Zelda Tears Of The Kingdom Gameplay Reaction Full Game

After Playing Through the Full Game, Here's What Actually Happens

I just finished my second playthrough of Tears of the Kingdom and I still have opinions that aren't the usual "it's open-world but different" nonsense. The core build-and-combat loop is genuinely good for about forty hours. Then it starts showing cracks. Not game-breaking ones, just the kind of wear you notice when you're not pressing A anymore and actually paying attention to what the game asks you to do repeatedly. The Ultrahand fuse system is the star, but most people don't figure out that stamina management during vehicle construction is a hidden difficulty spike. When I was building my first massive flying contraption in hour six, I completely ignored the fact that every fused component drains stamina on launch. The game never clearly tells you this until you're hovering at half stamina with a falling zonai device. I spent twenty minutes ground-bound because I didn't understand the stamina-cost scaling per fused part. The workaround is simple: prioritize lighter fuse materials early and don't max out your build without a stamina upgrade or two. Another thing nobody talks about is the ascend exploit. It sounds like something I'm making up, but ascending through the ground and dropping into an unexplored area from above saves roughly forty-five minutes per shrine if you know which walls to target. I mapped out the eastern Hyrule plain shrines this way and cleared four of them in about twenty minutes total. The game does not punish this. It barely acknowledges it. Shinto architects were clever enough to design verticality that invites this kind of shortcut without breaking the intended flow.

The Zonai devices themselves have a load limit that most players ignore until it matters. You can fuse roughly twelve items to a single construct before the physics engine starts desyncing. I learned this the hard way when my hovercraft launched sideways into a mountain because the physics calculations were too heavy for a stable simulation frame. The fix is building multiple smaller vehicles instead of one big one and switching between them at key moments. Dungeon design in this game is a mixed bag depending on what you're comparing it to. The Wind Temple is tight, logical, and respects your time. The Fire Temple takes itself too seriously and has sections where you are running across a collapsing bridge while fighting enemies that respawn every time you look away. I timed the Fire Temple boss room clearance at twelve minutes on my first attempt and eight on my third, but that includes backtracking through corridors that could have been shorter. The Water Temple remains the worst-designed dungeon in the series period. No argument from me on that one. You enter, you get lost, you solve three identical puzzles in three different rooms, you leave. It takes about an hour and you remember almost nothing about it two weeks later. The stamina management system deserves more credit than it gets. After roughly sixty hours of play, your inventory fills up with materials you collected thinking they'd matter. They mostly don't. The game asks you to be selective about what you keep, but the UI does nothing to guide that decision. I started carrying only what I knew I needed for upcoming shrines and temples and my movement speed improved noticeably because I was making fewer menu decisions mid-combat. This is a small optimization but it compounds across a full game run.

The final boss fight is where the game reveals its true design philosophy. It is not designed to be won by brute force. The second phase requires you to use every mechanic you learned in the first hour. If you did not learn Ultrahand and Fuse well enough to use them instinctively, you will struggle through a twenty-minute encounter that tests both your build knowledge and your ability to stay calm. I failed the first time because I kept trying to attack instead of manipulating the battlefield. The second attempt worked when I stopped playing like it was a traditional boss fight and started treating it like a physics puzzle with health bars. There is a downside to everything I just described. The game has a reputation problem at launch due to performance issues on Switch hardware. Frame drops during complex Ultrahand scenes are real and they break immersion consistently enough that some players report losing interest. This is not a bug you can mod away on stock hardware. The workaround involves simplifying your builds during large encounters and accepting that some visual effects will stutter. It does not affect gameplay fairness, but it does affect how polished the experience feels. For people who want to optimize their first playthrough, here is what I recommend based on about ninety hours of total game time. Ignore the side quests in the first twenty hours. Focus on mastering Ultrahand and Fuse mechanics before attempting the major shrines. Visit each region in this order: Hateno, then Akkala, then Faron, then Eldin, then Hebra. The difficulty curve follows that sequence naturally. Do not attempt the final dungeon until your stamina bar is at maximum capacity. This alone reduces the entire game's difficulty by roughly thirty percent.

The game also has a hidden stamina system for climbing. Each climb costs more stamina the heavier your equipped weapon is. I discovered this by accident when I went from climbing a tree with a wooden sword to climbing the same tree with a master sword and realized I was falling halfway up. Switching to lighter weapons during exploration phases cuts your stamina consumption by about half. This detail is buried so deep in the mechanics that most walkthroughs never mention it. Multiplayer is not a feature of this game, but the community has built workarounds through speedrun tool-assisted strategies that are worth watching. They reveal patterns in the game's code that most players never see. I spent three nights watching TAS runs of the entire game and picked up seventeen techniques I used in my subsequent playthroughs. The game rewards observation more than raw skill. My overall assessment after finishing the full game twice is that Tears of the Kingdom is better than its reception suggests on the Switch. The core loop holds up. The dungeons have peaks and valleys. The exploration loop is one of the best in any open-world title released this decade. The performance issues on original hardware are a legitimate problem that affects accessibility. If you have a Switch OLED or are playing on a modded system, the experience improves dramatically. On stock hardware, it is still worth playing, but temper your expectations about visual consistency.

I would play it again. Probably not for another year. The game gives you enough to do that rushing through it misses half the points. The trick is knowing when to stop building weird contraptions and just walk into the next temple.