When I say ‘tutorial shrines in Tears of the Kingdom’, your mind probably jumps to the quartet of challenges across the Great Sky Islands. Introduced by Rauru, these locations are built to introduce Link to a repertoire of new powers and simplistic puzzles in which to test them out.
From that perspective, you could certainly call them tutorials, but they don’t really dish out the gameplay basics of combat, exploration, and mechanics you’ll otherwise need to know. Each Construct spread across the opening area tells you how to cook, gather resources, and be a rascal across the plains of Hyrule, although even they leave out several essential tips.
These shrines exist though, albeit scattered across the open world in ways that don’t match the experience of each player. I suppose laying them out in a certain way without interrupting the freeform flow is impossible given nobody will play Tears of the Kingdom in the same way, but if that’s the case why not pop all the basics of melee combat, archery, and other ideas into a menu in a similar manner to Elden Ring instead of making a solid ten or so shrines feel like a predictable chore? I was still coming across them dozens of hours into my journey and had already figured out these fairly obvious moves for myself, so who are the shrines for?
Whenever I walked into a shrine titled ‘Combat Training: [Insert mechanic here]' it caught me by surprise both in the random areas they were located, and why the game suddenly needed to teach me how to throw objects and do backflips when I’d been doing it for days - in terms of the game’s immersion, Link has known how to do all this for years. Unlike his arm abilities on the Great Sky Islands, these are not new to him. I wasn’t the type to skip shrines either, unless a puzzle stumped me, so each became an odd surprise as I followed obvious instructions in exchange for a light blessing and precious bits of treasure. It was worth the tedium, but I couldn’t help but wonder if they have a place here.
Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom are all about fucking around and finding out, and the sequel does a much better job of drip-feeding tutorials during the opening hours through on-screen messages and character dialogue anyway, so splitting other pieces of guidance across shrines far removed from this introduction comes across as a needless design choice. I understand this is a game that will be played by all ages, so chances are some of us will have conquered three temples before realising backflips and flurry rushes are a thing. I’m already seeing videos online discovering things I was ignorant to for 80 hours, which is delightful, but not once has this pertained to basic gameplay actions.
I’m not sure what Nintendo was going for here. Did it hope to place tutorial shrines in set places where it thought you’d be using or doing certain things more than usual, and therefore think that guidance was warranted? It comes across as an awkward clash of the core design principle relying on endless freedom and experimentation, with the acknowledgment that players will eventually require knowledge that not everyone is going to figure out for themselves. Most open world games in the modern era suffer with this awkward dissonance, and risk making players feel out of sorts, or like they aren’t smart enough to go it on their own by forcing them to follow dull instructions for several minutes outside 100+ hours spent rebelling genre traditions.
The Legend of Zelda will always encounter these problems so long as it adheres to series’ traditions, and to an extent this legacy connection is inescapable. Video games have to teach us how they work, and it’s easy to develop an ingrained privilege once you’ve played so many of them that it feels like you’re being treated like a fool. I fell victim to this trap in Tears of the Kingdom, but placing tutorial shrines dozens of hours into the game is a different problem, and one that could have been solved with a bit of additional thought.