Following is a script I considered making into a video, but other projects are taking priority. Enjoy!

If Zelda: Breath of the Wild opened a new chapter for open world games, Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom may have closed it. That game is so committed to experimentation and open space, it sometimes feels like a satire of the genre. I don’t think anyone can reasonably say TOTK is too short or small, which tells me the series is approaching another reinvention. This essay will discuss what that entails, starting with the Zelda formula, and close looking at Nintendo’s ability to keep creating great adventures.

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Link Between Worlds, Breath of the Wild, Tears of the Kingdom, and Echoes of Wisdom have shifted away from key item progression to a more open-ended approach. So let’s go over some concepts.

First, open and linear design. I touched on these in my previous video Does Metroid need upgrades?, to review:

The pros and cons of Open Design:

+ sense of discovery
+ events feel player driven
+ “research” feel to world building
+ support from community discussion
+ sequence-breaking for replayability
– player can get lost
– soft gates / weird skill jumps
– backtracking through empty/boring areas

The pros and cons of Linear Design:

+ all concepts can be explored
+ linear story
+ linear skill curve
+ no “dead ends”
– can be restricting
– lack of discovery
– no options when hitting a difficulty spike
– events feel inevitable

Second, key items are inherently linear. For a key item to have value, the player must be able to hit dead ends, then turn around to find a key to unlock the path forward. If there is no dead end, the design is functionally open, and the item isn’t a key, it’s an upgrade. I go over this in depth in the Metroid video so if that doesn’t make intuitive sense, feel free to check it out and come back.

Third, external vs. internal rewards. You can also think of this as destination vs. journey, or result vs. process. The rough idea goes: internally motivated players pursue things at their own pace like mechanics, environments, social tools, creating their own rules, or going outside a designer’s intended playstyle. Externally motivated players might like achievements, collectibles, level grinding, story-as-reward, or pushing for completion for its own sake. Matthewmatosis explores this concept well.

All games balance internal and external rewards. A master designer might have a balance in mind, but one configuration can’t appeal to all players.

With these three concepts in mind, it’s easy to conclude this is all a matter of taste: Linear vs. Open. Key items vs. Upgrades. External vs. Internal. We can even make a chart!

Openness is a spectrum. Think of it like branches on a tree: more branches, more open. Fewer branches, more linear. The dependency charts in Mark Brown’s Boss Keys series illustrate this perfectly. It could be measurable by counting the number of doors available to a player at certain times, compared to the total number of doors in the game. If a large percent of doors are available early on, that’s an open design, but if the number starts low and gradually increases, that’s linear.

However, External and Internal reward systems coexist, and sometimes the line between them is fuzzy and player-dependant. Key Items and Upgrades can also coexist. Key Items just make a game more linear by controlling the explorable area.

With these three buildings blocks, we can borrow Nintendo’s term: pillars. For this essay let’s say the pillars of Zelda are getting stronger, helping others, solving dungeons and puzzles, and stopping the big villain. Each pillar then uses the building blocks differently.

Because there are valid approaches to all these concepts, I want to be receptive to the tastes of future Zelda designers. I hope this essay clarifies your preferences and why you might (or might not) enjoy adventure games. I highly recommend Celia Wagar, aka “Crit Points” writing on Zelda, as she focuses on mechanics, and helped me clarify my own language for this essay.

Let’s take a look at the four pillars, through the lens of those 3 dimensions of adventuring.

Getting Stronger

Getting stronger is linear, as you’re unlikely to forget learned skills. BOTW and TOTK play with this in no-gear challenges (Eventide Isle, Construct battle shrines in TOTK), as well as bargainer statues (swapping heart containers and stamina).

Similar to Metroid, this process is external and internal. External means scale upgrades and grinding, Internal is skill-based like combat strategy, item tricks, and more. Key items don’t just add attack power, they make the game deeper by expanding the moveset and area available. The exact way a player scales and increases their skill will vary, which is true of all games.

There’s a hidden experience system in BOTW/TOTK. I’m guessing hiding experience points was an aesthetic choice, while still tracking access to better weapons and shields. These items are external progress, while teh manner of engaging enemies doesn’t change.

A moveset is only as good as the opponents the player faces. It’s important to encourage the player to find and exploit enemy weaknesses IE attack patterns, item weaknesses, using the environment, etc. Check out this intro to Bayonetta for an example of an action game that does all of this and more.

Celia Wagar’s BOTW review appropriately compares durability to ammo. This supports it’s survival elements and emphasis on external rewards.

Helping Others

Side quests can be completed in any order and are therefore open-ended.

Older Zelda has external rewards like items, pieces of heart, and the dialogue and context for the side quest. Some side quests would be inaccessible until you have key items, which in turn can control the difficulty of the side quest. Open-world Zelda changes the balance a bit: there are more side quests, but they consist of similar, never-urgent tasks and rewards. They’re designed to be encountered along the course of the adventure, and because you can do them in any order, design and difficulty are more flat.

Older Zelda tended to introduce fantasy races with each game. Helping different fantasy races is wholesome, and introduces novelty, a concept I’ll come back to in my conclusion.

Solving Puzzles

Puzzles can be linear or open. In traditional puzzle games, the player is taught increasingly complex ideas about how to proceed. In older Zelda, this often means using different combinations of items to proceed through dungeons or specific areas. If you know the obstacle the key item unlocks, this is less a puzzle and more point-and-click adventure. The player isn’t supposed to experiment, they’re supposed to remember the locks and keys. Celia Wagar explores Eiji Aonuma’s preference for adventure game design, rather than arcade-y action and puzzle design.

In good puzzle games, catharsis comes from connecting concepts together, thereby understanding a solution before you need to execute it. Like learning a language and successfully communicating with someone.

In newer Zelda, lock-and-key design is replaced by experimentation. The large tool set means a player thinks about what a tool could be used for, then try it out. It’s not optimal to try every tool. In TOTK, there are often Zonai parts near an area to suggest the path forward. Where this isn’t the case (often in the Sky and The Depths), I would often build devices to keep traversal interesting.

With this approach, some tools are more useful than others. Matthewmatosis argues this isn’t a flaw of openness, it’s a feature. Flexibility can be fun, but I certainly had my most used Zonai devices of the 27 types, and I’m sure lots of hover bikers did too.

Beating the Villain

In BOTW and TOTK, this is open ended: you can decide to fight the villain whenever you want.

This fight is externally rewarded: the main villain gets more context the more you play the main story. They have a set health bar and attack power, and will fight the same way no matter what you do before meeting them. The external difference between hour 5 or hour 50 is determined by how much story you absorbed. The internal reward is different, because a 3-heart run is far more difficult than a well-equipped, high-level run.

Choosing when and how to engage is a fantastic commitment to the open design, and I’m glad the designers stuck to it. I think it’s far more valuable as an example to learn from, even if some players found that freedom unsettling.

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Perhaps, like Metroid, the thing that appeals to Western audiences doesn’t appeal to Nintendo developers. My ideal Zelda would have a skill-based combat system, increasingly difficult side quests from unique characters with a mix of useful and cosmetic rewards, dungeons and puzzles that build an internal design language, and a main villain that mechnically summarizes everything the player should have learned. This is a tall order, but some Zelda’s have come close.

The moveset in Twilight Princess is probably the largest, but it’s mostly optional.

The side quests in Majora’s Mask build the world of Termina thematically and make the game deeper by rewarding the player with masks. Because they reset after the 3-day cycle, there’s a sense of futility and melancholy to completing the quests. Though that’s a bit dark, it adds emotional stakes. The sense of incompleteness can encourage repeat playthroughs, and fits thematically within a world whose days are numbered.

There are brilliant dungeons throughout Zelda. Rooms are cleared through a mix of environmental logic, combat, key items, upgrades, and puzzles (shout out to cloning in Minish Cap). Yet again, Celia Wagar rightly points out that Zelda doesn’t really have puzzles, it has what she calls “nuzzles” or riddles.

Some dungeons have a hook that changes the layout and opens new areas. Mark Brown argues that the trickiest dungeons are those that give you multiple keys, providing branching paths.

It’s worth noting it’s impossible to break a Zelda dungeon. It’s possible to feel lost in some dungeons, because they force the player to stop and think rather than take a dead end at face value. I’d argue this is generally good design, and in the best cases, large dungeons include shortcuts to skip backtracking. I think having a perfect sense of where to go next takes tension out of dungeons, while checking a map and searching for keys/key items encourages paying attention to the environment.

As far as villains, I have a soft spot for the ending of Wind Waker. Ganon’s puppets are visually striking, and the idea of Ganon as puppetmaster is evocative and could have been played up further in the plot. Ending in a duel without a monster transformation makes the fight human-sized and, I think, more emotional. BOTW/TOTK’s final bosses respectively use the field and sky, which sums them up thematically. Do you prefer a human-scale climax, or a spectacular one? The final fight shouldn’t use Link’s full toolset because pausing to switch items would release tension. I hope future games expand on combat options so the ending feels like a culmination of what the player has learned, rather than single use arenas and quicktime events.

Some games include villain encounters before the final fight. If I had to guess, this is to give the sense the villain is a present danger, instead of running in the background. However I find this approach frustrating because the player probably has the skill to beat the boss if the plot allowed for it, therefore the result feels like padding.

Conclusion

Getting stronger, helping others, solving puzzles/dungeons, and beating the final villain each have distinct appeal, and there’s a fabulous adventure possible with these pillars.

My research playlist is full of people reviewing the series’ failures and potential with different levels of frustration and enthusiasm. These videos are excellent but often leave me asking why people feel so strongly about this franchise. I think it’s the tension between nostalgia and adventure.

I personally believe adventure is linked (!) to novelty. Nostalgia is the opposite of novelty, and therefore the opposite of adventure. We can’t always expect an innovative game to be a commercial success. Sometimes it’s the opposite, and innovation is repurposed (or watered down) by games that find a wider audience. Perhaps the game is called “ahead of its time”.

We may have fond memories of the first time finding a secret cave, crossing Hyrule Field, seeing the size of the BOTW map, or the first dive from the TOTK sky. These moments are all ways to tell the player they’re entering a world of possibilities.

But after hour 5, 10, or 50, a once-epic view can become an obstacle between points of interest. If you want, you can warp and look at a loading screen. In the Switch games you might see a new tip, but as you keep playing, tips repeat, and you might spend more time waiting than engaging with anything, rewarded by something relatively minor for the effort. The items in TOTK and Echoes of Wisdom are pretty much off the rails, and rely on the player’s interest in experimentation if they want variety – though many will stick with preferred options.

As I look back on my time with TOTK, it mostly felt like work. The more I think about it, completionism is an external reward mentality. It shifts focus away from engagement and depth, and instead on finishing a checklist. In good games, we enjoy completing a checklist, but if something is off, the player instead numbly pushes toward their end goal. The process is a struggle because it takes time, but provides a pretty low level of engagement.

If we return to our chart:

Zelda faces a dilemma. The series could continue with open design, and perhaps build up the quality of external and internal reward; a game with lots of functional items and mechnically deep gear. This approach isn’t ideal for puzzle design, because encountering puzzles in any order flattens their difficulty. Linear design can allow the development of a puzzle language. Perhaps one “spoken” through key items?

Breath of the Wild was developed during the life cycle of the Wii U, one of Nintendo’s least successful consoles. There was significant pressure to create excellent games, which concluded with a new hardware generation in the Nintendo Switch. Most first party Wii U titles saw a Switch re-release. And now in the Switch 2 generation, the company is at an all-time high, without pressure to innovate. There’s an objectively excellent catalog being updated from the Wii U, and even Wii era. As an advocate for game preservation I’m generally fine with that, despite my frustration with pricing, re-purchasing, or needing to subscribe for games.

Zelda will remain influential as it winds up for its next curveball. I suspect it will stick to the pillars I mentioned, and hope there’s serious consideration given to openness, key items, and reward systems.

Why this won’t be a video

Unfortunately, I don’t love thinking about the recent Zelda games.

I find Tears of the Kingdom and Echoes of Wisdom kind of silly. The open-ended approach to items feels like designers saying “make your own fun”, which I don’t find appealing when paired with a familiar fantasy story. With the exception of one great plot reveal, the Tears of the Kingdom story is pretty rough. Other reviewers have gone in depth on this, so I’ll refer to them.

Ultrahand contraptions are fun, but they make Link more of a walking god than a determined knight, and undercuts drama in the story. He’s far more powerful than the creatures he encounters, and it’s purely a game constraint that he can’t use Ultrahand to pick up living things. I get that doing so would be macabre, but it’s unfortunate when a game has the aesthetics of a grand adventure, and the mechanics of a creative toy.

And speaking of story, I think generally Zelda stories are a bit weak. Writing is difficult, and even more challenging when it needs to fit a game’s design. Zelda convention is that NPCs don’t help themselves, and the emotional tone means they’ll patiently wait forever if the player doesn’t engage with the side quest.

There are of course modern adventure games that experiment with NPC agency, allowing the player to get involved or not, while the NPC continues on their own set journey. There are still other games with procedural story – where stories emerge out of systems, not pre-written dialogue. I tend to prefer that, or minimal story in general – which puts me at odds with most game narratives.

So all of that is to say, most of the Zelda enterprise has worn thin for me, despite the series being a great example of large scale adventure design. It’s hard to look at other games with hearts in the top left of screen, block pushing, a sword and shield, and many more tropes without thinking “Zelda”. I’m cautiously optimistic about the next in the series, but won’t hold my breath, as my tastes grow broader and deeper.

On that note, I’m gonna take CritPoints’ recommendation to try Ittle Dew 2.