Tears of the Kingdom – Cookbook Confirmed

While I try to avoid what the previews are currently showing, I'm still looking at what Nintendo has to say and this screen was just shared by ZeldaOffcialJP. We're going to get a cookbook this time, where you can look up any dishes, probably of what you've already cooked so far.

The completionist in me was somewhat happy that Breath of the Wild didn't have this, but it can be fun to actually find all possible recipes by trying all sorts of combinations. Fire Emblem Heroes has something like this as well in its Aether Resort mode, though there the number of ingredients isn't as large and for the recipes you have only combinations of up to four, not five. And you still have an insane amount of recipes in that game.

Of course not having a cookbook was a common complaint about Breath of the Wild, because it can be convenient to look things up again. But there was also no real point in being all too experimental with the cooking – just throw in single Hearty Radishes and be done. The only reason why you might want to do something more unusual is getting long-lasting status effects for the Trial of the Sword. Ideally, they will also nerf the hearty and enduring ingredients this time, because they were just over-powered, like the food system as a whole. If that were the case, then finding good recipes would already be a lot more interesting for the player.

The styling of the recipe cards looks similar to the posters with recipes that you could find in the stables in Breath of the Wild, which is a nice touch. And the lower part of the interface looks actually like that new Nintendo Switch OLED that was released today, which is also neat. Well, it's the other way around, of course, where the Switch was based on the ingame visual designs, but we haven't seen these gold on white patterns yet, at least not in any official material. The previews probably have shown off all this stuff already, where I'm a bit in the dark, but that's where I want to be in the moment. (Though, it's quite difficult thanks to certain Youtubers who are blatantly reckless with their video thumbnails and titles...)