GAME CLEAR No. 141 -- The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (2023, Switch)

Developer: Nintendo EPD with Monolith Soft
Publisher: Nintendo
Clear Date: 8/5/23

Stuck in the Depths

If a great game comes out when you’re in a personal slump, is it still great? If a great game is mostly so good because it’s got the same bones as its excellent predecessor, is it still great? The answer to both of these questions, of course, is yes.

Is The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom a great game? I don’t know. I guess I sort of implied it was with the preceding questions, but I didn’t really experience it as one. In the nearly three months it took me to chip away at it and finally kill Ganondorf, I mostly wondered why I wasn’t having as much fun with it as I did Breath of the Wild. Those reasons, too, are implied above.

But here I am, dutifully filling out its entry in the vanity project I call the GAME CLEAR series of blog posts (which constitute well over 90% of my blog, I’m sure). I don’t feel that I have anything meaningful to contribute to the discussion of this game, which is surely one of the most talked about of the year. But my neuroses demand that I write this post, just as they demanded that I finish this game I struggled to love in the first place, as if it would be some failing to myself or the developers (or both) to abandon either task.

Maybe the reason I write these things is because of the (usually) ruthless efficiency with which I tackle the games in my backlog. Writing these forces me to pause and reflect. My desire to know a lot about video games by playing as many of them as I can is in constant conflict with my desire for that knowledge to be as authentic as possible. For it to be authentic, I’ve got to beat those games. The way this tug-of-war resolves is that I am generally a main quest fiend and do very little rose smelling. Some might argue, perhaps, that playing a game like Tears of the Kingdom in this manner – a game with so many roses to smell – is its own form of inauthentic. Certainly I can concede that I’m blowing by a lot of things people worked very hard on and probably cared a lot about. A casualty of my personal preferences, I suppose.

But again, maybe I etch these thoughts into this stupid monument I call a blog in some sort of attempt to memorialize the little computer worlds I pass through so quickly. If I don’t, surely I’ll forget them, and then what was the point of entering them in the first place?

It’s obvious at this point, though, that this post won’t help me remember Tears of the Kingdom. I’ve hardly said anything about it. It’ll help me remember what I was feeling when I played it, maybe. I don’t think that makes this a very valuable public blog post, but I suppose it works as a strange sort of personal journal entry.

Have you ever been sad and then had a lukewarm response to a piece of media you hoped to love? Sound off in the comments below.