Over the holiday season, we’re republishing select articles from Nintendo Life writers and contributors as part of our Best of 2023 series. Enjoy!

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom has been a critical and commercial success, garnering glowing reviews across the board (including from this here outlet) and making a lot of Switch owners very happy in the process. All that praise is thoroughly well-deserved, but with several AAA developers and publishers slowly but steadily upping their game when it comes to including thorough accessibility options, we wondered how Nintendo’s latest hit ranks in those terms.

We’ve previously looked at various Nintendo titles from an accessibility perspective, and now it’s TOTK’s turn. Over to Hilliard…

Initial Doubts

There was a fairly loud group of people proclaiming that Tears of the Kingdom was nothing more than glorified $70 DLC for Breath of the Wild. It was all irrational based on fear that the game couldn’t live up to the hype (or hatred that the game wouldn’t be like the 50th reiteration of the Zelda template established by A Link to the Past). I knew they were being ridiculous but I’m not going to lie and say I didn’t fear that Tears of the Kingdom would do something exactly the same as its predecessor.

The big difference was that my fear was justified. I was afraid that Tears of the Kingdom would not have any accessibility features. Prior to launch, I said I would dye my hair Nintendo’s signature red if the game included something as simple as in-game button remapping. Instead, I buzzed it all off.

I was paralyzed about 14 years ago (C5/C6 tetraplegic), so I have a pretty good understanding of Nintendo’s feelings about adding accessibility features to their games. They just aren’t going to do it.

Developer Attitude

Why has the organization and its developers taken this stance? I can’t read minds like Professor X so I don’t know the answer (I am balding though). Maybe a wheelchair user accidentally ran over Eiji Aonuma’s foot and this is his way of getting vengeance? It’s got to be something like that because Aonuma knows this is an issue. Read this exchange with Jason Schreier when asked why button remapping wasn’t in Breath of the Wild in a piece that Kotaku ran on June 2019:

Aonuma: When we have a button arrangement, we very much put thought into how we do it, because there’s a specific way we want players to feel. In some ways, 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 by just kind of handing everything over to the users. We have something in mind for everybody when we play the game, so that’s what we hope players experience and enjoy as well. But we understand also that players have a desire for free customization.”

Schreier: Also, physically disabled players might not be able to play the way developers intended.

Aonuma: Definitely, that’s a very good point, and that’s something we’ll keep in mind going forward, thinking about that.

My Experience Playing Tears of the Kingdom

All of that said, I am still able to play Tears of the Kingdom relatively well. I can’t move my fingers but when I plop my pro controller on my leg, I can fiddle the joysticks with my palms and jam the face buttons with my right thumb very easily.

Sometimes the controller starts sliding around but the game allows you to pause whenever you want so I can re-adjust as much as I need. The shoulder buttons are pressable with my knuckles but that requires me to take my left hand away from the joystick and my right from the face buttons. So that means I am unable to lock on to any enemy unless I keep Link still. Obviously, that is not ideal so finding a solution to that was my main priority when remapping the controls in the Switch’s settings. This is the setup I created:

My Custom Control Setup

By moving ‘ZL’ to ‘A’, I am able to lock onto an enemy and still move Link around. This move also benefits me since I have the ability to press two face buttons at the same time. That means I can still attack as well as perform jump dodges. Hitting ‘Y’ (attack) while holding ‘A’ is a struggle so I moved it to ‘B’. I rarely feel the need to target while using the bow so moving it to ‘Y’ from ‘ZR’ works pretty well.

Before I finish this piece, I want to give my accessibility recommendations to the developers. The first two are extremely obvious.

Accessibility Feature Recommendations

Yes, both can be done in the Switch’s system settings but there is no reason to not include them in Tears of the Kingdom’s in-game settings. I can already hear keyboards clacking telling me that’s a waste of time but it’s not, particularly for button remapping.

Reason one is changing button remapping at the system level is only reliably compatible with Nintendo’s official controllers. I bought a 3rd party pro controller after my official one started drifting but I use my old ratty Pro more often because I need access to my custom configurations.

Reason two is the game you are playing doesn’t change its prompts to match your configurations. I’ve put hundreds of hours into my remap for Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom but I still hit the wrong button all the time. I can’t tell you how many times I tapped ‘R’ to shift to the right in the games’ menus only to close it because my ‘B’ is mapped to ‘R’. Most of the time it is harmless, but I have missed out on flurry rushes because I was unable to ignore the flashing prompt telling me to hit ‘Y’ when I remapped the attack action.

Toggle-On/Off Functionality

My next recommendation is something akin to sticky keys — AKA that function on your computer you accidentally turn on by tapping the shift key too many times. This toggle option should be available for targeting enemies, swapping weapons/shields/arrow fusion, as well as rotating objects while using Ultrahand.

My final recommendation doesn’t really have to do with accessibility; it’s just common sense. There is no reason you shouldn’t be able to use the left joystick to rotate an object while using Ultrahand. The user has no reason to move Link while rotating an object (plus it would take awkward finger placement and grip to use the joystick and D-pad at the same time), so why are we limited to using the D-pad? I don’t get it.

Conclusion

Tears of the Kingdom does the impossible, it improves upon its predecessor — a game considered by many to be the greatest of all time — in every way… except in making the game a more accessible experience. It does not have a single accessibility option in an age where doing so is rightly becoming commonplace. Yes, I personally have been able to enjoy the game thanks to the inclusion of controller remappability in the Switch’s system settings, but it is far from a great solution and it might not benefit others as much as it did me.