The year 2021 marks the 35th Anniversary for The Legend of Zelda and with that we can look forward to an interesting year, filled with surprises, new Zelda games and goodies. Well, the 30th Anniversary only had a bunch of amiibo and an artbook under its banner, so it's not a given that every anniversary will be celebrated extensively, but we also got Twilight Princess HD and Hyrule Warriors: Legends in 2016, so it was still a strong year.
The new Hyrule Warriors already got released in 2020, but Age of Calamity will most likely see some additions in the form of updates and DLC throughout 2021. Additional playable characters, new Challenges and outfits, maybe even a new map or mode – there are many possibilities here. In the very least the Lucky Ladle and Training Sword might become available for purchase.
From the prequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild we will then slowly, but surely move to its sequel, which was already teased at E3 2019, but hasn't been shown ever since. We have learned very little about the game so far, where only Nintendo knows when it will be released. It might be that it's ready for late 2021, as the highlight of the 35th Anniversary, or it could be that we won't be getting it before 2022. It's really hard to say right now, but it's likely that Nintendo will tell us more about the game this year.
And with the 35th Anniversary Nintendo will probably distract us otherwise. The biggest candidate is arguably an HD remaster of The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, which will be getting 10 years old in 2021 and therefore could follow in the footsteps of The Wind Waker HD and Twilight Princess HD. Speaking of, Nintendo loves porting their Wii U games to the Nintendo Switch, where Super Mario 3D World will be next, and the Zelda HD remasters could follow, maybe even in a collection.
Otherwise there is always the possibility of getting a new top-down Zelda experience in some form. It might be a little bit too early for GREZZO's next Zelda project, e.g. remakes of Oracle of Ages & Seasons or a new multiplayer title, but maybe we're in for a small surprise here.
To celebrate the 35th Anniversary early on, they could do something with the original The Legend of Zelda for example. While GREZZO hasn't touched the remake of Link's Awakening since launch, its Chamber Dungeon feature would be absolutely perfect to include a remake of the first dungeon from The Legend of Zelda, with Aquamentus as a new boss enemy. As a free update this would be really cool.
But as the 35th Anniversary of Super Mario has taught us in 2020, you can never know what to expect. Except that we shouldn't expect the same things, since they always like to do something different with Zelda's anniversaries, like the concerts in 2011. An anime movie based on Breath of the Wild could be amazing or maybe we hear something from that rumored Netflix series...
However, while marveling over all the options that Zelda's 35th Anniversary could bring, let's not forget that it will also be the 35th Anniversary of Metroid. Nintendo has yet to celebrate any anniversary of the Metroid series, where its always overshadowed by its older Action Adventure sister, but 2021 could finally bring some news about Metroid Prime 4 and maybe a new 2D Metroid.
In any case 2021 should give us lots of new things to talk and be excited about... So, Happy New Year, everyone!
Happy New Year!!
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