Like pretty much everyone else, I’ve been playing The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom to death this weekend. I even took the day off of my day job to be able to play it as much as I could on Friday (though doing something with my family interrupted that). Hoevver, on release night, I found myself spending hours in the opening tutorial area, exploring everything that the game had to offer in a microchasm of the world floating in the sky. And I came to one solid conclusion…
Tears of the Kingdom has a masterful tutorial zone.
Learning in the World
It’s one thing to just give the player a list of buttons they can push and then send them off after an hour or so of play, it’s another to make them understand the mechanics of the game on a base level and how the mechanics interact with the world at large.
While there is a fair bit of telling you what the buttons do in this game, the game also does expect that you’ll likely have played Breath of the Wild, so it keeps these to simple pop-ups that are easy enough for an experienced player to skip over. And while the more intense combat techniques may be learned later in a shrine, the game gets you to grips with the combat basics enough that you should be able to handle most of the things that this new iteration on the Great Plateu throws at you.
However, each time a new mechanic is introduced by way of picking it up in a shrine, the world around that area gives you immediate chances to make use of it. Granted, Breath of the Wild did that as well, but in those cases it was smaller uses, like a few metal items being scattered around the shrine where you get the magnesis power. Tears of the Kingdom instead gives you Ultrahand (the power to lift things and stick them together to build) and then not only gives you variety of items, but sets the world in a way that you either need to build a way to ride a zipline or a bridge in order to make forward progress. It gets you familiar with the mechanics not only in terms of being used for puzzles like in a shrine situation, but also the ways that they’re useful for traversal of the world.
Feeling Smart by Understanding the Basics
Another thing that really stood out to me about the tutorial area is the way that the puzzles are set up to give a sense of accomplishment. There were often times where I would do something that was honestly very simple with the tools that I was given in order to traverse the world. I’m fairly sure I wasn’t doing anything too fancy, but I’ve also seen from social media just how creative others can get.
The thing is, though, every time I figured something out using just the tools that the creators had set out for me, I ended up feeling quite clever. Even if I wasn’t doing anything complicated, the game had been set up in a way to make me, just for a moment, feel like I had. It’s a shockingly robust sense of reward that comes entirely from the feelings of the player, which I think was well achieved.
Directional Flow
One of my favorite things about this tutorial area, though, is the way that the land itself is laid out. Now, The Great Plateau was a well designed little piece of land that had a lot of good signposts to nudge you in the right direction for where you needed to eventually get to. However, the floating islands that make up the tutorial of Tears of the Kingdom is a little more on the linear side. Instead of setting you free, they do have an intended order that things should be done in.
However, you might not notice that at first since the layout of the islands leads you to naturally make your way from one spot to the next in just about the order that they were expecting you to. Even when doing a little extra exploring, those points of interest are usually laid out in such a way that you’re carried along to the next point by them, or even just a little closer than you were before. The natural guidance that the game provides carries you along very nicely.
The World Sprawls Beyond
Of course the moment that you’re able to leave, the game opens up in a grand way leaving you in the wide open spaces of Hyrule Field for the first time after all the changes came to be. Even then, the location Tears of the Kingdom drops you off in leaves you space to explore and has a few objects around to toy with. It even compels you to head back towards the castle.
I know that’s a lot of words to say that the way the game starts is really dang good, but I think we can sometimes overlook the need for a good tutorial area in games once we’ve played enough of them to start rushing towards doing all sorts of new things in the main thrust of the story. I wanted to linger a moment and give this area it’s flowers. It’s rare that I can spend over three hours in a tutorial and not be upset by that, after all!