Tears of the Kingdom came out four months ago, but I still see Link everywhere I go. Or, at least, I see that the characters I’m playing as in other video games would be vastly improved if they had some of Link’s powers from the most recent Zelda game.
This thought has hit me multiple times while playing Baldur’s Gate 3. I’m in Act 2 now, and three of the battles I’ve hit so far in this portion of the game have been set in multilevel structures. One, in a small derelict house, one among ruins, and the third, and biggest, in a multistory building that I don't want to spoil for plot reasons. In a game like this, where you may spend multiple turns moving up a floor, it sure feels like Link's Ascend power would come in handy as a spell or cantrip.
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If you haven't played Tears of the Kingdom, Ascend is its most game-changing power. It isn't as sexy as Ultrahand, which opens the door to making all kinds of vehicles, but it does feel the most groundbreaking. The skill, which began life as a debug tool, allows Link to float up and through any flat surface above his head.
It had a wide range of applications. You could use it to nope out of an underground area you didn't want to explore anymore (and even soar out of the Depths if you find the right spot). You could use it to skip over parts of an area that you had already explored, like if you needed to get from the dungeons of Hyrule Castle to the top of its turrets. You could use it in fun edge cases, too, like phasing through a treasure chest hanging above your head, then looting its treasure while standing atop it.
It's an extremely cool mechanic and, like many things from TOTK's predecessor, I fully expect it to start showing up in other games in a few years. Was Horizon Forbidden West anywhere near as good as BOTW? No, but that doesn't mean I didn't appreciate it including a glider. I might have been meh on Immortals: Fenyx Rising, but I still enjoyed Ubisoft's decision to borrow Breath of the Wild's open-ended structure. Plus, there were the games that took inspiration from Breath of the Wild on a deeper level, largely indies. A Short Hike and Sable drew heavily from Zelda, but excised the violence to focus entirely on exploration.
In that way, I would love to see Tears of the Kingdom be the most influential game of 2025 and 2026. I fully anticipate that we'll see an indie in a few years that is fully built around Ascend. It would be a cool power to see in a Metroidvania-style game, or implemented for one level of a platformer. As much as I'm excited about the possibilities for innovation, I would also just be happy for more games to have an easy way to take a shortcut without having to fast travel. If I wanted to get to a higher vantage point in BOTW, I had to climb for a long time or warp to a tower.
Ascend allows you to cover a lot of ground without ever entering a menu. It's fully diegetic fast travel. For that reason, I hope developers start to adopt it widely. But, given the sheer amount of patents Nintendo has filed around Tears of the Kingdom, the main obstacle to Nintendo's latest masterpiece becoming widely influential… might be Nintendo.
NEXT: Nintendo's Zelda Patents Are The Polar Opposite Of Innovation
