I recently reviewed The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (BotW, 2017). In this article, I’ll share my early thoughts after about 10 hours spent with its sequel, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (TotK, 2023).

On emulation

Like BotW, I’m playing TotK on my Steam Deck OLED via emulation, despite owning the original Switch version. However, this time around, the experience was less straightforward. Unlike BotW, which I played using the Ryujinx emulator without much trouble (though it’s generally better to emulate the Wii U version using CEMU), TotK initially ran poorly, often dipping below 10 FPS and freezing every few minutes once I left the intro area.

After several hours of troubleshooting, I landed on a more stable setup: Yuzu, game version 1.1.2, and a carefully chosen set of mods. This configuration now gives me a mostly stable 30 FPS, though I still encounter minor graphical glitches that I haven’t been able to resolve. If you’re considering a similar setup, these guides might save you some time.

First impressions

BotW set a bold new direction for the series, prioritizing player freedom above all else. Once the Great Plateau tutorial is complete, the player is handed the quest “Destroy Ganon” and given the freedom to rush straight to the final boss. While most players will choose to get lost in an open world full of optional side content, the fastest BotW speedruns can finish the game in about 20 minutes, underscoring just how little of its world is strictly necessary.

By contrast, TotK feels like a return to a more structured, story-driven formula. The intro sequence is longer and more guided, and the game seems less interested in respecting the player’s time. Unlike BotW, there is no final boss to rush—only a long quest line that you must follow to see the conclusion to the story. This might be a deliberate response to players who found BotW too directionless, but it’s a noticeable shift in tone and design.

While TotK technically continues the story of BotW, the connection feels tenuous, not least because BotW itself had only a loose narrative. Worse, TotK reuses much of BotW’s world, which strips away a significant portion of the intrinsic motivation for returning players who have already spent hundreds of hours exploring Hyrule. In this sense, it feels less like a direct sequel and more like an alternative take on the same concept, aimed at players who weren’t sold on the radical shift of its predecessor. If only Nintendo marketed the game as such.

That said, TotK introduces some genuinely creative new powers and device-building mechanics, which my three-year-old found endlessly entertaining as we built a car loaded with explosives and drove it into a monster camp. So, while I’m skeptical that this new direction will sustain my interest over a 100+ hour playthrough like BotW did, I’m willing to keep playing for now, if only to see what other surprises it has in store.