Separated from Princess Zelda in the dark crypt, you, the brave hero of Hyrule, wake up again in a dim cavern. A light beam attracted your attention, so you walked along the path. Suddenly, a vast scene unveils: sky islands, clouds, and distant shrines all come into your view. Six years ago, you had woken up as the savior of the princess; once more, destiny beckons your return. As the title The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom appears, and the music reaches its climax, the land of Hyrule welcomes your return: dear player, welcome back to the world!
As with Breath of Wild before it, the developers at Nintendo welcome the players on the journey. But how could they further innovate when the previous entry achieved such acclaim? The land of Hyrule, consisting of eight regions, six countries, and 130 shrines, is spacious enough for any player to explore. Link, the character that the player controls, already has myriad types of weapons to start his battle. Players play games for fun and to achieve a sense of novelty. As a player who has played Breath of Wild for 100 hours, how can Tears of the Kingdom create more joy for me? What has Nintendo done to enhance players' experience with this new installment?
As the developer of Tears of the Kingdom, Nintendo offers a simple and complex answer to these questions: to provide players with joy. Simple since the basic rubric of game design is to evoke pure delight. However, it's also challenging, as many developers hardly fuse this core into their works. Tears of the Kingdom brilliantly answered the question with a common language deeply engraved in everyone's memory: childhood.
Staying in touch with the childhood experience, inside the game, you fuse a branch and a stone like you had thought when you explored outdoors as a child; you use the Ultrahand to build and combine objects like you had done with those Lego bricks a long time ago, you glide in the sky and become the savior of the princess just as you had imagined hundreds of times when you are young-every visionary dream comes true. Through its impressive gameplay, Nintendo has seemed to reverse time and transport us back into our childhood's carefree and joyous days. In the gaming experience, you will be curious like a child. You will be interested in the process of creating new weapons and objects. You will be impressed by the scenery, even as you realize you have a primary mission. It is like finding scattered pieces of your childhood memory back through Nintendo’s guidance, like opening a gift package. When you eventually open this gift, you will find a note from the developer- 'Open it, and find your childhood inside.'
It has taken Nintendo six years to develop Tears of the Kingdom—the same length of time it takes for a kid to grow up to become a teenager or a teenager to become an adult. Your ego in childhood has faded away with time, imprisoned at the very beginning of your memory, awaiting rescue in the present. You grow up, go to work, or learn according to the routine day by day immutably until an old friend called Nintendo opens the door of your insipid life and sends a package to you on the 12th of May, 2023. He invited you to rescue the childish self that trapped at the beginning of time back with the guide of the gift inside the package. "Let's play again as a brave hero, dear player."He said.
The story of Tears of the Kingdom is romantic: Princess Zelda had time-traveled to a thousand years before to save the land of Hyrule. She had lost contact with the hero, Link, and the Purah Pad was Link's only clue about Zelda from King Rauru. Building on that plot device, Tears of the Kingdom is the Purah Pad that Nintendo delivers to players. Childhood memories have been trapped in your early consciousness, and it's your time to be a hero. Just like Link, the players overcome tasks within the Guidance of this Purah Pad, eventually saving their princess—in other words, their childhood selves.
Thousands of video games have been released on hundreds of platforms nowadays. Among them, *Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom i*s still a masterpiece. It has revolutionary gameplay methods that have "Greatness in Simplicity": combining, fusing, and discovering everything, and this method evokes players' happiness. Maybe AVGN's quote is the most appropriate one to describe this game: "Nintendo rules the world!" When the player finishes the game, seeing Link and Zelda reunited, crossing the barrier of time and space led by the Purah Pad, they recover their imprisoned childhood selves through this ‘Purah Pad' developed by Nintendo. Once again, thanks to Tears of the Kingdom, Nintendo has woven a happy ending for this fantasy: The hero saves the princess, and they live happily ever after.
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