Friday, December 30, 2022

Nintendo Switch: Tears of the Kingdom Edition?

 leaked photos of the Nintendo Switch OLED model Tears of the Kingdom Edition

There has been a leak from China, which supposedly shows us the upcoming "The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Edition" of the Nintendo Switch OLED model, as seen on Resetera. This looks very much legit. If this is a fake, it's well done and should be shared anyway for the effort alone.

And I'm sure that this will happen with Tears of the Kingdom, whether this is a fake or not. If you've followed this blog in the recent years, you know it has been kind of a running gag to predict a Zelda-themed Nintendo Switch, only for it not to happen. Well, this should have been a thing right from the start with Breath of the Wild in 2017, but Nintendo wasn't interested and they weren't interested in doing this with spin-offs, remakes, or remasters that followed in the years after, where now it has been SIX years... And by now this just feels like a double-dip move. Almost all Zelda fans out there should have a Nintendo Switch, where Nintendo now wants them to buy a new one.

Well, I know a single Zelda fan out there who has been holding off on buying a Nintendo Switch to wait for the obligatory Zelda edition. This person will certainly be happy with the news, but those are six years of Nintendo Switch action missed out. This is a very long time. I personally regret that I've waited with buying one until Age of Calamity in 2020, because I've accumulated a sizeable backlog of Nintendo Switch games by then, where I may never find the time to play it all.

And in hindsight I probably should have gotten the Animal Crossing: New Horizons Edition, because this ended up as my most played game on Switch. At least the Nintendo Switch OLED model will be an upgrade of some sort, though I don't use the Switch in handheld mode so often that it would matter. But the new Nintendo Switch dock looks quite good in general.

As for the "Tears of the Kingdom Edition"... it looks alright. The dock is great and the Joy-Cons fit the overall aesthetic of the game really well, where I like the symbols on the back and front. I'm not really fan of mixing gold with green, which happens too much with 3rd party merchandise for Zelda, but at least that's only an issue with the left Joy-Con. The right Joy-Con with gold and white design looks gorgeous. And it's much prettier than the Skyward Sword HD Joy-Cons, that's for sure.

I will definitely be getting this if it's real. And with the thing leaked, Nintendo probably won't wait long with an announcement now. Maybe this will be one of the first news in 2023.

However, this also means that we won't be seeing a new Nintendo console / an upgrade of the Nintendo Switch with Tears of the Kingdom. They wouldn't make a special edition of the Nintendo Switch OLED model in that case, but of the new console. Or none at all, like it was the case with Breath of the Wild, which came out between two systems.


Via @pixelpar and ntower

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