Tuesday, September 13, 2022

Tears of the Kingdom – Title Revealed

Well, here we go! We finally can stop calling the next Zelda game "the sequel to Breath of the Wild", because we now have the title:

Tears of the Kingdom

I love how it has the same format as "Breath of the Wild", so it's "x of the y". This is the one thing I got right when speculating about the title earlier this year, but I couldn't have guessed the other parts. It sounds very poetic, though, and feels very meaningful when put together.

Both breath and tears are something from a lifeform (mammals), making the environment sound alive in different ways, positive and negative. The wild is breathing. The kingdom is shedding tears. Both "wild" and "kingdom" also contrast each other in referencing what's (probably) the same world, Hyrule. The wild references the decay of Hyrule, while the kingdom references its times of glory. So, these titles create a nice synergy, where I like this a lot.


We also have a boxart and a relase date: May 12th, so you know where to put all your vacation days next year. That's in eight months!

The new trailer probably raised more questions than it answered, however, and I'm not sure why they didn't reveal the title during E3 2021 already... They said it would give away too much back then, but this really just was an excuse and I don't see how this makes a difference from the last trailer. It probably even would have been a good fit to show it there with the droplet going up. But maybe it's referencing the seven orbs that you see in the new mural...

And I have to be honest that I felt quite bad towards the end of the Nintendo Direct, because I was hyping this up so much. Not just on this blog, but everywhere I'm busy talking about Zelda online. I was confident that this was going to be the big reveal and I really let people know.

Well... we did get a new trailer, the game's title, and a release date, so I wasn't off entirely, but I was expecting more: some actual gameplay, an introduction to the story, something like that. But this is better than nothing.

Let's take a deeper look into the new trailer in one or more separate posts, coming up today or tomorrow!

No comments: