In Tears of the Kingdom, The Legend of Zelda Remembers Itself

Nate Schmidt, Contributing Editor

Did anybody else freak out when his name turned out to be Rauru? The big bird ghost who walks you around the island that I’ve taken to calling Tutorial Town—he's Rauru, folks. Tweet at me if I haven’t been paying attention, but as far as I can tell, the Zelda games have been pretty careful to avoid employing very many explicit Ocarina of Time callbacks. If anything, the modus operandi seems to have been to differentiate as much as possible: the Zora in Twilight Princess, for example, don’t even look like the same species as the Zora in Ocarina of Time. Skyward Sword is supposed to be about Hyrule before it even was Hyrule. In fact, generally speaking, I think it’s a boon for the franchise that we’re supposed to accept from the beginning that the game’s narrative is legend, one version of a folk myth that has been transmuted across eons of intervening time. You’d expect there to be some slippage, some changes in aesthetics and topography, representing the imperfect work of memory and retelling. But in Tears of the Kingdom, the ghost bird’s name is Rauru.  

If you don’t recall this as rapturously as me, you may not be remembering that Rauru is the name of the Sage of Light, the quest-giving character in Ocarina who has the second best facial hair in the whole series (first place belongs to Tingle, my heart’s true companion). In keeping with typical Zelda shenanigans, there is no way that the timeline here could work so that ghost bird and the other Rauru could be the same person (again, unless we account for the shapeshifting work of mythmaking), but a callback is a callback, and right from the beginning, Tears of the Kingdom basically says, “Hey, remember what you have loved most about these games? Get ready, because we’re about to dish up as much of that as you can fit on your plate.”  

Counterintuitively, the game breaks new ground by constantly calling back to the best things about earlier Zeldas. You have Wind Waker-style island exploration (in the sky), complex temples that are a little smaller than the ones in Twilight Princess but often just as clever, and a giant world-mirroring underworld the likes of which we haven’t seen since A Link to the Past. I don’t know too much about the story yet, but I do know that there is a Temple of Time and that there are sages involved, and as a person who basically plays new games because he is looking for a little taste of that first Ocarina experience, these details make me very happy. And there are a ton of delightful smaller details, too, like the way Link hums ocarina songs to himself while he cooks, as if there is some magic thread of memory that ties this incarnation of the hero to the one who taught me what indelible impressions a game could leave. This is going to sound like Zelda blasphemy to some (and I do love a good blasphemy), but Tears of the Kingdom has actually showed me what was missing from Breath of the Wild.  

Breath of the Wild, while it has been rightfully touted as a callback to the very first game in the series, also emphasized the ways it departed from the formula that Ocarina laid down. That was a bold and necessary move. Consequently, the way I played Breath of the Wild was really different from the way I had played other Zelda games, and many of those differences were driven by the fact that I knew right off the bat that I had to go kill four different incarnations of Ganon in these “divine beast” temples, and that I was free to get distracted by whatever caught my fancy along the way. This didn’t feel repetitive when I did it for the first time, but now that I’m playing Tears of the Kingdom, I’m reminded of how it feels to play a Zelda game in which I really do not know what is going to happen next in the game’s narrative. I know there are still four main places I am supposed to get to, but I’ve so far found myself surprised much more frequently, while Breath of the Wild sometimes got (here comes the blasphemy) repetitive.

Also—and maybe this is the last and most important thing that reminds me of Ocarina—I find myself caring about the narrative in Tears of the Kingdom. I felt like Breath of the Wild basically had the narrative depth of the NES Legend of Zelda from which it drew so much other inspiration. Oh no, something bad happened to Zelda. Guess we better go find Ganon and kill him. The potential was there for some in-depth exploration of what it meant to live in a world that was covered with dangerous remnants of war—crumbling ruins were haunted by battle droids! But a lot of that potential went unrealized in favor of making the game as mechanically interesting as possible. In Tears of the Kingdom, Hyrule’s past is literally erupting into its present, with both potentially cataclysmic and potentially uplifting results. As numerous cutscenes suggest, Zelda is not a passive character waiting around to be rescued, but—like Ocarina—she’s caught somewhere between the present and the past, and I am actually excited to find out how, or if, she’s going to get back to the future. I can’t possibly keep track of the game’s gigantic crowd of named NPCs, but I can already see how a few of them, like Traysi from the Lucky Clover Gazette, have interesting motivations and some narrative depth, while almost all of the Breath of the Wild characters were basically quest-giving automata. Quests like the Hateno Village Mayor series remind me of the characters I really got attached to while completing the dense set of side quests in Majora’s Mask.  

So there’s some danger here, right? A game about the ways in which the past erupts into the present also leans heavily on nostalgia—and while I am delighting in each whiff of that scrumptious old nostalgia that I breathe in, I find myself wondering if Tears of the Kingdom will also find ways to think critically about what it means to reckon with the past. I have a feeling that time and its reversal is more than just a mechanic in this game, but I also feel that I have at least a hundred hours ago before I’ll be able to say for sure. Or, to put it more succinctly: time will tell.