Tears of the Kingdom on Switch 2 was my GOTY

Nintendo's quality-of-life improvements gave me newfound appreciation

I didn't like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom much when Nintendo first released it in 2023. It was dull, I incorrectly thought. It was ugly, I accurately concluded. Why bother? This year, I've played it more than any other game, and it's entirely because of the Switch 2's upgrades.

The yellow of the Sky Islands looks gross on the original Switch. That was my initial take after entering the game's tutorial area, and it shaped what I noticed the most about everything else afterward. The color is too garish in general, and the low resolution just makes it look bad. Then, it turned out, the low resolution made everything else look bad as well, from Link's blurry face to the appallingly gritty-looking half-shapes in the distance that were meant to be attractive enough that I'd want to explore them. Even the grass was crappy, all jagged edges and visual noise.

Using Link's Ultrahand powers caused some issues as well, since building and moving larger objects tended to make the resolution drop in handheld mode, and things get a bit fuzzy even when you're moving small stuff like mushrooms that are just a short distance away. Breath of the Wild has similar resolution issues. But, whether it was from Nintendo using not-atrocious color choices or doing a better job of managing how far you can see, they never stood out as much to me as they did in Tears of the Kingdom. Here, along with:

• frame drops
• laggy-feeling camera movements
• load times
• An ever-present veil of fuzz covering everything

It was all just a constant reminder that the game wasn't as good as it should have been.

There was another issue, though.Tears of the Kingdom launched just a few months before Baldur's Gate 3, a game that threatened to consume my work coverage and spare time besides (and made good on that threat). I felt rushed to get through as much of Tears as possible before that point, which, unsurprisingly, sucked the fun out of it. Exploring turned into a checklist. Building was a joyless chore, and all my little issues grew bigger than they probably would have if I had just taken my time. Yes, most of my issues were superficial, but my almost-made-up-mind lumped it all together and decided the game was just Not That Good.

The final choice to leave Hyrule behind happened soon after. Following 20 minutes of climbing through the clouds, I was ready to drop into the Wind Temple — and the game froze for about 10 seconds. It didn't crash, but with the prospect of new, more powerful hardware peeking over the horizon and other obligations coming up fast, I started thinking maybe it was time to put Tears of the Kingdom to rest.

It was a fitting metaphor for Nintendo's aged hardware. The Sky Islands were a crumbling ruin of a dream dreamt too soon. The ghosts of old had nothing but memories of a glorious yesterday — and the promise of someone else's tomorrow to cling to.

Poetic, but still irritating. The choice between playing the game that made my eyes sad or playing the one with a hot lizard and cute wizard, plus a dazzling array of unmined storytelling opportunities, wasn't really a choice at all. I ditched Tears of the Kingdom and happily spent 200+ hours in Baldur's Gate 3 over the next 18 months or so.

Fast-forward to the Switch 2 reveal, when Nintendo showed off what the new hardware would do for Tears of the Kingdom, and I cynically thought "framerate and resolution improvements won't save this mess, lol."

Well. I was wrong.

Sky Island Yellow is still an icky color, but it looks more natural and artfully applied on Nintendo’s newer hardware, instead of like someone chunked it on with a size-30 paintbrush tool. Grass — the substance even more common in post-disaster Hyrule than sadness — is well-defined and doesn't go all grainy when you move through it too quickly, which makes movement and exploration easier on the eyes (and much less annoying). Character models don't look like mid-transition Groose in the Scrunched Groose gif. Moving the camera no longer feels like dragging a resistant cat through mud. Load times are practically nonexistent, which means that fast travel and daring to enter a shrine aren't punishments anymore.

Without all those minor annoyances dragging it down, freed from time restraints and what felt like the equivalent of Nintendo running a cheese grater across my eyes, Tears of the Kingdom is good. Really good. I've spent roughly 120 hours with it since the Switch 2 upgrade launched in June, more time than I have with any other new game this year, even my favorites.

A big part of that comes from a nightly ritual I've established. After work and other obligations are finished, I settle in with my cheap little Joy-Con grip, then pick a spot to explore and make some weird-ass contraption to get there. Sometimes I find something useful when I arrive. Sometimes there's nothing other than a nice spot for a photo, which still feels like time well spent when a game looks as good as this one does now. Then after I've got some new gear, I'll venture into the Depths (an area I initially dismissed as "just a waste of time") and explore until some ridiculously overpowered enemy kills me or all my weapons break.

Quests break up the pattern and give Hyrule some much-needed life that's missing from Breath of the Wild. I'm slowly working toward exploring an entire region before tackling its dungeon (for the ones that do have dungeons) and am surprised by how long I'm sticking with it all. Open-world games tend to bore me after a while. But Tears of the Kingdom achieved a compelling balance between atmospheric emptiness and meaningful rewards and challenges, something that was missing from Breath of the Wild. There's just enough narrative context to make tracking down quests and collectibles feel satisfying, without the whole thing feeling too guided. And fusing bizarre weapon combinations means I'm actively going out of my way to fight enemies whenever I can, where I avoided combat in BotW.

I might even end up finishing everything there is to do in this version of Hyrule. But even if I eventually tire of the routine, I don't regret a minute I've spent with Tears of the Kingdom this year.