Myths and LEgends
A worthy follow-up to the groundbreaking Breath of the Wild, Tears of the Kingdom engages our own questions of dis- and re-enchantment.
Review by Jake Casale
In 2017, just as I was graduating college, one of Nintendo’s most venerable franchises remade itself. The Legend of Zelda had long been a titan in the fantasy role-playing game space, with a dozen-plus games released over twenty-five years and millions of units sold. While generally sporting straightforward narrative beats—a hero named Link is called to rescue the titular Princess Zelda from an encroaching evil in the kingdom of Hyrule—each new Zelda adventure thrilled players with novel mechanics, colorful characters, and beautiful settings teeming with secrets to uncover.
Yet by the quarter-century mark, whispers were emerging that the franchise was playing it too safe. The puzzles were overly familiar, the quest markers predictable, the economic and combat systems well-trod. Zelda wasn’t bad, but it struggled to feel fresh.
Then Breath of the Wild (BOTW hereafter) happened, blowing the formula to pieces and reimagining the player experience from the ground up. As the franchise’s first “open-world” installment, linear storyline progression was replaced with permission to go anywhere and do anything. You can hit all the major story points in whichever order and at whatever speed you want, or skip them all and head to the final boss. In the meantime—see a mountain? You can go climb it. That village over the ridge? Nothing’s stopping you from catching a horse and riding on over. There are no invisible boundaries, no off-limits locations, no challenge that you have to wait for the right tools to approach and solve. The immersive experience was unparalleled and exhilarating.
As a direct sequel to BOTW, Tears of the Kingdom (TOTK hereafter) was under no small amount of pressure to capture lightning in the bottle again. About fifty hours in (out of what will likely be hundreds; this game is big), I claim that it does—but this time around, I’m finding myself reflecting more on the game’s quieter achievements in atmosphere, texture, and cultural resonance than the latest set of gameplay upgrades. As I anticipated booting up TOTK six years after completing BOTW, I found that I was most craving a return to the feel of inhabiting the world of these games, which lands somewhere in the postmodern tension between supernatural and material—enchantment and disenchantment. The existential concerns of this iteration of Hyrule, while conveyed through the trappings of fantasy, bear more than a passing resemblance to what Charles Taylor described as the “cross-pressured” environment of the postmodern cultural moment that we all live within. Moreover, TOTK adds unique wrinkles to the puzzle that prompt us to reflect on the dynamics of re-enchantment.
The Hyrule of BOTW and TOTK is a post-apocalyptic world, where the surviving citizens live in the wake of the failure of their own cultural and religious mythology. As a society nourished by supernatural prophecy, Hyrule expects that whenever evil emerges, some iteration of Link and Princess Zelda will show up and drive it back. Yet 100 years before BOTW’s main action, a monstrous force attacked Hyrule, and the promised heroes failed to stop it; as a result, the world was ruined. At the start of BOTW, Link wakes up into an atmosphere of disenchantment, where the core of existence is simply leveraging the material world for survival against powerful monsters. And yet the landscape is still shot through with the supernatural and haunted by glimmers of yearning that the mythology will be revealed as true. Over the course of BOTW, that mythology is indeed vindicated as Link emerges as the hero of old, discovering and re-partnering with Zelda to ultimately vanquish evil. This leaves TOTK with the burden of addressing the question: what next? What does it look like for a disenchanted world to re-conceive itself under the glow of enchantment?
The player is forced to confront these mysteries alongside Link and Zelda, reckoning with how little they truly understand the story and legacy they inhabit.
What TOTK offers to that question is at once fragmentary and instructive. The triumph and reign of the heroes has led to a kingdom-wide effort to restore Hyrule, tying the notion of re-enchantment to the process of healing. Moreover, it quickly becomes clear that TOTK is obsessed with the sequence of building, breaking, and rebuilding. Not only does this find form in one of the core new gameplay mechanics, where Link essentially has both power and mandate to forge materials from his environment into all sorts of contraptions to navigate the world, but in the narrative as well. Link and Zelda are in the midst of rebuilding Hyrule from the last calamity when a new one emerges, interrupting the revitalization of the kingdom. This is a strange experience for the player; some Hyrulean infrastructure is in distinctly better shape than in BOTW, but in the wake of calamity-induced earthquakes, significant chunks of the landscape are now hovering above Hyrule (these games may be famous for their realistic physics, but they’re still fantasy games). Yes, this is a sequel trying to go bigger than before, but there is also a hint of truth here—the world bears the marks of recovery and new distortions simultaneously. TOTK does not imagine re-enchantment as a virtuous upward cycle; instead, it is marked by fragility and vulnerability to setbacks, mirroring any human experience of healing and reintegration.
TOTK links this vulnerability to the limitations of human knowledge that become startlingly apparent in re-enchantment. The new crisis that sparks TOTK’s story is tied to secrets from an ancient era in Hyrule’s mythological history, stumbled upon during the rebuilding efforts. The sudden, brute relevance of this lost period carries all sorts of surprises, including the existence of a horror-influenced cavern underneath Hyrule and a technologically advanced civilization that could reverse time and gravity. The player is forced to confront these mysteries alongside Link and Zelda, reckoning with how little they truly understand the story and legacy they inhabit. Such is the experience of taking steps toward re-enchantment in our own cultural moment; it is an inherently uncomfortable experience that requires encountering the seemingly unknowable and being subject to the consequences of its radical presence. This is true even when we suspect the unknowable comes bearing good news, like the possibility of unconditional grace. Locating ourselves in reference to what we don’t understand is rarely straightforward, even if it is necessary for stepping into wholeness.
Indeed, if TOTK suggests that re-enchantment is healing, it may be ultimately suggesting that healing is slow. This is manifest in the sequel’s musical choices, which re-use several understated piano sequences from BOTW’s score that helped to foster the cross-pressured environment of despair and hope in the original game. Why strike these same notes in the sequel, after the hero has made his triumphant return and vanquished (at least one) calamity? Why continue to suggest that Hyrule is a cross-pressured place to live? There’s always the chance that the producers were too stingy to commission new tracks, but it may also tap into the reality that a bandaged wound is not immediately a healed wound; that memories of absence are not always swiftly expunged by presence… especially when, you know, that castle just started floating ominously in the sky. In TOTK and in human experience, re-enchantment’s answer to “What next?” is a journey of restoration and of rebuilding trust—a journey of twists and bends and mysteries; a steady and recursive vindication of the hope that the myth is true.
Jake Casale lives in Boston, Massachusetts. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 2017 and has worked on public health/health systems strengthening efforts both domestically and abroad. He currently works as an analyst for digital health company Cohere Health.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom was directed by Hidemaro Fujibayashi and was published by Nintendo on May 12, 2023.
