The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom — all the latest on Nintendo’s huge sequel

If you’re 20 or so hours into Tears of the Kingdom and you don’t have Autobuild, you’re doing it wrong.

Last week, there was a tweet going around asking that now Tears of the Kingdom’s been out a few weeks, what advice would you share? Lots of people left valuable nuggets of information like fusing rubies to your equipment that can keep you warm during the Rito quest-line (just, y’know, don’t fuse ‘em to anything wooden). Another good piece of advice: use Ascend more! Are you using Ascend already? Great! Use it 1,000 percent more!

Okay, fess up: I can’t have been the only one to use one of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’s known duplication glitches to make a whole bunch of diamonds for easy Rupees. It wasn’t hard to do! Unfortunately, the money well might be running dry because, thanks to the game’s new version 1.1.2 update, it appears that many of the known duplication glitches have been patched out.

The patch notes don’t specifically spell this out:

Anyone who has managed to clock in hundreds of hours on The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild since its 2017 release will understand well how, over time, you can’t help but develop a constellation of habits and preferences that end up defining your individual playstyle. In the same way that there was no one “right” way to progress through Breath of the Wild’s story, the game gave you the freedom to figure out how you wanted to move through the world, and those two things alone made it unlike any other Zelda title in the franchise.

The same can be said of Tears of the Kingdom for a variety of reasons, ranging from how much bigger the game’s Hyrule is to all the new weapons and vehicles Link has at his disposal. But after years of ripping and running through Breath of the Wild, one of the most fascinating things I’ve experienced playing Tears of the Kingdom is having the distinct feeling that the game’s developers know exactly how I’ve been playing in the past — and they want me to change my ways.

The Zelda developers are trolls, and I love them.

One really well-designed aspect of Tears of the Kingdom is that the game will teach you how to play it. I don’t mean through explicit tutorials; rather, throughout my frankly embarrassing amount of playtime, the game presented to me, either in shrines or in the overworld, obstacles and the tools to surmount them. And every time I solved a puzzle, a more complex version of that same kind of puzzle would pop up later on, forcing me to put together what I learned to take on this new challenge. It makes Tears a kind of Metroidvania in that sometimes my progression is locked until I’ve mastered a certain skill or problem-solving mechanic.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom has officially been out for 10 days, which means that it’s now possible to see how many hours you’ve spent torturing Koroks exploring the vast lands of Hyrule by checking your account profile on your Switch. Strangely, you’ll only be able to see this number on your Switch 10 days after you started playing a game — it’s a weird limitation that’s been in place for the Switch since it launched.

Here’s how to check your profile on your Switch to see how many hours you’ve played the game. (This will let you see how long you’ve played other games, too.)

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom has become the Zelda franchise’s fastest selling game. According to Nintendo, the game sold 10 million copies worldwide in the three days after it launched on May 12th. Just to give you an idea of where that stacks among the Switch’s best games, Breath of the Wild, in its six-year lifetime, has sold almost 30 million copies, while Mario Kart 8 has sold 53 million copies.

So to recap, Tears of the Kingdom has sold a third of the copies of its predecessor and 20 percent of the bestselling Switch game of all time in just three days.

Tears of the Kingdom has been out over a weekend, and y’all, it’s getting grim out there. While I expected players to get wild and weird with their creations and was totally delighted to see that it only took about 24 hours before the first flame-spouting phallus hit my timeline, players’ creations have taken a decidedly unexpected and concerning dark turn.

It’s about the Koroks, you see.

The Legend of Zelda: The Breath of the Wild’s simple cooking was one of the most delightfully helpful parts of the game when it came to recovering hearts or stamina wheels, and it’s no surprise to see the mechanic return in Tears of the Kingdom. But while cooking has always been important in Nintendo’s current take on Hyrule, Tears of the Kingdom’s new portable pot technologically switches things up so significantly that it’s fair to call it one of the most powerful tools Link has ever had in his arsenal.

Despite it taking place shortly after Breath of the Wild — a story in which Link is meant, but not required, to gain a number of skills, powers, and pieces of armor that make him tougher — Tears of the Kingdom takes you back to square one, and leaves Link quite vulnerable. As the game opens, it isn’t long before Link happens upon a “new” (but seemingly aged, threadbare) toga number and a pair of strappy sandals that look very nice but offer him little in the way of defensive protection against the mechanical Zonai creatures he encounters in the sky — many of which are ready to attack on sight.