As promised yesterday, Nintendo has released over 10 minutes of new The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom gameplay, played and narrated by series producer Eiji Aonuma. The footage demonstrates Link’s powerful new abilities, namely Recall, Fuse, Ascend, and Ultrahand, which let players navigate through the world in unique ways and craft powerful compound tools and implements from individual components.
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Watch the gameplay video below:
Aonuma introduces players to the new interactivity-focused abilities in Tears of the Kingdom in the video. First, the Recall ability rewinds the movement of objects, and is particularly useful for when players seek to reach distant locations such as the Sky Islands in the game. The producer demonstrates this by climbing onto a rock that has fallen from the Sky Islands and rewinding its movement to ride it back up to the Islands.
The Fuse ability lets players combine items into a compound implement, which is particularly useful in combat. For example, combining a fragile tree branch with a boulder using Fuse creates a rock-on-a-stick that is both more durable and damaging than a tree branch. Fusing an ice elemental material with an arrow creates a freezing arrow, and a Keese Eyeball fused with an arrow results in a homing arrow that can target nearby enemies itself.
Movement is further simplified through the Ascend ability, which lets players move up through any visible roof to climb a structure from the bottom instead of manually scaling it. The Ultrahand ability allows Link to combine objects from the environment to create vehicles and other implements, which Aonuma demonstrates by creating a raft out of three logs and two fans and then using it to cross a river. The vehicles shown in the previous gameplay video are also created entirely using the Ultrahand ability.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom will be released this May 12 on the Nintendo Switch. Stay tuned here at MP1st for further coverage of the game.