‘Beyond expectation’: Nintendo’s latest Zelda title launches to critical acclaim
If university lecture halls and offices looked a little quiet on Friday, it may be down to Nintendo.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom – the latest in Nintendo’s long-running series of vast, life-absorbing adventure video games – has launched for the firm’s Switch console to a chorus of critical praise.
On review aggregation site Metacritic, it currently has an average score of 97/100, putting it comfortably in video games’ top echelon. That makes it a game worth taking a day off work to play – or maybe even a week.
If Mario is gaming’s most recognisable face, the medium’s equivalent of Mickey Mouse, Zelda is more like Indiana Jones – clever, swashbuckling and much imitated. It is the connoisseur’s choice, a game whose puzzles and battles involve your intellect as much as your reflexes.
Tears of the Kingdom invites players to explore a fantasy kingdom, Hyrule, as elven hero Link, letting them chart their own path through the world and uncover its many secrets.
It is already being called one of the greatest video games; Trusted Reviews said it was “likely to go down in history as one of the best games ever to grace a Nintendo console”, and the games media’s longstanding behemoth IGN has called it an “unfathomable follow-up, expanding a world that already felt full beyond expectation and raising the bar ever higher into the clouds”.
Critics have said it offers a previously unimagined level of creative freedom, letting players fabricate their own weapons and madcap contraptions, from makeshift planes to flame-throwing shields.
Zelda producer Eiji Aonuma, who has been working on Zelda games since the mid-90s, believes that the series’ willingness to trust the player’s intellectual curiosity is the key to their appeal.
“A lot
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