The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Switch 2 Review – The Upgrade That Nails It

Following up on Breath of the Wild has to have been a daunting task – after all, where exactly does one go after your last release was hailed as one of the best games of all time? Breath of the Wild reinvigorated not just the franchise it reinvented, and not just Nintendo, but the design and language of open world games as a whole. Any follow up would have big shoes to fill. With Tears of the Kingdom, Nintendo decided to take on the challenge, and deliver Breath of the Wild again, but more.

That represents the central difference in the philosophy of Breath of the Wild with the philosophy of Tears of the Kingdom. Breath of the Wild is a game that is marked by minimalism and solitude, pitting the lone player against what feels like an entire world that is indifferent at best and outright hostile at worst towards the player. It is a game marked by melancholy, introspection, discovery, and player-guided adventure. 

Tears of the Kingdom, on the other hand, takes the framework of Breath of the WIld and stuffs it with such an insane amount of content, it’s a wonder the entire enterprise didn’t buckle under its own weight. This is a game that empowers the player with the ability to manipulate literally anything in the environment, and puts the world at the player’s mercy. This is no longer the story of a lone warrior surviving against impossible odds, this is the story of a warrior at the peak of his powers, able to take on anything.

"Tears of the Kingdom is an excellent game that was already a technical marvel on the original Switch."

Maximalism is the name of the game with Tears of the Kingdom – a lot more playable area (the game now has three map layers, the regular old Hyrule, the sky islands, and a whole underground map that mirrors the surface). A lot more quests. A lot more story and storytelling. A lot more puzzles and dungeons. A lot more characters. A lot more emphasis on the music and soundtrack. Even the powers and abilities Link gets don’t have any of the restraint that Breath of the Wild’s did, with Ultra Hand, Fuse, Ascend, and Recall all being so game breaking, they would probably count as developer-only debug tools in pretty much any other game.

Tears of the Kingdom is an excellent game that was already a technical marvel on the original Switch. That the game was running on the original Switch at all was a surprise to many – this is a game that allows players to pick up and manipulate anything, maintains a record of the physical states of each individual object on screen separately (and allows players to manipulate them individually), and a game that allows players to bypass entire geometry and geography in an instant. It’s a game that has three gigantic maps, all seamlessly interconnected.

And all of this is on top of the pre-existing impressive physics and chemistry calculations that were already technically taxing in Breath of the Wild. And arguably, while doing all this, Tears of the Kingdom on the Switch ran better than Breath of the Wild did (at least at launch for the latter)! 

So this game was a technical marvel on release, a title that managed to do more on hardware that at best was equivalent to a mid range 2015 Android tablet than most other developers manage on consoles far more sophisticated. It’s surprising, therefore, just how much of an upgrade the Switch 2 Edition of Tears of the Kingdom feels, even compared to the upgrade for Breath of the Wild. On paper, the two games receive the same set of visual upgrades – 60fps, higher resolution, HDR. But Tears of the Kingdom’s upgrade feels a lot more impressive and convincing.

"Tears of the Kingdom’s update also comes off as better value for money than Breath of the Wild’s for one other reason – Breath of the Wild got paid DLC and an expansion, neither of which are included in the Switch 2 upgrade for the game, and must be purchased separately if you don’t already own them."

Running at a steady 60fps frame rate with pretty much no drops (unless there are a lot of particle effects on screen, which do cause some slowdown), the game instantly feels better to play than it ever has before. But the true improvement seems to be in image quality and clarity. Like Breath of the Wild, Tears runs at 1440p in docked mode and 900p in handheld mode on the Switch 2, up from up to 720p in handheld mode and up to 900p in console mode for the original release.

But that original release utilized its dynamic resolution scaling fairly aggressively, and then on top of that upscaled the final output via AMD’s FSR. This means the image quality was soft – softness which is entirely gone in the Switch 2 build, where the image looks crisp and sharp in both modes. 

This crispness in image quality is the immediate difference between the visual upgrades for Tears and for Breath. It’s unclear why Tears looks so much nicer – presumably the fact that Breath of the Wild was built on an older engine with Wii U era tech in mind has something to do with that, whereas Tears of the Kingdom was built on an entirely new engine, from the ground up for the Switch, which was a lot more modern as far as hardware functionality goes.

Maybe it’s because Breath of the Wild ran at or close to its target resolution almost all the time, so the bump to resolution doesn’t seem as notable there as it does in Tears of the Kingdom, which, as we already discussed, used a variety of scaling and sampling techniques on the Switch. Whatever the reason, though, the visual upgrade for Tears feels a lot more impressive than it did for Breath.

Tears also benefits more from the other upgrades it got. Like Breath of the Wild, it has received a bunch of new features that are gated to the Zelda Notes companion app, but the features on offer here are genuinely more helpful than what Breath offers. In addition to the voice navigation and photo editor that Breath of the Wild got with the Switch 2 upgrade, Tears of the Kingdom also gets the ability to share your Ultra Hand Autobuild contraptions with others by letting you import them to the app and saving them as a QR Code (conversely, you can also get others’ Autobuild creations this way), as well as also allowing players to gift items to each other.

Given Tears of the Kingdom’s central gameplay loop, which includes finding items around and combining them to create things that can help you do… whatever it is you are doing in the game at the moment, these upgrades are genuinely helpful, and also the exact kind of updates that should be outsourced to a companion app. Unlike the bonus features Zelda Notes offers for Breath of the Wild, which can feel nice to have but otherwise inessential, the new features you get here are a lot more helpful and impactful to the game’s central gameplay loop.

Tears of the Kingdom’s update also comes off as better value for money than Breath of the Wild’s for one other reason – Breath of the Wild got paid DLC and an expansion, neither of which are included in the Switch 2 upgrade for the game, and must be purchased separately if you don’t already own them. This can greatly diminish the perceived value of the package – if this is supposed to be the definitive way to play the game, and players are being charged the money they are for it, then why does it not include all the content in the original game out of the box? Tears of the Kingdom, however, never got any paid expansion, the absence of which therefore doesn’t undermine the value of this upgrade.

"If you’ve been waiting for better hardware to play Tears of the Kingdom, then you’ve made the correct choice, because now you get to play this great game without any of the technical shortcomings it may have had at launch."

So, this one is a lot easier to recommend – everything, from the excellent visual upgrade, to the great bonus features, to even the fact that the rare time you see a loading screen in the game, it lasts barely a couple of seconds, makes this the definitive way to play this game, with pretty much no caveats whatsoever.

If you’ve been waiting for better hardware to play Tears of the Kingdom, then you’ve made the correct choice, because now you get to play this great game without any of the technical shortcomings it may have had at launch. If you have already played the game, then the upgrade is still genuinely useful and helpful enough that it’s worth paying for. Whether you are a newcomer or an existing fan alike, the Nintendo Switch 2 Edition of Tears of the Kingdom is the definitive way to play this game, with no caveats whatsoever.

This game was reviewed on the Nintendo Switch 2.