By Freakout Studios
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, the follow-up to 2017's Breath of the Wild, has been launched globally. As the recognisable hero Link returns to the eminently explorable kingdom of Hyrule, the game has large shoes to fill.
One of the most eagerly awaited releases of the year, the most recent installment in the nearly 40-year-old franchise contains a reported 100 or more hours of gameplay.
It has been claimed that workers in Japan have taken paid vacation days as "Zelda holidays" in order to play Tears of the Kingdom on the day it was released.
People who aren't actually playing the game are saturating Twitter with fanart, livestream links, and pictures of themselves holding actual copies of the game.
Tears of the Kingdom-branded merchandise, such as T-shirts, neckties, art books, and more, are now available in Nintendo's official stores in Tokyo and Osaka.
Nintendo has extensively leaned into that design philosophy in Tears of the Kingdom, which is one of the reasons why near-limitless exploration was one of the shockingly positive surprises when Breath of the Wild hit platforms five years ago.
Diehards might need a little time to get used to the quick-fingered inputs needed to build the contraptions needed to navigate this version of the overworld, but they soon get the hang of it.
From then, the world is at your disposal: groups of goblin-like foes huddled in the next cave, treasure boxes tantalisingly perched on seemingly inaccessible rocks, and megalithic monuments towering on the horizon — with what can sometimes feel like any number of ways to approach them.
A new skill allows players to skip uphill climbs and shoot through cave ceilings to emerge onto mountaintops high above instead of loading up on stamina-boosting supplies.
Even with several hours of gameplay ahead of them, there is only one question that seems worth posing about Tears of the Kingdom: Isn't that accomplishment enough if all it achieves to be on par with Breath of the Wild?