Tears of the Kingdom – More Fighting Styles / Weapon Types?

While Breath of the Wild has a lot of different weapons, there are ultimately only four different weapon types in the game:

• Sword & Shield
• Two-Handed Sword
  
• Spear
• Bow
  

This gets reflected by the four Champions, where each of them utilizes exclusively one of these weapon types. A lot got squeezed into this systems, where rods are simply one-handed weapons, hammers two-handed weapons and so on. There are even boomerangs of different sizes.

But for the most part you use the weapons in the same category the same way. So, two-handed weapons for example won't let you shield, will only attack slowly, and will be whirled around you while charging, whether it's a giant sword, a hammer, or an axe. And this can get boring after a while, where there certainly should be some more variety. This is something where games like Elden Ring have the upper hand over Breath of the Wild and hopefully Nintendo has worked on this over the past five years.

Sadly, so far we haven't seen Link use anything new in Tears of the Kingdom. Well, there are some new possibilities thanks to Fuse. You can create an insanely long spear for example, but it still works like your normal spear weapon. The biggest change we have seen so far was a two-handed sword merged with a shield, so you can use it defensively. That's new, but the sword itself will otherwise work the same way, probably.

What we really need are some new fighting styles, new base weapon types. And if there are truly the Seven Sages, one for each "tear of the kingdom", as opposed to only four Champions, then there is the chance that some of the unknown Sages might feature something different from the others. In fact, we can already see Riju fighting with two Gerudo scimitars at once, like the Gerudo Thieves in the Nintendo 64 Zelda games. We don't know if Link will be able to do the same, but since this is not a Hyrule Warriors game, there is a good chance that Link will copy anything the new Sages will do, just like he did with the Champions in Breath of the Wild.

This wouldn't necessarily create new weapons, however. You would technically just fight with two one-handed weapons at once, where maybe you can combine them freely. So, you could fight with a sword in one hand and a boomerang in the other... Or a soup ladle, if that's your thing. But maybe there are some limitations to that or there are new weapons altogether which are specifically meant to be dual-wielded.

Things get even more complicated in combination with the Fuse ability. You have two swords in your hand, but you can only fuse one item at a time. So, what weapon does it go to? Perhaps Riju's new fighting style won't be something that you can copy and she still represents one-handed weapons, just in a different way from Urbosa...

With a Sheikah Sage they could follow Impa from Age of Calamity and offer some sort of throwing weapon. Those would be used up like arrows, but all weapons break, so it wouldn't be that different. It probably wouldn't work well with Fuse either, however, where this would have to be treated in the same way as arrows with the materials menu.

Another idea comes from the Creating a Champion artbook, where the Gerudo Champion originally was supposed to use a grappling hook, like some flail. This really could end up a in a separate weapon type, which is used differently and might provide some additional mobility. I'd also love to see whips, where they could become a thing of their own or maybe share a category with the grappling hook weapons.

In any case, there needs to be more on a basic level, which will let the possibilities of Fuse also grow. Like, you could fuse a sword to a whip for something quite nasty... But the truth is that they probably would have shown us at least one new weapon type if there truly were any, so I'm not getting my hopes up here.