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I’ve recently been exploring some of the additions and changes to Tears of the Kingdom, and the ways in which those changes both work and don’t. The game definitely encourages you to use these new systems, and yet at the same time they come into conflict either with themselves or something else, causing a kind of “push and pull” – on the one hand you want to use them, but on the other hand it gets so annoying that you may just not bother.
I don’t think this push and pull is unique to Tears, nor is it unique to sequels more generally. Every game is going to face these kinds of problems. We could just as easily carry out similar analyses of elements in Breath of the Wild, or Dark Souls, or The Last of Us, or hundreds of other games. Good games and bad games alike can run into these problems.
As I said in the first essay, at the end of the day I loved Tears. And I still do. Much as I understand the frustrations that many players have with it, it’s still a solid game that captures a very particular vibe for the Zelda franchise and improves on some of the elements that fell short in BotW.
But it’s still worth examining these systems and their struggles. To pick things apart and understand why these conflicts arise. In part because when designing systems, what we’re dealing with are a lot of moving parts that make complete sense on their own, and yet may introduce problems when they’re all put together. And it can be difficult to see those conflicts ahead of time. It may require direct interaction, or maybe even hours upon hours of gameplay before these problems become noticeable.
Like with the previous essay, this one is going to feature some spoilers. And this time around, it’s going to be a bit more significant than before. I will avoid direct narrative spoilers, but I will be discussing components that are supposed to be surprises for first-time players. So consider this the fundamental warning to stop now if you want to experience these things for yourself.
Breath of the Wild Recap
Like I did both times before, let’s cover the underlying concept from the first game. This time we’re going to talk about abilities. Specifically, the abilities you acquire from completing the main dungeons in the game.
BotW contained four primary dungeons, one for each of the major (non-Hylian) races of the game – the Zora, the Gorons, the Rito, and the Gerudo. These groups reside in different corners of the world, and their regions are plagued by some issue caused by a giant mechanical animal – the Divine Beasts. Your job is to get to the Divine Beasts, activate some pillars inside, and then defeat a boss so that the Beasts can then be used to help you defeat the final boss.
Technically, that whole process is optional. You could elect to just go straight to the final boss and fight it, although you’re likely to wind up dead. The game does what it can to suggest that it would be a really good idea to tackle the four main dungeons first.
Not least of which is that upon completing a dungeon, you are given a special power related to the story character that you free. These powers are activated in a variety of ways and have very different effects. One power is activated by holding the jump button. Doing so allows you to charge a special draft of air that rockets you skyward (allowing you to climb tall structures more easily). One power is activated by performing special attacks with your weapons by holding the attack button – this unleashes a bolt of lightning which does a massive amount of damage to your foe. Another is automatically activated whenever you die, and it refills your health (and gives you some extra hearts, to boot). And the last is a shield that blocks damage and briefly stuns an enemy, giving you a little bit of extra safety.
Those abilities likely sound ridiculously overpowered, and the constraint that comes with them is that they have a limited number of uses before they then need to recharge. The updraft, lightning, and shield skills each get three uses at a time, and then they respectively need 6, 12, and 18 minutes to restore those three uses. The power that revives you gets one use, and then needs 24 minutes to recharge.
So the abilities become a sort of resource that is technically infinite, but still need to be used somewhat carefully. You can feel free to use those abilities for the most part, but it’s best to not just use them anywhere.
The abilities are actually really solid, and give a strong incentive for players to complete those parts of the main questline. Experienced players in particular will often beeline to the Rito region to get the updraft power, which dramatically improves exploration of the game’s world.
Unlike in the previous two essays on combat and exploration, I don’t really have any criticism of the abilities in BotW. I think they’re great and the balancing works well to both make sure players can’t just spam them and trivialize all challenge, while also making sure that players still make use of those abilities. Which is not to say that they can’t be criticized. I simply want to use that as a juxtaposition with what we’re about to experience with Tears.
Abilities in Tears of the Kingdom
Tears follows much of the same formula that BotW does, unsurprisingly. The dungeons and the lead-up to them are a good deal more interesting, though they still rely on a similar layout of a handful of isolated puzzles to activate a number of pillars. It’s just that the pillars are replaced by something different in each dungeon to give them a feeling of being more unique, rather than interchangeable.
But when it comes to the abilities that are handed out after the dungeons are completed, there are some really important differences.
Firstly, there are five dungeons, which means five abilities.
Secondly, your abilities are cast by interacting with your companions as they roam the field with you. You walk up to the companion who has an ability you wish to activate, press the corresponding button, and then the ability is activated. After a fairly brief (10-15 second) cooldown, the ability can be used again.
Thirdly, as you can somewhat tell from the previous points, your primary reward is not the ability itself, but a companion that journeys with you around Hyrule. These companions attack enemies and can even draw aggression, and you do not need to worry about their health in any way – it’s basically free damage and distraction.
The changes are interesting in numerous ways. Not only do they give a different feel from BotW, but a unique feeling among all the other Zelda games. Having companions is not strictly speaking unheard of – a couple of games have had AI companions for brief periods, or have been built around having player companions – but the idea of persistent AI partners is basically unheard of in this franchise. Moreover, it provides a nice boost to the combat that can be balanced as you see fit – if you want to take on every monster yourself, you can turn off those companions at any time. And really, it just feels cool to have a party of companions roaming around with you at all times.
The issue that comes up is when you want to use the abilities those companions provide. Two primary problems crop up with the system as designed.
Utility
The first question to be asked in whether you want to use an ability is “how much use is this going to be?” For the abilities in BotW, the answer to those questions was obvious, and the constraint was the limit placed on how often you could use them.
In Tears, the utility is much more varied, to the point that it can often feel better to just not bother.
To explain, I need to describe the five abilities you get.
Your Rito companion is a bird-person, and thus provides a gust of wind. Unlike in BotW where the gust of wind launched you vertically, this one provides you with a brief horizontal burst. It is a way to get extra distance as you glide from place to place. The utility here is fairly clear, and it will undoubtedly be the ability used the most by every player. It is actually fairly clear why the game tries to direct the player toward the Rito village first.
Your Gerudo companion can control lightning, with a bit of help on your end. When you activate their power, a bubble of electricity starts to emanate from them, growing over time. If you fire an arrow into anything within that bubble (whether on the ground or at an enemy), a bolt of lightning will strike down on the arrow. It does a decent amount of damage to enemies, and can hit multiple enemies at once if they’re bunched up. But since it requires waiting for the bubble to encompass your target, and then you also need to fire an arrow at the target (usually in the middle of a frantic battle), the value of the attack can feel a bit hit-or-miss.
Your Zora companion is a fish-person with the power to control water. When their ability gets activated, you are surrounded by a sphere of water that prevents you from taking damage from one attack. Getting hit causes the shield to dissipate. If you attack, you can send out the water as a wave, presumably dealing damage (though if it does, it does not appear to do much). Since the shield is only good for one hit, disappears relatively quickly, and specifically requires you to not attack to keep it, it appears to hold no value. If you happen to use it to avoid damage, excellent…but that’s easier said than done.
Your Goron companion is a rock-person who has the ability to roll into a ball and charge forth in a fiery crash. When you activate the ability, you are allowed to aim your shot (the Goron rolls along the ground and stops at the first object it collides with). The ability does a bit of damage and can knock enemies away, and can also be used to destroy rocks. As a combat ability, it is mostly useful for taking out the armored enemies that you encounter now and then. But its capacity to destroy rocks makes it very valuable for exploring the world’s caves, which are often filled with rocks blocking your path – who needs to waste weapon space on hammers when you can just patiently use your ability instead?
Your final companion is the spirit of another character revived into a robot. The robot follows you around and its “ability” is a bit more complicated. Firstly, you can ride it around. Riding allows you to control the robot directly and attack – but this function appears to be fairly limited in its usefulness. Perhaps the best value that comes out of riding the robot is that you can cross patches of gloom (the evil stuff on the ground that saps your life) safely. The other thing you can do while riding is attach various bits of equipment to the robot’s arms and back, which it can then use in combat. The equipment will eventually break – just like it does for you – but it can allow you to temporarily boost your companion’s combat effectiveness. In all honesty, the ability is pretty underwhelming, and may likely get the most use when it is required.
As the descriptions likely suggest, the value of these different abilities vary wildly. Some of them are useful for very specific scenarios, while others will basically be your best friends. The problem here is that the game doesn’t really seem to make many of these abilities useful outside of specific contexts. The Rito and Goron abilities are useful for everyday adventuring, and the Gerudo and Goron abilities have some combat utility. But the remaining two abilities feel just slightly better than useless, and even the combat abilities are likely to see little use because of the next problem…
Activation
So as I mentioned, you are being accompanied by these companions, and you activate the abilities by going up to the companions and pressing a button. The ability then may need a bit more to then be properly used – pressing the button again or firing an arrow, for example. There are two exceptions to this rule. The Rito’s gust ability can be activated at any time when you are gliding – your companion automatically tracks behind you upon activation, and then you can press the button again to use the gust. Meanwhile, your Goron companion will track to you if you are in a vehicle of any kind. You can aim your shot a bit more freely, and if any enemies are killed by the shot the items they normally drop will be automatically collected.
However, activating abilities outside of those contexts is an incredible pain.
So it would likely be visually annoying to have your companions bunch up on you, and if they did then selecting the right companion would be difficult. So your companions are spread out a tiny bit, and programmed to move around as you do. And in combat they don’t stay still – they will go attack enemies and do the little “AI combat dance” of moving sideways a bit before launching an attack.
Perhaps you might see a bit of a problem here.
Three of these abilities – the Goron, Gerudo, and Zora ones – have intended combat applications. The Gerudo and Zora abilities are basically entirely combat-related. Which means that activating those abilities requires running up to those companions that are engaged with enemies, hitting a button, and then doing whatever needs to be done to finalize the activation.
Let’s use the Gerudo ability as our example, because it is the combat ability that probably has the best application.
You are in combat. There is probably at least one enemy tracking you, and perhaps another enemy locked in combat with your Gerudo companion. You’d like to use that neat lightning ability. So you need to disengage from your opponent and run to your companion. You need to put yourself in potential danger. Then you go to your companion, who might be moving around, or attacking. Or might be about to be attacked. So again, you’re putting yourself in potential danger. And then you need to be right next to the companion, so they might move out of the way before you activate the ability, meaning you need to keep moving.
And then when the dance is actually finished and the ability is activated, the bubble starts appearing. So then you wait for it to grow a bit – which means trying to run around and avoid getting hit. And then you need to pull out your bow and arrow and fire an arrow at your target.
The whole process is going to be filled with so much frustration and danger that it stops being worth it to actually use the ability. Just let the companion attack and distract enemies and use your weapons to kill anything. And again, this is the ability that is specifically designed with combat in mind and is most useful in this context.
The issue comes as a function of how the activation works in practice. If you’re just standing around, none of this is that complicated or annoying. If your companions just stood around during combat, it would probably be much easier to use the abilities. But then a companion that just stands around isn’t that interesting or useful. So you want the companion to be more dynamic…but that same dynamism makes their abilities more complicated to use.
The unfortunate problem is there’s probably not a great alternative solution. Because the buttons on the controller are already in use for so many other things, there isn’t much opportunity to tie those abilities to some other method. At best you could remove a different function and replace it with a radial menu for “prepping” abilities…but of course then what function would need to go? Or that radial menu could be part of the powers that you attain at the beginning of the game, though that would make the radial menu a bit cluttered. The irony is that while the implementation is bad, it’s unclear what a better solution would look like within the constraints of the already existing game.
Concluding Remark
I found myself simultaneously excited and disappointed by the companion system. On the one hand, there is this very visceral feeling of going on an adventure with your buddies. It also makes for some great moments in the core story. On the other hand, the companions…aren’t very good. They are weak and not particularly aggressive, making them mostly useful as distractions rather than as damage dealers. This latter point makes sense, as making them both powerful and aggressive would undermine any sense of difficulty in the late game. But I experienced so many occasions where I would be running around a weak enemy and waiting for my companions to finally attack, because I didn’t want to waste any of my weapon durability…and just waiting, and waiting, and waiting.
But probably the biggest potential draw to come out of the dungeons is not the companions themselves, but the abilities that come with them. The game’s dungeons are designed around those abilities, essentially replacing the standard Zelda formula of getting an item. The game spends a lot of time trying to acclimate you to those abilities and their utility. But once the dungeons are done…will you keep using the ability? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. The number of times I intentionally hopped on the robot to get around is far less than the number of times I was trying to pick up items or activate a different ability and accidentally started riding.
And when compared to BotW, all of this feels like a step forward and then a step back.
Abstracting Games 