In The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, I sprinted to upgrade my stamina as soon as I possibly could. Hyrule was big, and riding a horse sucked. At any given time you might run into a mountain that needed scaling, and the options at your disposal were limited. If you wanted to see all the game had to offer, you needed to get some green.
But, in Tears of the Kingdom, I’ve barely upgraded my stamina at all — I counted today and I've only added two segments to Link's stamina wheel while boosting his health bar by nine hearts.
Tears of the Kingdom jukes you early on and the little trick it plays might leave you momentarily thinking that the game isn't going to let you upgrade your stamina at all. Exiting the Great Sky Islands requires Link to open a door. As with lifting the Master Sword from the stone in Breath of the Wild, the exertion slowly drains your hearts, so you can only do this if you have enough health. After trying once, Rauru tells you that you won't be able to do it in your current form, and sends you to complete one more shrine. Afterward, when you go to the Goddess Statue with four shrines completed, the game only offers the option to upgrade your health, not stamina.
This is one of Tears of the Kingdom's interesting quirks; it's okay with letting you think the game is about to radically depart from something Breath of the Wild did, before — a beat later than you'd expect — doing exactly the same thing. If you spent the first few hours after reaching the ground wondering if the paraglider was even in the game, you know what I mean.
That headfake does feel like it's telling you something, though. This time around, it seems to be saying, stamina is a bit of an afterthought. That's because if you come to an obstacle in TotK, you have a bunch of different ways to get around it. Link doesn’t need to exert himself as much, now that machines can do the work for him.
Say you approach a mountain. You can try to climb straight up like in BotW, looking for little ledges to stop at and regain your energy. But you can also use Autobuild to summon a plane, and fly that to the top. Or, you might have a hot air balloon, a flame emitter, and a sled in your inventory, so you can assemble them with Ultrahand and float to the peak. Maybe there are a few trees at the bottom of the mountain, so you cut them down, weld them together, and climb up your makeshift ramp. Or, maybe you find a cave at the bottom, use Ascend, and swim right to the top. Or, you could hit Recall on a falling sky rock and ride it to the top. None of these were options in Breath of the Wild, but they’re all viable in Tears of the Kingdom.
Nintendo added a whole other ecosystem for you to manage with the Zonai technology you can use in your builds and the Zonaite ore you can mine to power them. It makes for a more robust game in most ways, but stamina feels a bit like it's dying on the vine. In Breath of the Wild, I was a stamina fiend, chasing down Spirit Orbs and trading them in for a slightly larger wheel as soon as I could. This time around, I just don't have the energy.