Tears of the Kingdom Is Bringing out Players’ Inner War Criminals

By Hope Pisoni  |  May 17, 2023 | 5:25pm
Games News The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
Tears of the Kingdom Is Bringing out Players’ Inner War Criminals

The latest entry in The Legend of Zelda series released just shy of a week ago, and players have already unleashed a cornucopia of creativity using its new building mechanics. Tears of the Kingdom introduced a slate of new rune abilities, with the most versatile being Ultrahand, which, besides being a cheeky reference to an old Nintendo toy, allows the player to attach different objects together and create large clockwork mechanisms by combining different machines. Ultrahand is an incredibly powerful tool, and with it the craftiest players have been able to develop maniacal, hilarious, and often downright strange creations.

 

 

One of the main ways Ultrahand was advertised in trailers and other pre-release material was in its ability to build vehicles, so it’s no surprise that that’s been one of the more common uses. But of course, give resourceful players a tool to build cars and before long they’ll have made a weapon of mass destruction. Funnily enough, this video comes from a shrine quest where Link has all his weapons and gear temporarily taken away in order to test his “natural” ability. Those poor robots probably had no idea what was coming.

 

 

But the last example looks like nothing in comparison to this progression of weapons of war. Within one day of release, we already had people decimating Lynels with laser beams and doing aerial bombing runs of bokoblin camps. Fortunately for Link, Hyrule has no equivalent to the Geneva Conventions, so he can bomb away to his heart’s content.

 

 

One of the more bizarre trends among Tears of the Kingdom players so far has been crucifying koroks, the small leaf creatures who were also found in Breath of the Wild. Nintendo gave some of the little guys in this game heavy backpacks which count as physics objects that Ultrahand can be used on, and for whatever reason, the logical conclusion for many has been to use this to put the poor things up on crosses.

 

 

Those crucified koroks from earlier might just be the lucky ones though. YouTuber Oyff seems to have some sort of vendetta against the creatures, and has made a wide variety of contraptions designed purely to cause them unspeakable harm, culminating in this cruel and unusual, but undeniably impressive, torture mechanism.

 

 

In a very predictable outcome, distinctly phallic creations quickly began to appear. It may not be the most mature of comedy, but there’s a certain majesty to this silly wooden man, his brief but joyful existence cut short by an explosive end.

 

 

Believe it or not, though, this technology actually has a practical use. Using Ultrahand in conjunction with the new time-reversing power Recall, YouTuber DeliciousTeaGaming was able to slay one of Tears of the Kingdom’s largest beasts with nothing but a log and two boulders.

 

 

Thankfully, some players have been decidedly more wholesome. An early source of disappointment for many was that Tears of the Kingdom, like its predecessor, tragically does not allow Link to pet any of Hyrule’s many dogs. Luckily, with this many tools at their disposal, gamers have found ways to right this wrong, in this case by using Ultrahand to create an ultra hand of their own, so to speak.

 

The dog-petting industry is already quickly evolving, though, thanks to the innovations of Good Vibes Gaming’s Jon Cartwright. Thanks to this development, Tears of the Kingdom has gone from a game where dogs cannot be petted at all to one with arguably some of the most sophisticated dog-petting the medium has to offer.

 
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