wild,” and most will likely come away preferring the new over the original.