Monday, March 27, 2023

Tears of the Kingdom – Gameplay Presentation Tomorrow

Eiji Aonuma at a desk, with the Tears of the Kingdom logo right next to him and a pair of white Joy-Cons in a grip

See the announcement on Twitter, in less than 24 hours we'll see the first actual gameplay of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, presented by producer Eiji Aonuma. It will be roughly ten minutes long.

I was already preparing a post about how they might continue to present the game from now on, but this saves me the trouble. The Super Mario Bros. Movie and the final DLC for Fire Emblem Engage are going public next week, where afterwards Nintendo will certainly want to put everyone's attention on Tears of the Kingdom, but it looks like they will start a bit sooner than that...

There were many expectations about a "Zelda Direct" coming in April, where this would have been a first...  The announced gameplay presentation is more like something that I would I expect from Aonuma, who likes to keep things simple and usually sticks to the big Nintendo Directs to make announcements. I guess, it will be a bit similar to the first gameplay footage for Breath of the Wild, only that this footage here is from the final game and not some early beta. Of course you could also classify this as a "Direct", but it's technically not called one.

In any case, I think this is when they will officially reveal the "Tears of the Kingdom Edition" of the Nintendo Switch OLED, unless this thing got cancelled because of the leak, which would be hilarious. But Nintendo has been waiting for something, where both the Collector's Edition and the amiibo have yet to appear for pre-order in the My Nintendo stores...

Afterwards I think that we will get one final trailer. Whether this will happen tomorrow directly at the end of the presentation or during the next weeks doesn't really matter, but I don't think they will leave things with the trailer from the last Nintendo Direct, because it was a bit underwhelming. You want the epicness of the  "Nintendo Switch Presentation Trailer" from early 2017.

As for the gameplay itself, I'm primarily hoping that Aonuma will show us the new "rune" abilities, like morphing through ceilings, or putting things together. I'm mainly interested in these two, because the time reversal has already been showed quite effectively in the trailers, though I wouldn't mind to see that in action as well. Some dungeon gameplay would also be really nice, but I'm not expecting more than a rough overview of what will be fundamentally different from Breath of the Wild.

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