Considering it’s a console that didn’t launch with a brand new Zelda game, it’s fascinating that the Switch 2 is somehow still the Zelda-est console Nintendo has ever made. That’s what it feels like anyway. Just look at the Nintendo Switch Online offering, which covers everything from the original Zelda on the NES to absolute classics like Link to the Past and Ocarina as well as weirdo off-shoots like the Oracle games, Four Swords and the Minish Cap.
There is a lifetime of Zelda goodness in that list alone, and I should know, because it is my life. Somehow I have played and finished all those games. And somehow it was sufficiently long ago that I might give them another toot now. But first, of course, there’s the arrival of GameCube classics on the service, with The Wind Waker as the obvious stand-out entry. I remember buying this game along with a silver GameCube and revelling in the sheer freedom and adventure it offered.
I remember one moment in particular, gliding between two peaks on Forest Haven island, still early on in things, the wind carrying me, the sea and landscape spread out all around, and it felt, briefly, almost too much. It felt like games had never given me such bright experiences and might never give me them in quite the same way ever again.
Wrong, of course. Because this is still just the Online service stuff. If you have the two recent Zelda games, Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, they’ll be on your homescreen too, along with paid upgrades – free if you’re a member of Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack – which boost them in all sorts of ways and make them feel a little bit new again.
These Zeldas are famously not like other Zeldas, and I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the past few days as I’ve found my bearings with the Switch 2 and worked out where individual games fit into it. Gone is the Hyrule in which you clear a polite path from one dungeon to the next and are rewarded with a new gadget each time. Instead, you get all of Hyrule pretty much all at once, racing off in every direction, and you get all your basic skills all at once too. Once the first few hours are done, you kind of have most of the stuff you need to get on with it. It’s another kind of Zelda freedom, and one that some players – me included – have struggled with a bit over the years.
As such I tend to fall in love with these two games and throw everything into them for a few glittering days every six months or so, and then I drop away, eventually returning only when I can convince myself that it’s not important that I can’t remember what I was doing, or which threads I was following, or how close I was to Ganon. This was the case – in both games – when I dropped in again over the weekend. In Breath of the Wild I was halfway up a mountain. In Tears of the Kingdom I was deep in the depths, navigating a giant lump of rock that was too tall for me to climb with my current stamina rating, while nasty unseen things shivered and chattered in the dark around me.
Real talk: the upgrades are quietly transformational. Both games are sharper and clearer and both seem to run at a constant 60 fps. I am not a technical person so I will have to put this in my own cumbersome language. Running on the original Switch both of these games were clearly pushing the hardware. The frame-rate could be a little choppy in busy places, but the world also had a sort of impressionist graininess to it when it was rendering the distance – there was something simultaneously soft and slightly deckle-edged to the vistas. Now you can see the edges of things quite sharply, even if a certain Romantic dreaminess remains – clearly part of what the design team was going for. The views are still a lovely series of faded Watercolours, but overall I get the feeling from these games that I get whenever I finally give in and get an eye test and a new glasses prescription. The world is new again.
This raises the question: what to do with these old-new games? Or rather, where do they fit in alongside Mario Kart World, Cyberpunk, and whatever’s coming next? I think I have an answer – for me at least.
I am going to call this now: I am never finishing either of these games. And that’s not for want of trying. I will probably be playing them forever, but the design is such that you are cast as an ant crawling over a page of newsprint. You are so small and Hyrule is so big – especially in Tears of the Kingdom, in which Hyrule obligingly extends up into the sky and deep into the ground. For ages, this bigness froze me up a little, but I now see it’s part of what the games are offering – it’s like they’re prompting me to play in a certain way.
To approach this from a different angle: since the days of the Xbox 360, every console for me has needed an in-between game. There’s Perfect Dark Zero or Kameo or whatever, but in-between there’s also Geometry Wars, good for little bursts of brilliance when you tell yourself you’re deciding where to go next. (I say little bursts, I played it much longer than either of those other games, such is the secret nature of the in-between game.)
Actually, this in-betweenness probably stretches all the way back to Tetris on the Game Boy. And crucially, it’s not limited to puzzle games either. Crackdown, beloved Crackdown, again on the 360, was in-between-ness incarnate. It was an in-between game that I played and loved and finished all while stealing moments in-between other things.
Now, Zelda games are clearly blockbusters. But they’re unusual blockbusters. They contain set-pieces and standout temples, but as Hyrule has expanded and the physics-based powers have come to the fore, they’ve become more like the knockabout, make-your-own-fun playrooms that they always brushed up against. It’s that ant and the newsprint business again. I can never remember where I was going in these Zeldas, or what’s at stake, or what I need to do next. Fine.
But that doesn’t matter as much as it should, because wherever I am there is something going on – some distraction built into the landscape, something interesting on the horizon, something I discover I need more of or something I haven’t properly experimented with yet. I will never finish these games, but I will continue seeing new things in them as I play them in thirty-minute increments, each one a thought fully expressed or a pratfall fully performed. I will walk my ant over the newsprint one word, then one sentence, then one paragraph at a time, and I just won’t think about how big the newspaper is.
It’s strange to think of Zelda as this kind of game. Even at its most distracting, the Wind Waker was an adventure I was locked into. I knew where I was headed, there was an X on the map, often a companion beside me, and a whole kingdom at stake. The new Zeldas do this too, but they’ve changed, and loosened up, become bigger and more filled with random potential. And I’ve changed too, my attention altered, split between many different things at all times. And so, weird as it is to say it, on the Switch 2, my in-between time will belong to Zelda. And in truth I could not be happier.
A Switch 2 and copies of the Switch 2 editions of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom were provided by Nintendo.
