One of the biggest wonders of Tears of the Kingdom is how the developers managed to get Ultrahand to even function, and this is the exact topic tackled in the latest Gamer Maker’s Toolkit video by Mark Brown.
Known among Zelda fans for his “Boss Keys” series which deeply analyzes the dungeons of Zelda every game up until Breath of the Wild, Mark Brown has quite the history of covering game design in Zelda. So, it’s no wonder that one of the core and most interesting mechanics of Tears of the Kingdom warranted a video from the YouTube game analyst.
In the video, Brown covers two of the core philosophies that Nintendo focused on when making Ultrahand, namely simplicity and feeling. The mechanic and its implementation had to be simple enough for players to understand and not feel overwhelmed. In addition, it must bring out feelings such as humor, letting players laugh at their failures. According to Brown, both aspects coming together is what made Ultra Hand such an intuitive and understandable feature in Tears of the Kingdom.
As always, Game Maker’s Toolkit does an excellent job breaking down the most complex and interesting parts of the Zelda series, and only the full video demonstrates how impressive the philosophy behind Ultrahand really was.
