Soapbox features enable our individual writers and contributors to voice their opinions on hot topics and random stuff they've been chewing over.Today, Jim dives into that opening...
Despite having been counting down the days until The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom's release over the past four years or more, nothing could have prepared me for the game's opening. Confident, eerie, cinematic. It does everything that a Zelda opening should do, but in a way that no other game in the series has. Sure, there may be a certain amount of recency bias at play here, but this might just be the series' — if not Nintendo's — best opener of all time and I can't stop thinking about it.
When you begin a new save file on a Zelda game, what do you expect? A melodic Fairy Fountain theme played on a piano? A quick lore session explaining the events of a war from a hundred years prior, an info dump on which all timeline theories will be based for the rest of time? A slideshow of images (or, at a push, a small cutscene) depicting said events? That's about it. Don't get me wrong, I always love these openers and I can completely see why they have stuck around — "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" an' all — but all of these look like a first draft compared to what Tears of the Kingdom achieves in its introduction.