How Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’s Successor Can Take Cooking to New Heights

Highlights

• Food has been a part of Zelda games for a long time, but Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom allowed players to cook for themselves for the first time.
• Cooking in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom was kept simple, with players only able to use five ingredients at once in one pot.
• The next Zelda game should expand on the cooking mechanic, adding new cooking methods, specialized cooking tools, and allowing players to prepare ingredients and choose the order in which they are added. Dedicated cooking-related side quests could also unlock new ingredients, skills, and recipes.

Since cooking made a return in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom with a handy in-game cookbook to keep track of hundreds of recipes, Nintendo now has the opportunity to expand the feature even further for future Zelda games. Though it wasn’t one of the more ambitious changes Breath of the Wild made to the series’ formula, Zelda‘s introduction of cooking and useful recipes allowed players to both heal and benefit from secondary effects. As a substitute for the traditional collectible hearts and health potions, it was virtually inevitable that cooking would return in Tears of the Kingdom.

However, despite introducing a cookbook for players to record, collect, and refer to, Tears of the Kingdom didn’t change much about the mechanic itself. While Zonai portable pots were an equally useful addition and there were new ingredients and recipes on offer, cooking itself remained the same, with players only able to use up to five ingredients thrown in all at once. Now that Tears of the Kingdom and its predecessor have acclimatized players to cooking, the next game should push Zelda’s cooking in creative new ways.

What’s Cooking with The Legend of Zelda?

The Quiet History of Cooking in Zelda Games

Though players were finally allowed to cook for themselves in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, classic Zelda games have used food as an in-game item for decades. For instance, the original The Legend of Zelda utilized “Food” as enemy bait, similar to the Yiga Clan’s banana obsession, while other games like A Link to the Past and Link’s Awakening included apples as collectibles. However, the closest the series got to actual meals would have been with the likes of Wind Waker’s Elixir Soup obtained via Link’s Grandmother, altogether demonstrating that food has been in the background of Zelda games for some time.

Cooking Between Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom

As part of many new mechanics working together to create a cohesive system for Breath of the Wild, cooking was a useful feature that players would need to rely on throughout the game. As a series first, it was likely intentional that Breath of the Wild kept things simple with a one-dish-fits-all approach limited to just five ingredients, giving players the chance to get to grips with the new mechanic. Its sequel didn’t stray too far from this either. Tears of the Kingdom added features like portable cooking pots and a cookbook to refine BotW‘s in-game cooking instead of attempting to revolutionize the mechanic.

The Future of Cooking Beyond Tears of the Kingdom

Tears of the Kingdom focusing on cooking’s quality of life gives its successor plenty of newfound potential to work with. Cooking allowed players to have a sense of agency in both Breath of the Wild and its sequel, such as allowing players to strategize with added status effects to engaging with side quests to unlock new ingredients, as seen with Tears of the Kingdom’s Hateno Cheese and Sun Pumpkins. Therefore, moving past simplified cooking could incentivize players to experiment and discover more through a fleshed-out food system.

Whether these changes are big or small, expanding cooking for new Zelda games could improve both gameplay and world-building for the player. By providing players with more control over how to cook their food, which ingredients to use, when, and how, and a wider range of outcomes for them to discover, cooking could become an intrinsic part of Zelda as much as fishing or horse-riding are. With several possible examples of how cooking could be changed or improved listed below, the successor to The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom could spice up the player’s experience and broaden their palates for future Zelda games.

• Add new cooking methods (such as baking, smoking, and deep-frying)
• Add more specialized cooking tools (such as ovens, barbecues, and smokers)
• Allow players to prepare ingredients (such as peeling, dicing, and filleting)
• Allow players to choose the order in which ingredients are added (potentially creating different effects or meals as a result)
• Add dedicated cooking-related side quests to unlock new ingredients, skills, and recipes