 What if I were to tell you that Tears of the Kingdom is going to be the greatest open world game to ever exist, not just the greatest Zelda game, the greatest open world game. Now, when I say things like that, it might seem a bit clickbaity, it might seem a bit out there, or maybe just a shock value type of piece that we're making here. But I gotta be honest with you, when I say this, I truly believe those words. Now, what is the greatest open world game of all time? Some people say it's Breath of the Wild, some will tell you it's Elden Ring, some will tell you it's the Witcher 3, or Skyrim. Look, it's subjective, right? So when I say, oh, it's going to be the greatest open world game of all time, that's only going to be true for some people, right? For others, it's going to be something else. And this isn't meant to diss other games on the market, it's rather meant to just express my thoughts on, well, let's just put it this way. I think at this point, Breath of the Wild looks like a damn tech demo. And to say that, heading into Tears of the Kingdom, oh man, let's just say Tears of the Kingdom is doing something special. Now, before I say anything else, I want to remind you that we are giving away a Legend of Zelda, Tears of the Kingdom Nintendo Switch OLED. In fact, I picked up that OLED we're giving away this upcoming Friday, because that's when it comes out, right? We're also giving away a, let's see, a Zelda, Tears of the Kingdom Collector's Edition, also a Tears of the Kingdom pin from PAX East. Now, giveaways happening right now, we'll pick the winner on launch day of Tears of the Kingdom, or Winners. There's going to be three different winners. And you can enter down in the pinned comment or in the description. I also want to add we're on a road to 133,000 subscribers, and I don't know what we're going to do for it yet if we get there. But why 133? Because Nintendo is 133 years old. Just a fun little fact for you guys. Alright, so why do I think Tears of the Kingdom is going to be, or already probably is, even though we haven't played it yet, the greatest open world game of all time? Well, when you talk about open world games, obviously you need to talk about why open world games are so popular and so exciting in the market. And a lot of it has to do with gameplay freedom, right? The freedom to do anything, anytime, anywhere, that you can see that mountain and you can go there. You can see that lake and you can go there. You can see over the horizon. And yes, you can actually go there. There's something freeing about being in an open world and being able to go anywhere. And there's a lot of games that enable this, you know, back in the older days of gaming, you would have some games that would experiment with it a little bit like Skyrim. But even predating that, you know, like MMOs, World of Warcraft or RuneScape or something like that, would have some pretty openness to their worlds. And they still do to this day, surprisingly, those RuneScape and World of Warcraft are still around today. But it's interesting thinking about open world and what makes it so damn appealing. And it's really just that freedom of exploration to do anything, anytime, anywhere, and just go. Whether or not you go to places that are way too high level for you and way too difficult of enemies too soon, it doesn't matter. You just have the ability to go there anyways, which is really cool. So that's kind of one of the big appeals is that people like that freedom. And I think it's because it just reminds them of the world we live in. We live in a world where, yeah, if you want to walk north, south, east, west, wherever you could just go, it might not be a good time. You might run into some survival issues or, you know, climb a mountain that's too tall with low oxygen. But at the end of the day, we do have the freedom as humans to just go anywhere we really feel like and deal with the consequences or the challenges that are presented to us in that world. But a lot of us aren't willing to put ourselves at that sort of risk, right? Going out in the middle of the Arctic or climbing the tallest mountain or exploring the jungles of the Amazon or something, or the Sahara Desert or something. A lot of us aren't really willing to do that kind of stuff and put ourselves in danger. But we would like to have some sort of feeling of that level of exploration and do it in a safer environment, such as a virtual world. That's what makes open world games, at least to me, fundamentally exciting. Now, just having a giant world to explore is obviously not enough. You need things to find. You need things to do. And that is where, you know, the separation in all the games happen. When you play a game like Cyberpunk 2077, it really does feel significantly different despite being made by the same developer than The Witcher 3. And when you play The Witcher 3 and then you play Breath of the Wild, that feels significantly different from those games. And then you might play Horizon Forbidden West and that feels even different than Breath of the Wild. And then obviously you have things like Elden Ring, which just feels completely different from that. What's really cool about an open world to explore is how many different ways you can build a game in that type of world to appeal to sometimes completely different audiences. And I find that to be really fascinating. And so we enter in Tears of the Kingdom and Breath of the Wild right now is still wildly considered one of the greatest games of all time. It's a 97 overall Metacritic and Open Critic. One of the highest rated games ever, just behind Ocarina of Time, of course, but Ocarina of Time, I mean, let's just be honest, Ocarina of Time did not have a lot of reviews back in the day. There weren't a lot of review outlets being counted. So I don't think a re-release of it today would do as well, but that's neither here nor there. Breath of the Wild is an open world game and Ocarina of Time isn't. So we're talking more to a specific subset of video games. Just happens to be a really popular one. And Breath of the Wild is amazing, right? The physics engine. The world building. Even the way it told its story through memories. Yeah, most of the story is from 100 years ago and some people liked that. Some people don't. But there was just so much to do. You could build an entire town. You could have your own house that you could purchase and expand and add furniture to. You could do a whole bunch of side quests and get to know some of the characters. And just really enjoy the freedom of the tools the game gave you from the Sheikah Slate abilities to the Champion abilities to just play in with the world and finding out these really cool things that can you believe I did that? That I added 50,000 octoballoons to a rock and now I'm flying midair with that rock. And then I jump off the rock and then Magnesis, you know, a minecart to catch the rock and now I'm still flying with Magnesis. And then off of that, I hit Stasis. I sit there and slam the hell out of the rock and then I get on top of the rock and go flying, you know, 50 miles an hour with the rock. Like it's, there's so many cool fun things you could do within this world. And that was part of the fun of Breath of the Wild. And Tears of the Kingdom to me, if you pay really close attention, has already surpassed almost everything that Breath of the Wild established. Now let's just talk about this in order of importance, right? We talked about what makes open world so appealing in the first place to so many people, that freedom of exploration. Well, they've added that freedom of exploration again, right? We have Hyrule again, but they added some verticality to it and even some underground to it. The verticality, the sky islands as an example. There's so many of them to explore that that alone could have been an entire game. And then they made so many changes to the world of Hyrule that a lot of people that play Breath of the Wild are going to just want to re-explore Hyrule again. And if you did play Breath of the Wild, it's a completely new world to you and that's even more amazing for those people on top of that. They've added caves and underground segments and that wasn't there at all in Breath of the Wild. Heck, if they added underwater exploration on top of that, that's another layer that they could have potentially. I know we haven't seen it yet, but potentially added to this game. And that just adds so much more to explore than just that freedom of exploration and adding that verticality and the vehicles that we can build to fly around this world. And let alone the ability we still had from Breath of the Wild with the sailcloth, it just is going to create another sense of freedom that we didn't even think could go. Like we already felt pretty damn free in Breath of the Wild. And I'll imagine that freedom can go to another level. That's incredible. And I would say the sense of freedom in Breath of the Wild already surpassed so many other open world games. I'll give you a recent example. Elden Ring is amazing. It is inarguable, one of the best games ever crafted. I think it should make everyone's top 20. For some people it's top five. For some people it's probably number one. But it didn't have that same sense of freedom with the exploration because you couldn't climb everything. There wasn't like this sailcloth ability or some of the freedom in the physics. It was still by the way an amazingly epic game that didn't need those things to be what it was. It wasn't trying to be Breath of the Wild. It was trying to be like a Dark Souls game but open world. And that's awesome. And there's nothing wrong with taking a different approach. But that's what makes Breath of the Wild so unique is that sense of freedom that it gave you and this Tears of the Kingdom is just going beyond that adding another layer of freedom. And that is just incredible. Then you look at other things that where I thought about how Breath of the Wild might have been a tech demo. I've had these thoughts on my mind for a while and it's kind of crazy because I'm going to just... I gotta shout it out man. I gotta give Player Essence some credit here. He got a video up before me. I actually recorded this video three times in the last week. But Player Essence did a very similar video talking about the tech demo aspect. Look, I think that Breath of the Wild just really was an experiment. They spent so many years making the physics work, building the world that they didn't have time to implement a lot of the core gameplay features. They would like the durability thing I actually like. I know some people hate it. But they sort of gave a best of both worlds in Tears of the Kingdom. Oh, your stick's about to break. Your sword's about to break. Fuse it. Fuse it mid-combat. Get that durability back and turn it into a completely different weapon that might even be better than the weapon you were using in the first place. That to me is incredible. You can take a one-hander, turn it into a two-hander. Maybe you can take a two-hander and turn it into a one-hander. We have no idea because there's going to be so many fusing capabilities. It makes the whole world sort of this Lego box. This playground. Play-Doh maybe. Like form it the way that you want. I find that to be an incredible thing that just takes that entire gear system that existed in Breath of the Wild to unseen levels. There's been games that have let us forge and reforge gear and repair them, but nothing that quite let us just combine so many things organically together on the fly. I find that to be just an incredibly endearing aspect that just brings more value to Tears of the Kingdom. And this is without even talking about the Ultra Hand ability. The ability to just craft what we want. I don't know how free this ability is yet. We've only seen it very sparingly. We've seen like a little mech made. We've seen some other things as well, but I don't know exactly how free this is. How many different materials we can use Ultra Hand with. But what I will say is it looks like there's a lot and that our imagination is really the limitation. We might be able to build a literal floating Hyrule Castle replica ourselves with nothing but Ultra Hand glue baby. I find that to be wow. You want to talk about an amazingly cool thing that we might be able to build in the middle of Central Hyrule if we just bring all the supplies together. Man, that's incredible. And only a game like Tears of the Kingdom can give us that level of freedom building that top of what Breath of the Wild established. And then you can think about another complaint from Breath of the Wild. First time through maybe not as much of a complaint, but over time it gets to be a bit much so was not that much enemy variety. It was Bokeblins, Moblins, Wisrobes, and let's see, Lizalfos. Those were the core enemies with different levels through those enemies. We had different stuff as well, of course. We had Hinoxes and Stalnoxes and really all the skeleton versions of all those things. Plus you can throw on top other enemies, like Otterox and Chuchus. So there was, if you actually break it down, there was a decent number of type stone talises and some types of enemies out there. But honestly, after a while, it didn't really feel like it was that much variety. Almost every zone sort of just had new level versions of the same enemies. So maybe a different elemental version. So I understand where people get, where the variety didn't feel fantastic. Well, they've already addressed that in spades. It's not only taking the old enemies, keeping them there, and giving us new versions and new forms of them with probably better AI because this is a Switch game versus Wii U. They've added new enemy types on top. We've already seen the giant Golem. We've seen the constructs. And heck, the constructs, there are different versions of the constructs for crying out loud. So we've already seen that. And just so much more, they've even expanded Bokeblins with the King Bokeblin. They've added new enemies like the Gleeok on the bridge. And so much more. So they're adding a ton of enemy variety. Maybe even Redeads are back and we got flying cargo rocks, assuming that those aren't cargo rocks. We don't really know for sure. I'm just, I'm mystified at the moment. Like likes. I can't believe how many different enemy variety types are going to be in this game. It looks like we might have triple to quadruple the amount of enemy types in this game. And that's not even getting into bosses. So just talking about just the enemy variety itself is utterly incredible and well beyond Breath of the Wild, which also puts it well beyond most other open world games. And then you get to what we don't know for sure, right? It looks like dungeons might be back. We don't know, but they might be. What does look like it's back for sure is some sort of boss encounters and boss encounters with variety. The storytelling of this game as well is reaching the levels that we've seen other Zelda games potentially go with Skyward Sword, Twilight Princess, Wind Waker, Ocarina of Time. You know, we've had epic stories told in Zelda's history, but all of that took place mostly in a linear setting where you had to experience the story and experience the game in a sort of a set pattern. Like maybe you can do a couple of dungeons out of order, but story progression wise, we get to see Nintendo take a modern, really epic story and see how they can implement and tell this in an open world setting. I'm very curious how that works and I'm super excited to see that. Obviously the return of Ganondorf, that's obviously more so something that fans of Zelda will care about than necessarily just fans of open world games in general. Every open world game has a baddie, right? Every game usually has a baddie. So, look, I just think that Tears of the Kingdom is positioned to be the greatest ever and if you want some evidence of this, and again, I'm going to credit Player Essence for mentioning this. I hadn't watched these videos, but you guys absolutely should. You guys should go around and watch all the various analysis videos from a lot of other YouTubers, you know, our different Andrus Restart or Zeltik or Commonwealth Realm or just any of them. Just look up Zelda Trailer Analysis. Tears of the Kingdom Trailer Analysis and you're going to see so many things Nintendo has done you probably haven't noticed. I know on my channel I've pointed out a lot of this stuff already and as I said, I don't really watch a ton of other YouTubers because I like to focus on what I got working but it just so happened that right when I was hitting record on this this morning I noticed that Player Essence put up a video that had a title pretty similar to what I was thinking of doing so that's why I keep giving shoutouts. To my boy over there, he makes excellent content. You guys should go check out his video. I think he did a recent one as well talking about the marketing of the game. You guys should go watch that. I got nothing planned for that right now. I've already talked about the marketing of the game so you should go check out that video. I'll put a couple links to Player Essence's videos and maybe some links to some of the best trailer analysis I've seen for Tears of the Kingdom as well or at least have noticed. I haven't really watched that many of them but because I did my own analysis, right? Like I don't need to watch other people's videos to reaffirm what I've already seen and already know. But yeah, that's it. That's all I got. I mean, Tears of the Kingdom is shaping up to be incredible. It's a few weeks away, less than a few weeks away at this point. And I can't wait guys. You guys see with all the Tears of the Kingdom content I've been making, I'm clearly excited for this one. Can't wait to get streaming it for you guys on launch day. 12 hour streams for seven straight days. It's going to be a blast. Can't wait to see you guys then. Catch you later.