I had the chance to head to New York to play The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom with the Nintendo of America and Nintendo of Canada teams.
On April 18 and 19, five Canadian media and I were invited by Nintendo of Canada to visit the city that never sleeps, the Big Apple: New York. The reason for the invitation? The Nintendo of Canada and the Nintendo of America teams not only wanted to introduce us to the brand new game The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, but also to allow us to play it for almost an hour.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is so much more than I expected
Invited to the Glasshouse Chelsea, a reception room located on the 21st floor of the Chelsea Art Gallery in the heart of Manhattan, we were welcomed by both Nintendo of Canada and Nintendo of America in a large room where several gaming stations were installed with the Nintendo Switch OLED The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Edition plugged into TVs, ready to receive us.
One of the Nintendo representatives invited us to come and sit on a sofa facing a TV on which The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom was broadcast in order to talk to us about what we are going to experience during the event as well as the new features linked to the powers of Link’s corrupted arm, using Ultrahand, Fuse, Ascend as well as Recall.
Behold the powers, now you are on your own!
Once the demonstration of each power was finished, we were invited to a gaming station for each media which included a sofa, a Pro Controller, a Nintendo Switch OLED: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Edition and some decorative goodies around us.
The purpose of the session? Try to solve a puzzle using the powers we had learned within a 15-minute time limit. Picking up wagons using Ultrahand to place them on rails, placing a Zonai Fan on top of them, switching back to Ultrahand to push the wagon onto the rails, and ultimately bringing an NPC from a floating island to another island thanks to this new means of transportation. Afterward? Bringing another wagon up a cliff but whose rail was broken and could not be repaired. Finally, entering a cave to use Ascent and melt into its vault to pop on the top of the mountain. The puzzle was solved using Link’s various arm abilities, mostly Ultrahand to merge objects together as well as Recall to move certain moving objects. Honestly, it’s crazy how much you can accomplish with your imagination!
Clearly, we are not talking about a simple open-world game here but a game where your complete adventure is a gigantic puzzle that can be completed in any way you want, whether easy or more complex.
I managed to complete my puzzle in about ten minutes. It was then that I noticed, on a slightly lower platform, that a kind of gigantic stone golem was lying there. So I rushed to it, using my recent experiences using Fuse powers, my arrows, and bombflowers, to defeat this entity called Flux Construct.
The allotted time being over, I thought I saw that I was the only one to have completed the puzzle in its entirety and faced this boss. I was quite proud of it!
There will be a ton of puzzles to keep you busy
The Nintendo representative, the one who had shown us Link’s powers, brought us back to his demo station a second time to offer us a new challenge: another puzzle even bigger than the first one which consisted in finding a way to leave Hyrule and go up to Skyrule (you know it feels right calling it that) to cross three different floating islands and accomplish one last puzzle.
This session also allowed me to face a camp of Bokoblins and Moblins, forcing me in getting back into the habit of fighting with Link. I must admit that I was a little rusty during the confrontation with multiple enemies. On the other hand, it was a real pleasure seeing a message saying that my weapon was going to break. Earlier, at the time when I fused this weapon with items I found lying on the ground here and there, a pop-up revealed the endurance of my new fused weapon was going up. I even had fun making myself a sword-sword (I fused two swords together), a sword-explosive barrel, or even a super torch using a stick and a ruby, creating a funny sceptre that shot out fireballs. I had to face a Bokoblin leader as the leader of the camp. For this encounter, I fused a longsword with an enemy trap which was a large metal ball with spikes. As I twirled around with my weapon, I inflicted painful damage on the troops that rushed at me.
Finally, I was able to get to Skyrule and get back into puzzle-solving mode using Zonai objects, floating platforms, hot air balloons, rockets and, above all, my 41-year-old brain that’s proudly making a 16×16 blocks house lacking aesthetics but would fit right into a game of Minecraft.
In the end, I completed the majority of the puzzle suggested by Nintendo in just under 15 minutes, so that still gave me some time to find out what was around me. I was able to spot another boss which, in fact, was essentially a stronger version of the Flux Construct I encountered earlier. I faced this one using the same explosive arrow routine but the damage dealt was minimal and there came a time when I ran out of components to fuse with my arrows. Being too big for me to hit his head with my weapon, I had to think of a solution while trying to avoid dying. Suddenly, I made a blunder which, in fact, allowed me to think and analyze the situation.
Without wanting to tell you exactly everything I did, know that I ended up overcoming it! For a few moments, I shattered the stone golem in front of the amazed eyes of the people around me who gathered behind my sofa, whispering among themselves and saying things like: “Did you see how he did that? He managed to do that? What is this boss? I didn’t even know you could do that kind of stuff! “. Once again, a very great feeling of pride and accomplishment.
Still remaining a few minutes in my game session, I decided to relaunch the save point where we are in Hyrule to speedrun my ascent to Skyrule and redo the proposed puzzles.
The next two weeks will be painful
I wasn’t ready to leave the demo station and I L-O-V-E-D my experience with The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. In addition, I really found it exciting to see that they showed us the new powers in Link’s arsenal before leaving us to our own devices. I felt a lot less rushed as I was able to think outside of the box without worrying about constraints normally left in by developers. 1
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom also looks incredible and it’s colourful, feeling like you’re often bathed in light. Everything around you comes alive with the wind, sunlight, and life itself, whether you are in Hyrule or Skyrule. The music is always so soothing and relaxing when you walk around and the tension goes up a notch the moment you are seen by enemies or directly during fights.
The puzzles are both simple and complex. In fact, as I said earlier: everything will depend only on you and your ability to analyze and solve these.
To wrap it all up, unfortunately, I can’t tell you about the lore that surrounds the game since everything was thought out only to show us the gameplay and how to get started with the game, but I can tell you one thing: if the story is as pleasant as what the adventure reveals to us through these gratifying puzzles and its action that is both intense and fun, you will have in front of you a game which, clearly, is likely to be talked about even more than The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
