For the first three mainline God of War games, Kratos wielded the Blades of Chaos, razor-sharp daggers attached to his wrists by fiery chains. The essence of God of War's character action lived in those whirling knives. But, when Kratos came back in 2018, he had traded the Blades of Chaos in for an ax. His iconic weapons were nowhere to be found.
Link's weapons tended to break in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, so the game made an item in your inventory instantly iconic, instead. At the start of BOTW, it gave you everything you needed before you left the Great Plateau. Weapons, clothes, the ability to freeze water and pause objects in place, the power of magnetism, and bombs that blow up at the press of a button. Once you earned all these new skills, you received the most important item of all: Link’s paraglider.
You couldn’t leave the Great Plateau until you had it. If you tried, you would just fall to your death and end up back where you started. The glider was your one way out and your golden ticket to everything Breath of the Wild had to offer. Once you left the Great Plateau, you had everything you needed to finish the game.
Tears of the Kingdom does things a little differently. Like Breath of the Wild, the game has an early tutorial section on an isolated landmass, the Great Sky Islands. Once you finish the four shrines contained there, you’re free to go. This time around, Link can leap from a floating island, skydive down, and land in a body of water, sending droplets raining down. No glider needed.
For the past few months, as Nintendo has rolled out more information about Tears of the Kingdom, I chose to stay in the dark. I watched the trailers, but stayed away from most written previews, podcast discussions, and videos about the game. As I landed on terra firma while playing the game myself, I couldn’t remember if I had ever seen the paraglider in any of the material shown. They couldn’t have gotten rid of the glider, right?
The interesting thing about Tears of the Kingdom is that it would let you continue playing without it for as long as you want. As in Breath of the Wild, nothing is forcing you to play the main quest. You can ignore the bright yellow dot on your map, do shrines, and raid bokoblin outposts to your heart’s content.
But, there are obvious clues that the paraglider is waiting for you. En route to the map marker, I found an extremely deep hole extending down into the earth. I saved, then jumped in and Link went into the spread eagle pose he uses when skydiving. I hoped there would be a pool of water at the end of the darkness. There wasn’t and I splatted into the ground. It was as clear a moment as I could find that I was missing a crucial part of my arsenal.
By following the quest, I quickly found out what it was. But as I progressed through the mission, reconnecting with Purah and Robbie, the nagging feeling began to grow. “Maybe the glider isn’t in this game.” Then Purah introduced me to the game’s tower equivalent, vertical canons that blast Link skyward so he can survey the ground below and gather map information. Why had Purah waited to gather this basic information on the area where her camp was? Because she was waiting for someone… someone who could operate… a paraglider.
The beat she gave it to me was an extremely exciting moment in a game filled with them. As you launch out of the cannon, you get a gorgeous view of the surrounding area as Link unspools an Ethernet cable allowing him to upload the information he captures to Purah. Then, he lets out the glider and floats back down.
The moment doesn’t get as much fanfare in game as Kratos returning to the cabin to retrieve the Blades of Chaos in God of War 2018. But, as someone who was still marveling at how much Tears of the Kingdom offered that was new, it was a relief to see something old.