Nintendo pulled back the curtain on The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’s gameplay on Tuesday to reveal a ton of new ways Link can craft stuff. Mushroom shields. Helicopter rafts. Big, huge sticks. The hero of time is handier than ever and fans are loving it.
Today’s mini-Zelda Direct showed Tears of the Kingdom is doubling down on Breath of the Wild’s incredible toolset to let players create everything from boulder clubs to cars. Link’s new abilities will let him rewind time to fly through the air on big rocks as well as fuse items together to make contraptions both goofy and powerful. The possibilities are clear, and so are the memes:
One of the best parts of Breath of the Wild was all of the emergent techniques, trick shots, and glitchy ways to break the game that devoted players discovered in the months and years following its release. If anything, Tears of the Kingdom looks poised to be even more chaotic. Fans joke about Link taking on Calamity Ganon with some caveman monstrosity made of rocks and twigs but that’s exactly what’s going to happen. Or maybe they’ll find a way to simply ram him with their Green Goblin glider.
As others have pointed out online, it’s basically confirmation over 10 years too late that Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts was onto something. It also makes me wonder what Fallout 76-style Zelda with full-blown base-building would look like. Maybe we’ll find out in the year 2030. For now, I’m content to see how many weapons I can craft out of mushrooms, even if the return of weapon degradation means they still might be constantly breaking. If Link’s vehicles can break too I might start to cry.