On March 28th, Eiji Aonuma played roughly ten minutes of Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom that releases May 12th, 2023. Here is what he demonstrated for us:
- Hyrule reaches high into the sky, called “sky islands”.
- How do we reach the sky islands? Aonuma points out to a falling object from the sky and proceeds to reveal a new mechanic:
- RECALL (rewind) ability: You can rewind an object’s movement. This allows you backtrack that object’s movement and ascend into the sky.
- Aonuma explored a few sky islands. There will be a few different methods to travel between them, including with your trusty paraglider.
- On a larger island, there are man-made structures and trees. He mentions there aren’t much of those golden leafed trees on the surface. Something to be mindful of.
- Constructs are new enemies on the sky island. Aonuma used branches to fight one.
FUSING ability: You can stick objects together with various effects. It can increase durability. This encourages experimentation as you can fuse various weapons. You can even fuse arrows with items. For example, you can fuse a leaf and ice elemental to freeze an enemy. You can also fuse things to your shield, like a puff mushroom.
- AIM ASSIST—Now you can attach a monster part and allows arrows to hone in on creatures like when hunting a bird.
- ULTRAHAND ability: Fusion can also craft rafts and other modes of transportation. Aonuma demonstrated attaching and detaching a makeshift raft. With regard to the ones seen in the recent trailer–they are not found early in the game.
- ASCEND ability: You can pass through a ceiling to the floor above. There are a few limitations, but for the most part, it will apply to things with ceilings. You can now get to the top without utilizing stamina.
- You can speed your descent to the surface
Time flew in those ten minutes, but Aonuma confirmed there is still lots of new features and mechanics yet to discover. There is definitely a theme of creativity and innovation on top of exploration. Lastly, a new Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Nintendo Switch OLED was announced.
If you haven’t wanted the demonstration, check it out below:
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Wow, it looks great. Fuse looks to easily be the best new feature and will undoubtedly bring hours of joy. Watching that raft be created was incredible.
The view from the sky looks amazing, it’s so refreshing to get a glimpse of what is in the distance compared to the original.
My one fear is that, like so many others, I played so much of Botw that I overplayed it. With this game looking so similar, to the point of even having the exact same items in it (keese wing for ex), it might feel like I’m playing Botw again before long.
But these new mechanics looks to be so fun and creative, reusing the same old items will probably feel brand new. In Botw you weren’t using a keese eyeball type item very often after a certain point, Totk looks to make it so that all items have fun and diverse purposes.