Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom Gameplay Trailer

Nintendo said their gameplay trailer for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom would be just ten minutes long, and considering how huge the world in it must be, we had no idea how they planned to sell all that in such a short time. They pulled it off, by focusing on new abilities that have the potential to dramatically change how a Zelda game is played.

The first one is “Recall,” which allows Link to rewind the movement of any object. What use could this have? The footage demonstrated it right away: Link mounted a rock of debris that fell from the sky and “rewound” it so that it served as an elevator, taking him up to one of the sky islands. This was no doubt inspired by one of the most common tricks you see on Twitch for BOTW — freezing an object, whacking it to build up energy, climbing up top and releasing it. You shouldn’t have to do this in TotK now that there’s an official variant.

But the freezing trick is a good example of what players will come up with as they play around, and the rest of the new powers fully encourage that sort of thing. Weapon Fusing is an ability that will let Link make anything he finds on the ground into a weapon. You can combine literally anything that can be collected, so within seconds Link went from holding a handful of meaningless sticks and rocks into being a lethal force on the sky island. This could be very addictive!

And it doesn’t stop with weapons. Players will be able to craft any object they desire with whatever they find, thanks to the third new ability, Ultrahand (Gunpei Yokoi, RIP). It turns out the primitive-looking automobiles and airplanes we saw Link driving around in a previous trailer were not objects that one can just find. You build them by sticking them together with Ultrahand. In BOTW, scavenging was mostly an activity for cooking; now you can conjure up virtually anything by just wandering around and sticking stuff together. That is awesome!

The final new ability is Ascend, which lets Link escape any enclosure with a ceiling by teleporting up through it (this includes caves, as they demonstrated). We don’t see at the moment how this won’t break the game by making cheating in shrines really easy, but there will probably be places where you can’t use Ascend.

You can see all these new powers in the trailer below. We’re psyched for all this — we could see ourselves losing hours to playing around with this stuff. Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom will be released on Switch May 12.