Tears of the Kingdom shows that without change, accessibility in Nintendo games will remain accidental

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is an evolution. From the world of 2017’s Breath of the Wild, Nintendo has created something richer and more malleable through a grander story, an expanded map, and the ability to build countless contraptions to torture innocent Koroks. Fifty hours in, I’m yet to even start any story-related adventure, and I’m more interested in dressing Link in cute outfits. Does that make the game good or bad? I have no idea!

As with so many Nintendo games, however, it’s an evolution that comes with a price to pay for many players. Tears of the Kingdom may be a glow-up for Switch-era Hyrule, but fundamentally little has changed in the six years between titles. Which is to say that the game remains, somehow, both accessible and inaccessible at the same time.

This is only made more clear by the accessibility advancements the gaming industry has made between The Legend of Zelda releases. These are advancements that may have finally cracked the perceived apathy towards accessibility exhibited by Japanese studios, but that Nintendo continues to ignore.

It’s disappointing, if not exactly unexpected, to see players struggle with the biggest game of 2023. And one that, if Elden Ring’s enduring popularity is anything to go by, will be part of online conversation for years.

That Tears of the Kingdom wouldn’t prioritise accessibility in its development has been evident as early as 2019, when Jason Schreier asked series director, Eiji Aonuma, about the lack of button mapping in Breath of the Wild.

“If we freely let players do customizations on key assignments and such, I feel like we’re letting go of our responsibility as a developer,” Aonuma said. “We have something in mind for everybody when we play the game, so that’s what we hope players experience and enjoy as well.”

Pressed on the importance of remapping for disabled players, Aonuma’s response was non-committal. “That’s a very good point,” he said. “That’s something we’ll keep in mind going forward.”

Four years later, many are experiencing less Tears of the Kingdom and more just tears because we’re pressing the wrong buttons because of the game’s baffling control scheme.

That said, Tears of the Kingdom isn’t without improvements. Mandatory motion controls are gone, though players still have no control over UI readability beyond making text boxes more opaque, and nothing to mitigate Tears of the Kingdom’s silent speech and many inputs.

The game does include a chat log and recipe book, however, both of which are great additions for people with cognitive disabilities (though the cluttered layout of both suggests that wasn’t the intent). But the game’s habit of placing quest markers on quest givers rather than at the destination is a cognitive nightmare. Elsewhere, hiding combat prompts behind missable tutorials is one of the game’s most baffling design decisions.

All of which paints a remarkably inaccessible picture in 2023, one made all the more ironic by a game that centres on a main character experiencing disability.

Rather than developing accessibility, Tears of the Kingdom continues a trend to which Nintendo has weirdly adhered for years. It’s a trend in which accessibility in its games feels almost accidental.

We can’t say for sure what considerations went into the tangential accessibility Nintendo employs. We can only surmise that there’s no evidence disabled players are a focus for the company, while there’s plenty of evidence in their games that we’re not. Instead, features that feel designed for a different demographic or purpose just happen to end up helping us – .