Let's get to the meat! You can watch the newest trailer from the end of yesterday's Nintendo Switch Presentation again and again on Youtube. Or don't and better stop reading this site right now, because I will go into detail about the trailer from this point on in various posts.
Overall I really hope that this is it. We have a release date, we have Limited Editions announced, we will be playing the game in exactly seven weeks, and we've seen more than enough of the game already to get everyone, who's potentially interested, excited. Best case scenario is that Nintendo just let's us have it and keep up the current mystery around the story, the giant world and everything. We should explore that on our own. But with Nintendo it can go very quickly from "let's show you, how it feels to leave the Great Plateau" to "hey, take a look at Calamity Ganon"... So, the next seven weeks can be critical and it might be a good idea to stay off the media for the time being.
Anyway, last year at the E3 Nintendo really set a focus on exploration, action and puzzle solving - essentially the gameplay, which got people like me excited, who are playing Zelda games for this stuff. However, it left the story loving part of the Zelda community baffled, even skeptical or disappointed, whatsoever. And the focus of the new trailer was clearly to get the attention of those fans, who play Zelda first and foremost for the story, while the Game Awards trailer was somewhere in between. And from what I could observe (for example on ZeldaEurope, a very RPG and story focused Zelda community), this worked splendidly. Reactions turned from "meh" to "woah" and Nintendo should have the attention of the entire Zelda community now.
And it's all thanks to the power of nostalgia and voice acting. The latter certainly feels unusual, but it did help with the cinematics of the trailer. However, quality differs between the languages and might even cause a quite different experience for everyone. I watched the trailer in subbed Japanese, English and German and I haven't fully decided, what I like best or worst. German was probably the worst, for example the Goron lacks the "Here it comes!!!" power from the English version and the old woman (probably Impa) is clearly spoken by a young woman altering her voice to sound old, while the English King sounds too young and the English Zelda seems to lack some soul. Overall I liked the Japanese best and I hope that you can select the original tone with subtitles. But this will certainly add a layer of replayability to the game, at least with the European version. With different playthroughs I might want to experience different voice overs.
The rest of it really plays with the nostalgia of the fans, as evident by the music, where for the first time they transitioned into the traditional Zelda music theme with Breath of the Wild. They brought the Deku Tree with the Koroks back, as well as other popular races from both Ocarina of Time and the Wind Waker (including the Gerudo) to form some group of "sages" that will accompany Link throughout the game, they are having a Zelda character that keeps you emotionally invested and more. Individual posts about all these topics will follow, so stay tuned!
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