 Earlier this week, and maybe in the past on livestreams, we've talked about how some of the media seems to be attaching themselves to negative narratives surrounding the upcoming Tears of the Kingdom game releasing on May 12th, in fact, we've just passed the four month mark, so less than four months technically until this game gets here. But I don't want to talk about that again. Maybe that's a conversation to have if it continues to happen. I actually want to focus on the way fans are reacting, Zelda fans, Nintendo fans. There seems to be a lot of tepidness around Tears of the Kingdom, a lot of concern, a lot of worry. And in this video, we're going to go over why I think this concern and worry exist, what some of the common threads of the concerns are, and why I think for the most part not Tears of the Kingdom is going to be just fine. And more than just fine, it's going to exceed what Breath of the Wild did. First we need to talk about why there was a swelling of negativity towards Tears of the Kingdom in the first place, because this wasn't always the case. Part of it is because it's a sequel to Breath of the Wild. Breath of the Wild is widely acclaimed as one of the best video games of all time. It features on most pundits top 50 games of all time. It's usually in Zelda fans top 5, top 3, some are in the top spot. It's also the most popular Zelda game ever released at over 30 million combined sales between the Switch and the Wii U. So it's in a very popular game, it reviewed very very well, and it blew many people's minds. And even if you didn't like it as a Zelda game, you probably still thought it was an amazing experience in that of itself, just in the action adventure open world genre. For the most part, Breath of the Wild one way or another is considered to be a masterpiece. But the interesting thing is, at E3 2019, they dropped a surprise out of nowhere. It never leaked, there were no rumors about it, Tears of the Kingdom sequel announced E3 2019, and it blew many people's minds and got all of us excited. It looked really dark and people seemed to like darker stories in their games. So the red eyes, the Ganondorf, the zombie body, what is going on, and then obviously Zelda and Link sort of adventuring together. That was an exciting prospect. So it set things up where, hey, we didn't expect this, it's just announced, it probably should come soon because hey, it is a direct sequel, same engine, same graphics, same world maybe, so this should be something that comes soon. But then we didn't hear about the game for two years. Then it cropped up again at the much maligned E3 2021, which that was sort of a really bad show, but the Nintendo aspect of it was actually pretty good. They did their thing like they usually do at E3 presentations and they showed us this game again. We didn't have a title yet and they told us the title would be a spoiler for some reason, still can't figure out that one. But hey, this was just another teaser, right? It felt much like the reveal trailer. It's like here's small snippets, here's a tease, and we waited two more years for a tease. Now in this tease they did show us falling from the sky and a couple new abilities, but it was so short and with so little actual gameplay, it still kind of left us like what is this thing? What is this game? Why are we just talking about it? And they gave us a vague 2022 date. Well 2022 felt weird, that's five years after Breath of the Wild came out and this is where people started to have growing concerns because of how long it was taking to make this game. Now COVID probably played a role in that, but still five years is how long it takes to make something like Breath of the Wild. In fact that's exactly how long it took to make Breath of the Wild and yet here we are with a sequel using the same engine, the same visuals that only show on us teases. And 2022 I just, something fell off. And then as 2022 came, we didn't hear about things. The months rolled by, the February direct happened, nothing. June came around, they didn't really do anything, nothing. And then finally we get to the September direct and they drop another teaser trailer that barely shows anything for the game to clarify, even less than the prior two trailers. But they do show us the release date and the title and logo. And that was cool. But again, for the third consecutive showing of this game, we didn't really see anything, we didn't really learn anything. We have a lot of guesses, but we don't know much. We know when the game is coming out and we still don't know a ton about this game. And from the snippets we have seen, it looks a lot like the same Hyrule all over again and that is something that just made people worry, hey, this game is now coming out in 2023, that's now over six years since Breath of the Wild. What's happening? And the concerns started rising up. Now let's fast forward to the actual concerns that I've heard listed and talk about what they are and why I think there's an excellent counter to all of them. And if this rebuilds your hype for Tears of the Kingdom cool, if it doesn't rebuild your hype and you still have concerns, please share them down in the comments below. But the first concern seems to be that this has the longest game dev time ever. Now I actually think this is a positive, but it's sort of weird hearing it used as a negative because it's using the same engine, because it's using the same visual style. People think it's really strange that they took all this time. But if we remember back to all the cut ideas from Breath of the Wild, the aliens and the arm mechanic which appears that they've put in this one, and several other aspects that made it to the idea board but got cut and they said, hey, there just wasn't time for this stuff, it's really interesting to think, hey, they did have time this time for all of these crazy ideas they might have. So if anything, having this super long development cycle probably bodes well for this game being way better than Breath of the Wild ever was because they already did Breath of the Wild. Now they get to do all the crazy things they wanted. It's almost as if maybe Breath of the Wild was a beta test for Tears of the Kingdom. Let that one salivate in the brain for a little bit. Next up, another concern I see often is that this entire game originated from DLC concepts. It's just trying to be Breath of the Wild plus more and I kind of find it hard to look at that as a negative, Breath of the Wild plus more. Well, if Breath of the Wild is one of the greatest games of all time and this game is that plus more, that should mean this is a better game. I honestly don't think that this is some wild out there thing. They didn't have time for some of these crazy ideas. Breath of the Wild again needed to prove it could work. The climbing mechanics, the open world, the go anywhere, do anything, any order you want, the whole idea of telling a story mostly through memories of the past. They needed to prove all of this stuff could actually work and be accepted by gamers and it has. So now they could take that to the next level that they maybe would have done with this. But sometimes you're afraid of introducing too many new things at once. You don't want to overwhelm the player and I think the way Breath of the Wild handled things was perfect. Now it's time to do something crazy and I think we're about to get that regardless where the ideas originated from. So another common criticism that makes people wonder things is it's the same graphics, it's the same world, it's the same map. Now they've talked about how we'll be able to explore to the sky. Maybe we've seen Sky Islands and Beyond or Ann Moore and so look there could be an underground, there could be additional lands. This is all unknown stuff but I find this to be rather interesting because Breath of the Wild has aged pretty gracefully from a visual perspective. Of course it's not going to stand toe to toe with Horizon Forbidden West or something that Sony's pushing out on PlayStation 5 these days, God of War Ragnarok. But those are completely different visual styles and who knows if those visual styles are going to be still considered good 10 years from now. But Breath of the Wild still looks good. Now yeah sure it could do with some resolution bump and some frame rate smoothing but hey this is a game from 2017 made on tech from 2015 and actually originally made for the Wii U on the power PC architecture which hasn't been updated literally since the 90s. In fact Wii U is the only multi-core processor to ever exist in the history of power PC architecture. So yeah to say it was made for some pretty ancient tech would be an understatement and they did it in a way that it still holds up today. So I find this weird to be worried about the graphics or worried about the world and the map. Look they've had a lot of time, they've had more time than they did to make Breath of the Wild. They just sit on their hands during that and part of the fun and breath of the wild was using all the mechanics as you explore the world. Now imagine they've increased those mechanics 10 fold. Imagine all the crazy new things you're going to be able to do and how exciting that's going to feel. Also from a visual perspective this was made for Switch. Look maybe it'll be a new hardware, that's a different debate for a different day. But this was made for Nintendo Switch. I cannot emphasize that enough because regardless of what some naysayers out there might say, Nintendo Switch is a pretty significant architecture and spec bump from the Wii U. Breath of the Wild was a Wii U game ported to Switch. That could explain some of the frame rate issues. That could explain some of the needing to go with multiple resolutions and have dynamic resolution scaling. A lot of that can be attributed to the fact that the game was built for the ground up for a completely different platform that had a game pad. This is not the case today. It was built for the ground up for Switch. They've had six additional years of optimization. Six additional years to find out what they can do visually with the Switch. I think a lot of this concern is just misguided and probably just completely made up in your mind. Another thing I think is completely made up in CW's minds is the next point of concern. That's a distrust of the developers. The Zelda team isn't your Pokemon team. Maybe this is actually a time to get into a moment, but the Zelda team has been wildly consistent at producing quality products over the years. Maybe you don't enjoy everything. Maybe Skyward Sword wasn't your cup of tea or Triforce Heroes, which was technically made by Grezzo. Maybe Four Swords or Four Swords of Ventures or Zelda 2. You can call out whatever games in the Zelda series you don't like if you have experience with them, but they've consistently been making one of the highest rated IPs in history. Almost every Zelda game rates at 90 plus from all reviews. That doesn't happen by accident. It happens because you're consistently creating a high quality product. So why would we distrust the developers to do it right? Again, you know they made Breath of the Wild, right? If they did that, why would we think they can't do more? Next up, we have to talk about performance. We talked about the visuals a bit. We talked about the world and the map, but people are concerned about the performance. Ever since Pokemon Scarlet and Violet came out, people looked at it and go, well, this isn't a very big game. It's smaller in scope and it struggles. It struggles to run on Switch. How the hell is Tears of the Kingdom going to run well on Switch when it's a much bigger scope game, much bigger draw distance, much bigger world, and hey, Breath of the Wild has some performance issues here and there, especially with a lot of particle effects and certain things happening on screen. And now Tears of the Kingdom is promising even more crazy mechanics and more insane stuff. How the hell is it going to be able to handle that? And this is where I go back to the distrust of the developers. In this case, you should trust the developers. The Zelda development team is not the same team that does Pokemon Scarlet and Violet. It's a fact. Pokemon Scarlet and Violet was made in about one third of the time that they've actually spent making this game. This game is made by a team that now has a full experience making open world games run on Switch. They made Breath of the Wild. Pokemon Scarlet and Violet were the first ever open world Pokemon games made by Game Freak. These are just very important distinctions to point out. The Zelda team is more experienced, it's much larger, it has more help from other groups like Monolithsoft, and honestly, I think we're going to see better framerate performance. Not beyond 30 FPS, but I think we're going to see the game stick very close to 30 FPS significantly more than Breath of the Wild did because now the game and the engine has been fully optimized specifically for Nintendo Switch and who knows, maybe that next hardware platform as well. And then the last concern is one that there isn't a lot I can do about it. If this is how you feel about Breath of the Wild, it's probably how you're going to feel about Tears of the Kingdom. And that's that some Zelda fans feel like Breath of the Wild wasn't a real Zelda game. It didn't have the traditional dungeons, the traditional progression of get your items through dungeons, get your heart piece at the end of your, expand your hearts at the end of dungeons, and all the puzzle elements, although there's quite a few puzzles in Breath of the Wild. Optional, they're not optional in other Zelda games. So it felt like a massive departure for some. Interestingly enough, it's actually very close to the way that the Legend of Zelda, the very first one was with how open it was, except that game even had traditional dungeons and puzzles and typical progression with how you get your items and this game didn't have that. So people go, well, well, it might be similar to that, but it's missing this core thing that's been on every Zelda game. Ergo, it's not a Zelda game, and I can't do anything if you feel that way. But if you at least thought it was a good game, this should be an even better one. Now, if you're concerned about not getting more of that traditional Zelda that you know and love, that I understand. But this game was never going to be that game. So maybe instead of trying to hope that Tears of the Kingdom transforms itself into what you want it to be, maybe just think about those things you enjoyed in Breath of the Wild on its own as its own game and imagine being able to expand upon all of that and do even more and have even more fun. So even if you don't consider this a real Zelda game, you might consider it an even better experience than Breath of the Wild was for whatever kind of game you want to call it. If you're not going to call it a Zelda game, then whatever you want to call it, a new IP, OK, well, then this is the next iteration of that new IP. And I can agree with you in some ways. I've actually thought for a while, Breath of the Wild feels like a pseudo reboot of the Zelda franchise, which could explain why you might not feel like it's a Zelda game, because it was in such a drastically different direction than the prior games that it does sort of feel like if we're going to call this Zelda, it's Zelda 2.0, Zelda 3.0. If you want to say 2.0 started with Ocarina of Time or a link to the past, right, whatever version you want to say, this is very different from what it's been in the past. And we've seen this Tomb Raider, the rebooted Tomb Raider, pretty different than the OG Tomb Raider, right? So I'm just pointing out there that, hey, it's OK at times for things to feel the same. And maybe this is just a new era, whether or not you like this era is going to be completely subjective. So you guys, let me know what you think about all this. I honestly think Tears of the Kingdom is shaping up to be the best, at least, I don't know, best between Breath of the Wild, Tears of the Kingdom. Either Tears of the Kingdom is probably going to be the better game. Significantly so. The last point of concern I just want to briefly mention is some people say one thing that made Breath of the Wild so magical is that we've never seen it before. We've never seen a game like this before. And that's true in many regards. We've seen overworld, we've seen the combination of all these things, especially with that physics engine and some of the cool things with the Sheikah Slate, we've never seen this exact combination of features before in a game. And there is something magical about that. I also think, if you think that's magical, wait until this team that was just sort of beta testing this concept actually gets to apply a billion unique ideas into this concept. I think your mind might end up being blown even more. Now, time will tell. We should see this game again sometime in the next month or two. I mean, you figure we're getting really close to release. And maybe a lot of these fears you have will be tossed to the curb or maybe you'll come up with new ones. But personally, I think we're concerned a lot about nothing. We just need to have some patience. And this game is going to end up being the masterpiece that we all know deep down it's truly going to be. Thank you guys for tuning in and I'll catch you in the next video.