Can Tears of the Kingdom match the sly genius of Breath of the Wild's music?

The best thing about The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is its emptiness. It landed back in 2017 at the perfect moment: the Ubification of the open world genre was more or less complete, we were all utterly sick of trundling along breadcrumb trails to waypoints while fending off swarms of sidequests, and here was this game made up of mile upon mile of relative nothing - not so much an open world as the artful devastation of an open world, trimmed back to its towers, dungeon mouths and campsites, a world that lets its misty, muddy, cartoon geography do the talking. In practice, there's as much to do here as in any Assassin's Creed or Elder Scrolls. But the possibilities are scattered and overgrown, secrets to find or realise through experimentation, rather than Content that thrusts itself upon your attention.

It's a lonely world, closer to the arid canyons of Shadow of the Colossus than any previous Zelda, but on returning to it ahead of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, I realised that it never quite leaves you alone. There's a presence at your elbow throughout: a solitary pianist, who feeds the odd note or phrase into the game's engulfing swell of wind, leaves and water. Most Zelda games have grand, momentum-building overworld themes, the kind of rousing anthem that gets you thinking "oh golly, I have to do something heroic now" and, if you're a scholar of Zelda lore, "oh golly, this is a remix of the Star-Spangled Badger's Theme from Quantum of Ocarina". For Breath of the Wild, Nintendo lightened the soundtrack even as it brushed away the heavily telegraphed optional activities that fill most open worlds, reducing the musical component to a troupe of travelling performers who seem as lost in this landscape as you are.

I don't have the technical vocabulary to really describe what the pianist is doing, but the vibe I get from them is a mixture of curiosity and irresolution, even reluctance, a butterfly-esque inability to settle on any single thing, and a touch of whimsical embarrassment about that inability. They launch into a few chords and trail away with the pedal held, as though distracted by a bird call or the re-appearance of the sun. A few seconds later there's a trickle of high notes, as though in mimicry of that bird, then a series of chords which seem muffled, as though the pianist had drifted into the undergrowth and were circling a tree, one hand on the trunk, the other on the keys. They're most sure of themselves on the heights - freed, like you, of the geography's intricate moving parts, able to look out and offer some mournful, overall reflections, with the spectre of Hyrule Castle festering in the distance.

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