I have some baggage with Breath of the Wild.

But I haven’t yet finished Tears of the Kingdom.

When Breath of the Wild came out, I was wrapped up in a relationship with my high-school girlfriend; she was Link, always a bit more sporty than I. I was growing my hair out. Since reading the Ocarina of Time manga in elementary school, I had loved Zelda – Zelda, or Sheik? – and when I played Breath of the Wild, I piloted Link around in the Sheikah armor as my own hair grew long enough to put up into a bun. It was a nebulous time. Later a painful time. I went bird-watching in Breath of the Wild.

Here is what has prevented me (to this point) from finishing Tears of the Kingdom: I can’t help but feel like Zelda gets fridged.

In Breath of the Wild, Zelda is powerless under the pressure of her father and a kingdom’s expectations, unable to pursue what she wants. There is a distinctive edge to her interactions with Link, seen only by us through his gradually recovered memories. When the holy power of the goddess erupts from her, it has been a long time coming. In Tears of the Kingdom she is powerful from the beginning, yet powerless. Link is special to her already – or at least she is told that by those around her. Zelda in this game does not follow an arc of self-determination. Rather than achieve the tragic mastery over time her Ocarina of Time predecessor cultivates, her hand is forced into an alternative method. Extending her life by tens of thousands of years, she submits to ego death and becomes a dragon. Non-speaking, non-thinking.

Maybe this changes at the end of the game. I’m sure there will be spectacular setpieces. But I also feel fairly certain that Zelda will not be a dragon anymore at credits. Which sort of feels even worse, as if this transfiguration is drained even of its consequences. Zelda’s sealing of the Demon King in Breath of the Wild is hauntingly personal. It is a move full of a lifetime’s intention and one that requires her complete focus. Turning into a dragon – as the game puts it, “losing one’s self,” – is a milky dissolution. “Zelda” wanders mindlessly only to give Link his sword back. It is her second go-round with this kind of self-sacrifice, yet this one feels so passive. Zelda gives up on the life she has fought so hard to regain. Her personality itself is taken out of the question, leaving only echoes of her entreatments.

In the Ocarina of Time manga that I was obsessed with in 6th grade, Zelda turns to us, the reader – and Impa – and declares that, in the wake of Ganondorf’s overthrow of her family’s kingdom, she will become a boy. She declares that she will live, live as a boy of the Sheikah tribe. It is a fierce act of life, of consigning part of oneself to oblivion to propel forward into the future. Royal blood hidden behind traitorous blood; gender in one move collapsing. Sheik finds Link and guides him through his path. He does not beg to be found.

The memories in Tears of the Kingdom feel pulled in every direction, with not quite enough focus for me to wholly feel like Zelda’s decision is entirely her own. It is mentioned once by Mineru (quite heavy-handedly) who then delivers nearly word-for-word the same lines about it being ‘forbidden’ when Zelda tells her she’s going to do it anyways. But later, I do enjoy this knifelike recontextualization of seeing her figure cryptically dotted across the map. It’s a move that makes Ganondorf feel more wicked; the Zelda we see in Link’s present time is basically a puppet of her corpse. Not only does it sow chaos among the people of Hyrule, it also must sting for Link, both when he doesn’t know and when he does know what’s happened to her. If the beastlike Ganon is slumbering malice, then the humanity of Ganondorf is awakened spite, holding a grudge for eons and eons.

After I wrote the bulk of this, I returned briefly to the game to see if I could be pulled through to the conclusion. It turned out that I didn’t have much of the main story left. But clearing the Spirit Temple and moving towards Ganondorf exposed a greater failing of the memory system in Tears of the Kingdom. Despite being ostensibly optional (as they were in Breath of the Wild), Tears of the Kingdom needs the player to obtain the Master Sword to complete the game, which is inextricably linked into this memory system.

As such, if the player actually completes the memories before nearing the end of the game’s main quest line, there is a degree of redundancy in the plot that becomes annoying (that is, if seeing nearly the exact same cutscene at the end of every temple didn’t already make one itch.) In fact, one of the cutscenes I went out of my way to find earlier in the game is replayed to me in this final segment. In Breath of the Wild, the reward for seeking the memories out is not the resolution of a mystery, but rather, the narrative satisfaction of seeing the culmination of Zelda’s relationship with Link and with her heritage. In Tears of the Kingdom, the memories solve a mystery that the game needs the player to have solved by the end of the game anyways. They shed little to no new light on Zelda’s character. She is pulled every which way: diluted.