The Guardian gave Tears of the Kingdom 5 stars. They gave Breath of the Wild 5 stars. It's the same map.

Let's do some franchise-loyalty math. Breath of the Wild, 2017: five stars from The Guardian. Tears of the Kingdom, 2023: five stars from The Guardian. Same map, same protagonist, same engine, same stamina wheel, same weapon-durability system that the entire internet spent six years asking Nintendo to fix. Two games, one identical score. The difference between them is a building mechanic and some sky islands bolted onto the same Hyrule the same publication already handed five stars to six years earlier.

Here's what a five-out-of-five means in standard critic scales. Classic. Essential. Genre-defining. Fine. But what does it mean when you hand out that same ceiling score to a sequel that reuses the vast majority of its predecessor's geography, menus, combat, and world design? It means Nintendo has a floor. It means Zelda has a floor. It means the score isn't being assigned to the game — it's being assigned to the logo on the box.

Watch how the same critical class treats sequels from publishers without Nintendo's halo. Every Assassin's Creed that reuses its engine eats a star. Every Call of Duty that follows its own template gets accused of being a reskin. Any Pokemon game that ships with recycled assets gets flamed by the exact same reviewers who just handed Tears of the Kingdom a perfect score for shipping with a recycled map. But Zelda can ship a remix of a six-year-old Hyrule, a locked 30fps on hardware already five years old at launch, a seventy-dollar price tag — Nintendo's first — and somehow land in the same scoring tier as the most revolutionary open world of the last decade.

Tears of the Kingdom is a wonderful game. That isn't the point. The point is that a review scale stops being a scale when one franchise gets to live at the top regardless of how much it repeats itself. Breath of the Wild: five. Tears of the Kingdom: five. The next Zelda: five. A Breath of the Wild Switch 2 remaster with a redrawn map icon: also five. Sponsored by the truth, which is that 'Zelda' isn't a reviewed product. It's a checkbox.