This article contains spoilers for Eventide Island in both Tears of the Kingdom and Breath of the Wild.
Lightning never strikes in the same place twice. That saying breaks down a little bit when you’re talking about the two most recent Zelda games because lightning very much will strike the same place twice if you've got any metal objects on your person, but in general, those who are looking to catch lightning in a bottle should plan to be in places it hasn’t yet hit.
That’s unfortunately true on Eventide Island. The landmass off the coast of southeastern Necluda was home to one of Breath of the Wild’s most exciting secrets. If you managed to make it a mile out to sea, you were rewarded with the game’s most unique shrine. Instead of entering a stony structure to access the puzzle, Eventide Island was itself the puzzle. When you landed on the island, you got the ding of a bell and the same on-screen text that appears each time you enter a shrine. Link then loses all of his armor and equipment, forcing you to become the shirtless scrub you were when you first emerged from the Shrine of Resurrection. It was the game’s way of taking you back to the state you were in at the start, pushing you to rely on the knowledge you had gained, not the weapons in your arsenal.
While exploring Eventide Island, you’d eventually find three pedestals that required three orbs.One was in a bokoblin camp at the top of a hill. One was hanging from a Hinox’s neck. And, the most difficult one, given Breath of the Wild’s more limited toolset, was just off the coast on a tiny pebble of land.
Figuring out how to return each orb to its pedestal was immensely rewarding. I think of it as the game's best kept secret, the virtual equivalent of a hole-in-the-wall restaurant with five-star food. It was Breath of the Wild in a nutshell — a wonderful quest you would only find if you were curious enough to go looking for it at the furthest edge of the map.
Eventide Island is representative of Tears of the Kingdom in a similar way. As with the map as a whole, Nintendo has taken Eventide Island as an opportunity to do something different within the same basic geography. Now when you arrive at Eventide Island, there's no bell dinging and no text appearing. Instead, there's a guy on the beach who tells you that he was sent to investigate if a crew of pirates are operating out of the island. He's supposed to scout out the island, but there are three groups of monsters that are preventing him from exploring.
So Link sets off to take down each camp. Like Breath of the Wild's pedestals, the monster camps are spread across three different areas of the island. One is fenced in on a hill. Another is arrayed along the floors of a wooden tower. Another is on top of a mountain. Once you take down all three — none of which are especially difficult or memorable — you can return to the dude on the beach, who will tell you that he saw a pirate ship pass by the other side of the island, but never emerge. So, you head back there and find a cave hidden in the back of the mountain.
Inside, there's a huge ship and a bunch of monsters. This is a cool discovery, but then you just… beat up the monsters? Compared to Eventide Island's unique quest in Breath of the Wild, this is a bit of a letdown. You could do this anywhere.
There is a chasm on the island that you can dive down, which offers the opportunity to get a pretty cool reward. There's a coliseum at the bottom and if you beat the waves of monsters hiding inside, you gain access to a treasure chest with Midna's helmet from Twilight Princess hidden inside. I've been wearing it ever since. It's a cool nod to the old school Zelda fans.
But, Eventide Island is less cool as a nod to Breath of the Wild. It's fun to find the pirate ship, but overall it feels less like an interesting riff, and more like a failed attempt to capture lightning in a bottle one more time.