I’m 95 hours into The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and I keep getting blown away by what the game is. An improvement on a predecessor I thought was basically perfect. Ridiculously deep, with robust building systems, endless Fuse options, and long, well-written side quests. And as good a story as Zelda has ever told, with a potently tragic narrative. But when I attempted the shrine overlooking Tarrey Town, I had my first thought about what the game should be: a competitive arena battler.
The Rasitakiwak Shrine, which is perched on the mountain near Link’s purchasable plot of land, is one of the game’s many Proving Ground shrines, the kind that strip Link down to his skivvies and task him with finding everything he needs to succeed within the shrine itself. This one is focused on vehicles, dropping the Hero of Time into an arena filled with armed Zonai Constructs and a ton of parts to build combat vehicles. There are pre-built cars, so if you just want to drive around running over Constructs, you can do that. But there are also beam emitters, flame emitters, spiked metal plates, and more that you can Ultrahand to your vehicle to become a rolling death machine.
On a metal grate overhang that you can Ascend through by pulling a car up for a height boost, a plane body and the other component parts wait. You can take that and ride it into a walled off section in the middle of the arena to gain access to a badass car with a bunch of parts around which you can assemble in safety, then flip a switch, and ride out guns blazin’.
I was having such a good time doing this that I was a little sad I was just up against a bunch of easily dispatched robots. This seemed like such a perfect test for Tears of the Kingdom’s mechanics, but it really needs human players to make that test worthwhile. I’m rarely the person calling for a game to get a multiplayer mode — I’ve always been a single-player guy first and foremost, hence my spending 95 hours on Zelda — but a multiplayer Tears of the Kingdom mode would be so good I’m mad I can’t just play it right now.
On some level, this might sound like Fortnite. That’s a game with combat and building and vehicles. But the joy of using Tears of the Kingdom as the foundation is that the building wouldn’t be instantaneous. You would need to find the pieces, maneuver them into place, and occasionally disconnect a piece from the body, inadvertently breaking your whole contraption in the process. Once you get the hang of building in Fortnite or Minecraft, it’s as fast as walking or shooting. But TOTK is fiddlier, and that would make for more interesting bouts. Melee weapons would probably need to be nerfed in order for the vehicular combat to really shine. Maybe you could still have swords, shields, and bows, but they would break even faster than they do in the game to encourage a reliance on the things that you build.
You could build an army of robots, then send them out to do your fighting for you. You could make a fighter jet, and release a swarm of drones on your foes. You could build a big ass monster truck and run them over. If the first month of Tears of the Kingdom’s release has taught us anything it’s that the possibilities are as endless as the creativity of the player base. I don’t have all the details worked out, but I hope when Nintendo eventually announces DLC for TOTK, it takes us to the Battlebot arena.