Tears of the Kingdom is closer than you think
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Today, Nintendo dropped a mini-Direct of sorts with the aim of showing off more footage of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. While everything we’ve gotten so far has just been vague clips and clues — leaving us to pick up the pieces — Zelda producer and boss Eiji Aonuma gave us 10 minutes of gameplay today. Let’s dig in!
Here’s what happened during the March 2023 Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom stream, and a link to watch it
- Eiji Aonuma opens the broadcast by saying that development on Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is “now complete”
- 40 seconds in, we’re shown gameplay – “if we talk about all the changes today, we’ll run out of time,” Aonuma says
- “In this game, the vast world of Hyrule reaches the sky…” Aonuma calls them the “Sky Islands”
- A chunk of rock suddenly falls from the sky, and Link uses the rewind power to cause it to fly back up, with Link riding it in the process
- Breakable items are still in, including a tree branch used as a weapon
- Link is shown fighting a “Construct,” a new type of enemy in Tears of the Kingdom (the items dropped include a Zonai Charge, and a Soldier Construct Horn)
- After the branch broke, the demo showcased a “new ability for Link” called fuse, which melds a branch and a rock together into one weapon as a “makeshift hammer” – it has “much better durability” than the broken branch
- The next fuse demonstration includes a stick and a pitchfork to form a pike – a leaf/piece of ice are fused into an arrow to freeze enemies – fusing arrows and eyeballs create homing arrows – fusing mushrooms to shields creates a smoke effect when blocking
- The demo shows link manipulating logs using the ultrahand power to attach them together to form a boat – a wind machine/fan can be attached to the boat to power it – you can “freely craft” structures and machines
- Another power, ascend, was used – you can ascend through the floor and “emerge” at the top of a structure, including using it in caves to ascend mountains – “in the previous game you had to use stamina, but now you can use ascend to climb up”
- Enemies can use fused weapons as well – a Construct using window power to swipe at Link was shown
- When diving out of the Sky Islands back to the main overworld, you can “speed things up” by diving quicker (hey, a makeshift battle royale!)
That’s mainly it in terms of broad strokes. The powers were the big focus here, and will likely create all sorts of emergent gameplay clips and the like: similar to Breath of the Wild.
New Tears of the Kingdom hardware was revealed too
Multiple accessories and an OLED model were also shown off. The OLED is coming on April 28, 2023 and the game is not included. A Switch Pro Controller and a carrying case are arriving on May 12, 2023.
We have more info on all of that here.
Screens from the Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom stream
