The more successful a franchise becomes, the more developers are under pressure when working on a new installment in the franchise. Different AI chatbots listed Legend of Zelda as one of the greatest games in the history of video games.
Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, the latest installment in the long-running Legend of Zelda franchise, was released on 12 May 2023 on Nintendo Switch and is the sequel to Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is one of the most anticipated games and fans were really excited to celebrate the midnight release. Players decide their own path through the expansive landscapes of Hyrule to discover new destinations, puzzles, sights, and fight off lurking dangers. Players need to be resourceful to overcome the witty puzzles.
As of the time of writing this post, the game has an average score of 96/100 on Metacritic, a review aggregation site. That score puts the game among the very best in the industry. It is already being taunted as one of the best video games ever made on the Nintendo console. You can purchase your copy from Amazon.
Trusted Reviews said Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom was “likely to go down in history as one of the best games ever to grace a Nintendo console,” while IGN called it an “unfathomable follow-up, expanding a world that already felt full beyond expectation and raising the bar ever higher into the clouds”.
Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’s greatest appeal is the creative freedom
Eiji Aonuma started working on the Zelda franchise in the mid-90s. The Zelda producer stressed that the key to the appeal of the franchise was its ability to trust the player’s intellectual curiosity. Players are given limitless creative freedom to fabricate their own weapons and unthinkable contraptions, from flame-throwing shields to makeshift planes.
“A lot of times people tell me that when they play Zelda, there are these wonderful ‘I did it!’ moments, where they solve a puzzle and think they must surely be the only person in the world who could have cracked it,” said Aonuma.
The producer is of the opinion that if the franchise provided “too much guidance about how to do things,” the game would lose its appeal among players. According to Aonuma, the satisfying appeal of the game among players “comes from exploring and figuring things out on their own”.
Since its debut about three decades ago on the Nintendo Entertainment System, every new addition to the franchise always presents a leap in creative and technological possibilities in the gaming industry. For example, in 1986, The Legend of Zelda was one of the first times in the history of video games where players were allowed limitless exploration rather than the linear path that characterized most levels.
The Ocarina of Time which was released in 1999 was the first time that players were allowed to explore and fight in 3D. Consequently, the game introduced a new dimension to video game world-building and controls.
Breath of the Wild which was released in 2017 ran with the concept of an open fantasy world. It presented an alternate reality where players could lose themselves. Some players have spent over 100 hours exploring the game.
Focus on exploration rather than finishing the game
Aonuma has already finished Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom 20 times and his advice to those that will play the game is, “Don’t head straight for the ending”. While Breath of the Wild was widely heralded for its vast open world, Tears of the Kingdom which is six years in the making offers even more fun and rewards for those that embrace detours.
“I’ve played this game from start to finish about 20 times, and I can say that it’s more fun with detours, even more so than in the previous game,” Aonuma said in an interview published by Nintendo. “When testing the game, I sometimes needed to rush ahead to clear the story, but later on, as I started to go off on side paths, I realized… it’s a whole different game!”
Although Aonuma played the game so many times, he said he never got bored of playing. Each time, he was surprised at what he could do which he didn’t know before. While most games lure players back in with Game+ mode, Tears of the Kingdom is keen on keeping players in for as long as possible with limitless crafting combinations and detours.
“Even when sticking things together, there are so many different combinations that even I don’t know all of them,” Aonuma said. “I even discovered something new the other day while shooting the gameplay demonstration video. So, it may take some time, but as you take detours and try out whatever you can at the time, I think you’ll be able to enjoy the game in your very own way.”
Why Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom will be a commercial success
Although the Legend of Zelda series has received critical acclaim for stretching the possibilities in the gaming world, the franchise didn’t become Nintendo’s biggest money earner until 2017. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, the best the franchise could sell was 9 million while Pokémon and Mario would sell tens of millions of copies.
All that changed with the release of Breath of the Wild. The game was launched simultaneously with the Nintendo Switch console. It went on to sell over 30 million copies. With over 125 million Switch consoles now sold, Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom has a good chance of at least doubling the sales number of Breath of the Wild.
Nintendo has a policy of rarely discounting old games. Given that Breath of the Wild sold over 30 million copies and was sold at $60, simple math will show that the game has grossed over $1.8 billion in lifetime revenue.
If a quarter of all Switch owners purchase Tears of the Kingdom in the first month of release (which normally records the majority of sales for most games), the company would exceed that revenue and probably double it before the release of the next installment.
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