According to my Switch, I've played 105 hours of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom since it came out back in May. If you’re the kind of multiplayer fiend who has thousands of hours in Destiny or Overwatch, that may not sound like much. But, for me — someone who almost exclusively plays single-player games — it’s a lot. The last game I played for that long was Hitman 3 — which is the rare live-service game to get its hooks in me (or, rather, its garrote around my neck). Before that, it hadn't happened since Breath of the Wild in 2017.
It's rare for a game to hold my attention for over 100 hours because, when you think about it, that’s about four full days of my life. That's a lot of time!
But Tears of the Kingdom did it, and even now, I feel like there’s so much more to see. Over the weekend, I rolled credits on the game, which would usually be my cue to delete and move on. I write about games for a living, and writing on new games tends to get more views than writing on old games, so sticking with one game for months on end isn’t a luxury I can usually afford. The thing is: rolling credits hasn’t altered my desire to keep exploring Hyrule in the slightest.
I’ve started playing Pikmin 4, which is very good, and am still chipping away at Marvel’s Midnight Suns, which is my favorite Marvel thing in years. But, as much as I like those games, I’ll have no trouble yeeting them out of my storage as soon as I reach their endings.
Tears of the Kingdom’s structure makes it difficult to feel that you’ve ever seen enough. Even at 105 hours in, I still feel like I’ve only scratched the surface. Well, more precisely, like I’ve only scratched three surfaces. I’ve spent dozens of hours in the Depths, but I haven’t cleared the fog off that map. I can take a glance at my Hero’s Path and see all the swaths of Hyrule's green plains that I’ve only crossed near, but never actually explored. My Zonai gauge isn’t upgraded all the way, so there are still sky islands I can't reach.
Late in the game, I started spending more time in the villages, tracking down the quests in Tarrey Town and Hateno Village, but there are still plenty of NPCs I haven’t talked to, plenty of quests I haven’t even received, let alone completed. All of this is standard for my experience with open-world games. I basically always go for the style of playthrough that HowLongToBeat.com designates “Main + Sides.” I complete the story, and do a sampling of the other stuff on offer, but I have never, in my life, earned a platinum trophy. I just don’t care enough about ticking off every box, and there are always new games to play or old ones to dust off on the pile of shame.
But Tears of the Kingdom is the rare game where just about everything is worth doing. The side quests are worth tracking down. The central story is as good as a Zelda narrative has ever been. There are still shrines to find, which means there are still weird contraptions to jerry-rig together with Ultrahand. The game is so good and there's so much of it that I may just never move on.
Who am I kidding? I know I'll move on. But if Nintendo convinces me to get my first 100 percent completion that will be a miracle in itself.