Tears of the Kingdom – What Will Return?

In an interview with GameInformer, which took place around the Game Awards last week, producer Eiji Aonuma and director Hidemaro Fujibayashi talked about various aspects of Tears of the Kingdom. One of the key takeaways here was that they consider the Ultrahand ability to be the big gimmick of the game:

Fujibayashi: When we're creating a title, say, Tears of the Kingdom, as you mentioned, the crux of the experience in playing Tears of the Kingdom is Ultrahand and the freedom to create. As you mentioned, that is what Tears of the Kingdom is. So every time we're making a Zelda title, we want to create something new. If, for example, there was any continuation of Tears of the Kingdom and we were to bring in, say, Ultrahand, then I think to us, it would feel like, "Well, we're just bringing in Tears of the Kingdom as is." What we want to do from a game creator's perspective is create something new. From that perspective, I don't think we'll be seeing Ultrahand in every Zelda game or anything in the future.

Aonuma: When you're talking about Ultrahand, that is a really core idea for Tears of the Kingdom and I think it represents our approach of kind of putting everything we could into this game.

This stings a little and actually takes me back to Majora's Mask, which was also a direct sequel and brought something absolutely groundbreaking on the table with the transformation masks. The ability to turn into a Goron or a Zora at will was simply so good that I couldn't imagine Zelda without it, going forward. But it never returned, at least not in the same capacity. We had the wolf transformation in Twilight Princess, which was so bad that the game had to force you into it, and there were the costumes in Tri Force Heroes, but they weren't on the same level. If you want to play as a Goron or a Zora these days, you have to buy Hyrule Warriors.

And when you think about it, then Breath of the Wild doesn't really have a defining gimmick, the one big thing that sets this game apart from the entire rest of the series. The game has completely revolutionized Zelda from top to bottom, but what stood out was really the ability to freely climb everywhere, in combination with the Paraglider. But Tears of the Kingdom has adopted both of this and pretty much everything from its predecessor.

The Ultrahand ability really is just a natural evolution of Magnesis and going forward it's going to be dearly missed. Even if there will be another ability to move around objects, it will automatically feel inferior without the ability to attach them to each other. At the same time it's understandable that Nintendo doesn't want to bring back such a convoluted system, where you even need something like Autobuild on top to make it more convenient. Whatever they will do with the next 3D Zelda game, it has to be something where the players don't feel like they are missing something without the Ultrahand.

And it's probably not desirable to simply fall back into the gimmick pattern. Make Breath of the Wild with the power to build stuff. Make Breath of the Wild with the power to dig into the earth. We already had this after Ocarina of Time and they need to focus more on evolving the franchise, instead of creating ideas for a single game.

But this raises the question, what in Tears of the Kingdom could and should potentially make it into the next game? Is there something in the game as essential as the free climbing in Breath of the Wild? Or is it all just gimmicks that are never meant to return, like the Ultrahand?

The first thing that comes to mind is the sky diving. It's not a new thing, because it first was introduced in Skyward Sword and now has been refined for this game. But this mechanic became so good that its full potential never really gets explored in Tears of the Kingdom for some reason. For example, you can turn around in the air while aiming with your bow, which you may not even know, because at no point in the game this is even necessary. Nintendo has released entire patents for this, but in the game it's really just a thing you can do without any major reason to do it, because the aerial combat is very minimal.

The entire setting of the sky islands is quite frankly underutilized, again, and for the most part just feels like something that was thrown into the game to make you build flying vehicles. Maybe one day we will get a Zelda game that truly focuses on such a setting and brings you aerial mobility to the next level. Third time will be the charm.

Another gameplay mechanic is the summoning, which is a new sort of partner system. This is also nothing that never was done before in Zelda, where for example you had some sages at your side in The Wind Waker as well. The difference is that you can't control them yourself this time, but they will fight autonomously. We also had this with Wolf Link in Breath of the Wild already, but here it lets you summon multiple allies at once. However, it's a bit of a mess, because it gets too crowded very quickly and the sage interactions can get in the way.

They meant well with this idea, but it's probably not something that will return in this form. Instead, this could turn into something that will be explored in other ways, like being able to actually play as other characters, maybe even going back to the transformations from Majora's Mask somehow.

This leaves us with the main items, the Zonai abilities. Well, we've already talked about the Ultrahand, which has the Zonai Devices and the Autobuild as its extensions, where it looks to be a one-time deal and brings a level of complexity with it, which might never be repeated in a Zelda title. At least not for a while.

Fuse is on a similar page, where we most likely won't see the ability in its entirety again, which lets you freely combine all your weaponry with each other and also with objects from the environment. That was just needlessly crazy, but being able to use materials to augment your arrows and/or weapons is really something that needs to stay with the series, in whatever for that may be. In the very least, the ability to craft different types of arrows from your materials should return somehow.

Well, they should limit the total amount of materials for future Zelda games and get rid of all the redundancy, while they should also make them much easier to organize and browse through, but Tears of the Kingdom comes with the best utilization of materials in the series so far. And it would be a shame to lose this, because It makes so much sense on so many levels, where it really feels like a natural evolution for Zelda.

Now, both Ascend an Recall feel a bit underutilized in comparison to what the Ultrahand and Fuse are offering. In case of Ascend this isn't much of a surprise, because it was really just a debug feature that made it into the game (source). The world of Breath of the Wild wasn't created with this ability in mind, where it becomes more useful in that world's extensions, mainly the caves and the sky islands. But it never reaches its full potential, where it would be nice to see this ability return in a future Zelda game that comes with a world more cleverly designed around it. Ascend could become the next Hookshot.

It's quite obvious with the dungeons, which either try to prevent the usage of Ascend entirely or make it pointless in any case, because you're tied to a sage descendant, who can't follow you through ceilings. Imagine dungeons where entire rooms are sealed off from all sides and the only way in is from below...

And Recall is such a smart ability that you could probably create an entire Zelda game with it as the main gimmick. That's not going to happen, now that this item already was a thing, but you never know. After all, the shrinking in The Minish Cap originally came from an item in Four Swords. But it would need to evolve. In Tears of the Kingdom it primarily acts as another great companion for the Ultrahand, where you can move things around and then reverse their movements with Recall. It's also very useful for retrieving things, like gliders that have crash-landed. But otherwise it mainly turns fallen objects into elevators.

Of course this isn't entirely fair towards Recall and there is lots of creative utilization for this ability in the game, but it's clear how Tears of the Kingdom was first and foremost developed around the Ultrahand ability and Recall had to take the backseat here. At the same time it might not be so bad that they didn't turn Recall into a main gimmick, because this could have gotten really tiresome...

Well, the idea of a playable Zelda is something that gets discussed time and time again. If it ever happens, giving her the Recall ability would look like a natural fit, since this was her new power in this game.

Summary

Tears of the Kingdom has experimented a lot with its gameplay mechanics, maybe more than any other Zelda game before it, where it will be painful to lose some of the innovations with the next game. And while the Ultrahand may not return, there is really some good stuff here that definitely should return in future titles of the series, first and foremost the excellent usage of materials and the improved sky diving mechanics. But there is also a lot of potential left with Ascend and Recall, where it would be interesting to see them evolve even further.