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Tears of the Kingdom gently guides you towards a few locations to get you started – but you can go anywhere you want, if you’re intrepid enough to try. Once that’s done, you’re able to descend to Hyrule proper and get exploring. But here the game retreads the prior entry here as you need to journey to a handful of shrines to get a new set of abilities, just like you did on the Hyrule plateau in Breath of the Wild. The first few hours of the game take place entirely in the sky, a fascinating setting with a host of new challenges and enemies. Lest you think, like me, that Nintendo just invented a new mysterious culture with a new set of powers to replace the Guardians from Breath of the Wild, the Zonai were actually briefly mentioned in the previous game. The twist comes when Link awakes in a sky kingdom populated by ancient and powerful technology, courtesy of the Zonai clan.

A quick prologue reveals the dark wizard Ganondorf and a calamity known as the Upheaval – events that leave Link grievously injured and Zelda missing (stop me if you’ve heard this one). Tears of the Kingdom kicks things off in a fashion that’ll be familiar to anyone who played Breath of the Wild. Fortunately, I then decided to slow down and indulge my curiosity, a decision that made the game far more rewarding and made me eager to explore at my own pace, without worrying about getting to the end. And as I tried to play through it as quickly as possible, to see as much of the world as I could for this review, I ended up more frustrated than satisfied. There’s an overwhelming amount of things to do, locations to see, puzzles to solve and enemies to defeat here.

Perhaps even more than its predecessor, though, Tears of the Kingdom demands patience. Instead, after successfully blowing up the Zelda format, Nintendo is giving players even more – more of Hyrule to explore, and more freedom to dream up how to tackle the many, many challenges the game throws at them. The result is The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, a game that is not a complete reinvention. Internally, Nintendo decided to get right on that, announcing a direct sequel was in development only two years after Breath of the Wild arrived. What in the world do you do for an encore? Breath of the Wild is the biggest-selling Zelda game of all time and was an unqualified success with critics and players alike. The 2017 title came 31 years into the franchise’s history and somehow felt familiar while simultaneously remixing or entirely removing core tenets of the series. Games like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild don’t come along often.

Get more hearts zelda breath of the wild