Tears of the Kingdom released on 12th May 2023 with huge fanfare. After all, this was the sequel to Breath of the Wild, Nintendo’s record breaking Zelda game that sold millions of Switch consoles. However, since Tears of the Kingdom released the Zelda community has been divided. Today marks 2 years since the game came out, and I polled over a thousand fans to get their feebdack to help understand why this is one of the most contraversial sequels in The Legend of Zelda history.

I remember the build up to Tears of the Kingdom. While it was a long time, the excitement was palpable. First we got a teaser trailer at E3 2019, which showed Link and Zelda exploring the caves under Hyrule Castle, ultimately finding the corpse of Ganondorf. We’d have to wait 2 more years until 2021 for the next teaser, where we saw more gameplay and hints of Link’s new abilities. We finally got the first official trailer on 13th September 2022 which showed us hints of the sky. In February 2022 the offical 2nd trailer showed us more of Link’s abilities and gameplay, and then finally we got trailer 3 a month before release on April 13th 2023 with one of the best trailers Nintendo has ever released.

The game released on 12th May 2023. Tears of the Kingdom released against a backdrop of 10/10 reviews, and had astronomic sales in the first week, selling 10 million copies in just a few days. While the game was off to a great start, it wouldn’t tell the whole story, which would take a little more time to play out.

Let’s have a look at some of the numbers associated with Tears of the Kingdom.

• To date, Tears of the Kingdom has sold 21.5 million by December 2024. That’s second to only Breath of the Wild (which has sold 34.3 million).
• Tears of the Kingdom has a Metacritic metascore of 96. That’s taken an average of 150 critical reviews. It also has an Open Critic score of 96, which is an average of 156 reviews. Reviewers love Tears of the Kingdom.
• Then it has a user score of 8.8, still pretty good but there is clearly a mismatch here between reviewers in 2023 and user scores over time.
• The game is arguably loved by critics, it’s seemingly well liked by fans, and it’s sold more than 21 million copies.

These numbers appear to tell a very good story. However, the drop off from Tears of the Kingdom was steep. This was much more pronounced than Breath of the Wild. It felt like we were talking about Breath of the Wild for years after it released. We were playing it for years after release. Theories ran wild, it felt like there was always something new to talk about. Yet, months after Tears of the Kingdom released the hype died down dramatically.

A few months after launch, the fan backlash started. A quick search and you’ll find the Reddit posts and the videos that are highly of critical of Tears of the Kingdom. Objectively, Tears of the Kingdom builds on top of Breath of the Wild, and just adds more… new abilities, new locations to explore including the Sky Islands and The Depths. While I agree you can poke holes in the story of Tears of the Kingdom, other aspects of the game are incredible. The fact that this game exists is a near miracle, and it released largely bug free. In a world where games release unfinished, a buggy mess with predatory microtransactions all over the place, personally I think Tears of the Kingdom deserves the critical praise it received, and I don’t agree with the overly negative criticism of the game. Lore wise it’s flawed, but gameplay-wise, it’s very good and gave me nearly 100 hours of great gameplay.

Tears of the Kingdom could about to get it’s second lease of life, as one of the launch titles for the Switch 2. Zelda games had a reputation for struggling on Nintendo Switch, with Tears of the kingdom really chugging at certain points. Nintendo are offering an upgraded version for Switch 2, which will see it run at 1440p and 60 frames per second, finally we’re going to see what Tears of the Kingdom should look like it all it’s glory.

In order to understand the critical scores and the fan backlash for Tears of the Kingdom, I conducted some research of my own through YouTube polls. I wanted to test my assumptions to see if they were right or wrong, and do this through data, rather than a small number of opinions.

My assumption going into these tests and feedback was fans are very mixed on Tears of the Kingdom, and I wanted to find out if that was true or not. I aksed a series of questions to Zelda fans, and got ~1,300 responses.

Do you think Tears of the Kingdom is a good video game?

90% Yes
10% No

That’s a pretty definitive answer. I was expecting a higher percentage on the no’s, but 90% agreeing it’s a good video game seems to go against the grain of the mixed perception I certainly have regarding Tears of the Kingdom.

Which game is better?

48% Breath of the Wild
52% Tears of the Kingdom

This result was surprising to me. I was expecting a definitive win for Breath of the Wild here. While the result is very close, Tears of the Kingdom coming out on top was an interesting result.

Did interest in Tears of the Kingdom fall off quicker than Breath of the Wild?

86% Yes
14% No

This wasn’t a surprising result, and validated the point I made earlier in the video. It certainly felt like the interest fell off quicker, and to see a definitive win for yes here makes a lot of sense.

Are you planning on playing Tears of the Kingdom on Switch 2?

59% Yes
41% No

This result was surprising again. My assumption going into this question was no, people wouldn’t be jumping back in to Tears of the Kingdom. If the reception was so mixed, then why would you jump back in?

Looking at the poll results, I realise that the data is telling me a much more positive story about Tears of the Kingdom that I was expecting. Zelda fans definitively say it’s a good video game. When given the choice, the majority would choose Tears of the Kingdom over Breath of the Wild, and Zelda fans are ready to jump back into Tears of the Kingdom when the Switch 2 releases in a few weeks time.

As well as the voting, I got some great feedback from the community related to Tears of the Kingdom and to help us understand more about how fans feel about the game, lets have a look at those comments now.

Community Comments

Do you think Tears of the Kingdom is a good video game?

@notmireelnam4863
I have some serious criticisms about Tears of the Kingdom, but I think it’d be a gross overstatement to say it’s not a good game

@TamirMor-r8b
It’s my favorite game ever. Botw is second. (And yes, I’ve played botw years before totk) Zelda fans can be very picky sometimes, and I can understand, because totk can definitely feel a little bit too similar to botw sometimes, but you can say the exact same thing about Spiderman 2, for example. So in the end, totk is a masterpiece, just like botw.

Also, I can offer a different take on it: the fact that it’s a little bit too similar to botw, is also one of the reasons I enjoyed it so much, because I had the opportunity to kind of play my favorite game of all time for the first time again, but this time it was much bigger and better.

Skyward sword is also absolutely amazing, maybe one of the best games I’ve ever played. I just finished it today for the first time. Yes, it’s very linear, but it doesn’t make it a “bad” or “average” video game.

@TheFallenSithMaster
Best game ever made people have a right to complain about issues and stuff they don’t want in a new zelda game but let me tell you that was the best damn game I played since skyrim came out It’s 100 times better then breath of the wild.

@sparklefulpaladin
Is it a great game? Absolutely. Is it my favorite Zelda game? Absolutely not. Out of the ones I’ve played, it’s mid-list at best. While I’ve genuinely enjoyed most of it and it solved some of the issues that I didn’t like about BotW, I really, really, really miss actual dungeons.

I think Echoes of Wisdom and Link Between Worlds hit the more open world and variable dungeon order really well and I’d have loved to see something like that in TotK. While the Temples were alright (I still have one regional phenomena left), none of them so far have felt like epic places to explore and solve puzzles.

It does have one of the best boss themes in the franchise, though!

@mrwho995
I think even most people with misgivings about the game would still say it’s good. It’s a pretty bold statement to call it bad even if you didn’t enjoy it too much and have criticisms.

That said, I think it’s a bad game. None of my opinions haven’t already been covered by YouTube video essays explaining all of the problems so I won’t bother repeating all that. But the tl;dr is that I think it does so many things so badly that they outweight what it does well and makes for an overall bad game. Most peope agree the game has problems and most people agree about what those problems are – just for me the problems detracted from the game sufficiently that I’d vote ‘no’ on this. That doesn’t mean the game doesn’t have great elements or great moments though.

@Flaris
It’s not a bad game. But I just wouldn’t say it was a great one. There’s plenty of good there for sure. But they really spent too much time on the creation stuff and not enough on story, dungeons, or the world. Could have cut either the sky islands or the underground since both are extremely unimportant. Putting more time into one of them would have made that a great addition.

It’s good. But it’s not great. Excellent Botw DLC, but as its own game it should have done more.

@TheRealPSKilla502
It’s not better than OoT, MM, TP, or even SS

@reneecorley61
I think it’s a wonderful game. I love it!

@10k-Noodles
I think ‘good’ is an understatement. It’s a great game. But there’s a difference between being a great game and being a great Zelda game.

@anthonyduffy6953
Its just fine. Its not amazing and its not terrible. The ultrahand mechanic was the only bit worth mentioning really, and even that got boring.

@thehound1359
Too tedious building things that only last for 10 seconds.

@ExilioRebelBC
Can’t replay BotW after experiencing TotK.

@HumanXtinction
I can’t believe I’m 200 hours into this game!

@Cosmosis-86
It’s a great game, I think it may ‘age like fine wine’

@cykes5609
without a doubt it’s an amazing game, my only real problems with it are from a lore perspective and how all 4 dungeons are pretty much the same gimmick over and over again

@robinita46853
It’s a good game. But it’s not a good Zelda game and it’s not a good sequel to botw.

@Antera0210
TOTK is a fantastic but flawed video game

Let me know in the comments what you think of Tears of the Kingdom.