The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdomis a hopeful game, which is a little strange when you consider its backdrop of catastrophe. As the game begins, Link and Zelda reawaken Ganon, causing the Upheaval. This pushes Hyrule Castle into the air, surrounded by deadly black and red gloom. A bunch of smaller islands also appear in the sky, and chasms, rimmed with caustic ooze, open in the ground. As an explanation for the game’s weapon degradation, we find out that objects are falling apart at a much faster rate. All in all, things seem pretty bad in Hyrule.
But that doesn’t stop people from being friendly and kind, or from building community. In fact, Tears of the Kingdom is a markedly less lonely game thanBreath of the Wild. In TOTK, you see people far more often. Not much in the Depths and not at all in the Sky Islands, but if you’re on the ground, you’re going to run into a lot of people. Maybe it’s a traveler making their way along the roads, or maybe it’sAddisonstruggling to keep the President upright. Maybe it’s a visitor perusing a newspaper at a stable, or one of the dozens of citizens in the game’s towns. Whoever they are, whatever they’re doing, there’s more of them out and about in the world.
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Unlike in Breath of the Wild, there are now more concentrated efforts among those people to work together. The main quest quickly introduces you to the research teams investigating the chasms. Impa and her right hand man, Cado, travel Hyrule, investigating the Geoglyphs. The communities from Breath of the Wild are back again, with Goron City, Gerudo Town, Rito Village, and Zora’s Domain each maintaining populations from their respective species. But there are new settlements too, like Lookout Landing and Tarry Town, the village Link helped build which has advanced significantly since Breath of the Wild.
Throughout the game, we see communities working together. While Link is often playing a crucial role in that work (or in saving the community from outside forces so that the work can begin), the game shows the communities starting and completing the work themselves, too. In Lookout Landing, Link arrives in the midst of a research operation that is already underway and joins up as a valued member. In Rito Village, Tulin has gone to search for the arc and Link partners with him to reach it. The game is still built around Link as the primary agent of change, but we consistently see Hyrule’s communities coming together to understand and survive the Upheaval.
We see the same response in our own world. Though there are bad actors who seek to undermine community, even amid the worst of climate change, COVID, cops, and capitalism, we see people showing up to work together and fight back. Those in charge may wish to disregard the majority’s voices, but they can only do so for so long. The Upheaval and the degradation it causes is a good analogy for the way things fall apart in our own world. Mutual aid didn’t stop during the pandemic, and people still frequently do their part to fight back against climate change, to protest police violence, to unionize to carve out a fairer world in the framework of capitalism. The crisis is ongoing — when I started writing this, the sky in New York City was orange from wildfires in Canada and the air was harmful to breathe — but people come together in the midst of it. Tears of the Kingdom is still a power fantasy, but it does double duty as a testament to the truth that there is power in numbers.
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