Ocarina of Time, released in 1999, was the first to let players fight and explore in 3D, introducing innovations in its controls and world-building that are still being iterated by game designers today. 1986’s The Legend of Zelda was among the first games that allowed players to explore as they saw fit rather than following a linear series of levels. Ever since it debuted nearly 30 years ago on the Nintendo Entertainment System, new entries in this series have often represented a leap forward in the creative and technological possibilities of video games.
The Zelda series’ developers at Nintendo are no stranger to breathless critical acclaim. In Tears of the Kingdom I believe that this aspect, this feeling, has become even stronger.” The feeling of satisfaction comes from exploring and figuring things out on their own – that’s the route to joy. “I think if we provided too much guidance about how to do things, they wouldn’t feel that way. “A lot of time people tell me that when they play Zelda, there are these wonderful ‘I did it!’ moments, where they solve a puzzle and think they must surely be the only person in the world who could have cracked it,” he says. Zelda producer Eiji Aonuma, who has been working on Zelda games since the mid-90s, believes that the series’ willingness to trust the player’s intellectual curiosity is the key to their appeal. Photograph: Richard A Brooks/AFP/Getty Images People queue to buy the game after it went on sale in Tokyo. It is already being called one of the greatest video games Trusted Reviews said it was “likely to go down in history as one of the best games ever to grace a Nintendo console”, and the games media’s longstanding behemoth IGN has called it an “unfathomable follow-up, expanding a world that already felt full beyond expectation and raising the bar ever higher into the clouds”.Ĭritics have said it offers a previously unimagined level of creative freedom, letting players fabricate their own weapons and madcap contraptions, from makeshift planes to flame-throwing shields. Tears of the Kingdom invites players to explore a fantasy kingdom, Hyrule, as elven hero Link, letting them chart their own path through the world and uncover its many secrets. It is the connoisseur’s choice, a game whose puzzles and battles involve your intellect as much as your reflexes. If Mario is gaming’s most recognisable face, the medium’s equivalent of Mickey Mouse, Zelda is more like Indiana Jones – clever, swashbuckling and much imitated.
That makes it a game worth taking a day off work to play – or maybe even a week. On review aggregation site Metacritic, it currently has an average score of 97/100, putting it comfortably in video games’ top echelon.
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