When Zelda hands you spicy peppers, you make spicy-pepper-ade

Less than two hours into The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, I was stuck and was seriously considering returning the game to my shelf. Tears of the Caleb.

I, along with every other man, woman, child, and Groblovian in the universe, am playing The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Friday’s (5/12/2023) release of this game is a big deal, like a “standing outside in a line with strangers for hours” kind of a big deal, the kind of “line with strangers” that mid-pandemic men, women, children, and Groblovian’s would have thought never again possible. But here we are.

There was a time, before digital downloads crept their way into the physical cartridge sandbox that humans and those from Groblovia¹ alike would attend what are called Midnight Release Parties, participated in mostly by the party goers themselves and—only as a point of obligatory worship of the Capitalist engine—coordinated by hourly employees at GameStop. See, the Midnight Release Party isn’t really a party. It’s an event where hundreds of eager video game purchasers line up outside a video game store to await the release of a new video game, which means that “Party” is the most marketing-forward use of the term since political parties confiscated the word to encourage interest in government. I assume this is the reason political parties aren’t referred to by the more accurate, combinatorial-leaning “political factions.”

Thankfully, the “midnight” part of Midnight Release Party has been massaged down to a more reasonable evening hour. But it’s amazing, right, that even as digital distribution threatens to make physical cartridges extinct, the Midnight Release Party still exists, even if only for universe-changing games like Tears of the Kingdom. It’s worth taking note of anything that can cause people to willingly stand in a line for hours.

Credit to CBC News. And credit to these people’s knees and day jobs.

For Tears of the Kingdom, the queues were to be expected. The game’s predecessor, Breath of the Wild, is considered by many to be the best video game of all time. Fans, me included, eagerly awaited Tears of the Kingdom like members of any US political faction awaited the results of the 2016 presidential election, tears included.²

Okay, I’ll move on soon to the point of this post, but first let me quickly emphasize the anticipation of this game by reminding you that the producer of the game, Eiji Aonuma, refused to reveal the “Tears of the Kingdom” subtitle during the game’s announcement because he feared it would give too much of the game’s plot away. Then, when we got “Tears of the Kingdom,” nobody could discern the reason for Aonuma’s secrecy. Perhaps Japanese has a more forward relationship with homonyms, and so Aonuma thought Americans would surmise that “tears” could be “tiers” and thus we’d intuit the sky/land/underground structure of the game’s world map.

But no. We didn’t.

Instead, once we did learn the title, we collectively dismissed it and instead collectively embraced our zeitgeist pantaloons now having been fully crapped into. This is the fucking sequel to Breath of the Wild, dammit!³ Let’s just digest that concept for a minute before we start trying to lore-mine our way into speculation and inevitable disappointment.

Eiji Aonuma, seen here revealing the sequel to Breath of the Wild, but keeping its subtitle tucked deep down into his shirt pocket. Or that’s his nipple poking out in there. Either way, what a thirst-trap this guy is, eh.

Thankfully, the game released to the opposite of disappointment…which is…appointment? This game has been appointed King of Games due to its stellar reception. The game currently sits at a Metacritic score of 96 out of 100. This is a ratio that would, in any other situation, make even those who pride themselves in their rational treatment of outsiders look at the 4 non-believers as pariahs deserving of the 96’s ayre and pitchforks.

Suck it, Elden Ring. But hey, Tekken 3, wanna hang out?

So why did I almost give up on this Midnight Party-worthy, subtitle-hiding solar eclipse of a game? Because I couldn’t stop Link from freezing to death after completing one of the early-game’s tutorial shrines.

The game’s first quest, essentially the tutorial quest, asks the player to visit three shrines, each of which grants the player a power and then teaches the player how to use that power. Once the three basic powers are gathered, the player is able to move into the final bit of the opening tutorial. That’s most players. Players named Caleb J. Ross had a bit of trouble with the third of the three shrines, a shrine that sits high up in the game’s mountains where an almost-naked, early-game Link doesn’t have the right clothes to combat the icy temperatures. Instead, the player must gather nearby plants called Spicy Peppers, cook them to release their body-warming properties, and then eat the resulting meal for a timed buff against the cold.

The buff effectively adds a timer to force the player to return to habitable elevations lest Link freeze to death. This should be easy, but the third shrine sites atop a mountain cliff (with sides too step to leap down, thus making a quick fall an impossible counter to the timer) and adjacent an icy river (which is so cold, even a Spicy Pepper meal fails to protect).

My theory is that the Spicy Peppers keep you warm because of the hot diarrhea they cause. (credit: GameSpot)

The situation seemed to Caleb J. Ross’s that we are meant to learn how to use our Ultrahand ability while under the pressure of the Spicy Pepper timer. The Ultrahand allows Link to build various devices to help navigate the world. The hour leading up to the third shrine taught me how to build a raft out of logs, for example. Given this previous introduction, it seemed logically to build a log raft and sail it across the icy river.

Nope.

Apparently, the trees in this biome don’t fall in perfect raft-building measure like the logs of yore. Once constructed, my raft repeatedly capsized, no matter how delicately I placed it into the river, assumedly due to the crooked trunks. I tried varying the shape of the raft, the number of logs, the position of a helpful fan (in lieu of wind and a sail), and I even added nearby crates to the raft, a-la a pontoon, only to have these crates reveal their unassuming delicacy when, after dropping the craft at the shore in prep for my surely-successful voyage, the crates burst into splinters. The river is like 20 feet wide with NO current. Come on game, just let me swim it! My Spicy Pepper timer is at less than two minutes and I’m out of ways to manipulate tree trunks!

Here is an example of a good raft. This is not what I made. (credit: twinfinite)

Where Tears of the Kingdom truly boiled my blood is with its lack of fast travel (at this point in the game; I understand that fast travel is introduced later). Every icy drowning returned to me to the shore with my limited Spicy Peppers and worthless building materials. With fast travel, I could have returned instead to a warmer environment. I felt trapped. Did the game not account for this?

I’ve seen enough Breath of the Wild gameplay to know that there’s definitely a galaxy-brained way of solving my problem. But I’m not galaxy brained. I’m crawlspace brained. Guest-bedroom-brained, at best. So, I had to keep faith that the genius designers at Nintendo understood that players have brains of all sizes. So, I tried again. And again. And again. And every time, I got just a bit closer to the opposite shore of the icy river, but never close enough to leap to land.

And those incremental gains were tedious. I navigated the river while riding a half-submerged log with a battery-exhausted fan, willing my Link to clip along an iron damn, tilting my Switch in hopes that the gyroscopic tech in my Pro Controller extended to my gameplay style of “just a little bit further” said through clenched teeth. Remember in the 90s when our parents would move their entire bodies with a controller to get Mario to jump. I was doing the 2023 version of this, only for me there was actual precedence for controller movement to impact character movement. But sadly, this was not the case with my forever-marooned Link.

Eventually, the solution revealed itself, and what an anticlimactic solution it was. I simply had to navigate back up to the shrine and cross the river via a land bridge behind the river’s source waterfall. Then, once back down to my original angry-elevation, I found myself at the opposite shore, looking over to all the wrecked crates and felled trees of my previous, idiot self. Just a few, short climbs down, I was back to the warmer climate.

And that return to warmth came a return of my excitement for Tears of the Kingdom. I can’t stop thinking about what’s next. In fact, why the hell am I writing this right now? I’ve got Tears of the Kingdom to play. Bye.

1. This means nothing, by the way. I just made up an alien race for the sake of expanding my reference to outside of humanity, to show just how big this game is. Should there be an actual Groblovian race of aliens in any existing context, then let me say, welcome to my newsletter, Groblovian! You should subscribe.

2. But, from my anti-Trump vantage, generally from different ends of the emotional spectrum.

3. Or “Breadth” of the wild. Not an exact homonym, but I like to believe the unprecedented expanse of Breath of the Wild means the similarity to “breadth” is intentional.