Wednesday, April 12, 2023

Tears of the Kingdom – Final Trailer Tomorrow

As expected, they are going to release one more trailer for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and this will happen in less than 23 hours. With about three minutes of runtime this will be the longest so far. See the announcement on Twitter.

Naturally, I'd love to get something on the same level of epicness as the Nintendo Switch Presentation Trailer from 2017. I think this is one of the best video game trailers ever made and I keep coming back to it for the feeling. It was just pure hype and Tears of the Kingdom really needs this one last push, one month before launch, where people get super excited.

That being said... it's a double-edged sword, because that trailer for Breath of the Wild really has shown a lot, where in the end there were many, many "I've seen this in the trailer" moments while playing the game. I personally think it was quite spoiler-heavy.

We're in the same position right now as before the trailer back then. We have seen a bit of the early game and what abilities you have. We have gotten teaser trailers with some story glimpses, but nothing much, so we know little to nothing about the game's story. And with one trailer this could all change tomorrow, where I'm worried that they might show too much again and we will be getting a lot of "I've seen this in the trailer" moments.

The January 2017 trailer also created a lot of false expectations by leaving out the context. For example, it used many scenes from the memories that you can find, but from the trailer alone it wasn't really clear that these are just memories from 100 years ago. Some people have guessed this, of course, but it wasn't by all means obvious and potentially created the wrong impression that Zelda and the Champions might a more active role in the game.

History could even repeat itself here tomorrow, where we might get to see some similar scenarios. What if they were to show the first Champions from 10,000 years ago? What would that even mean for the game? Of course we have a clear understanding now how story telling works in Breath of the Wild, but this doesn't have to apply to the sequel.

Whatever they show in tomorrow's trailer, it will need to hype responsibly, while answering some of the burning questions at the same time. So far we haven't seen any dungeon gameplay and this really keeps the expectations low, up to a point where people might worry that this game doesn't have any. I'm confident they'll present something tomorrow that will make such worries go away, but I'm not so confident that in doing so they will still manage to keep the expectations in check.

Of course everyone has the right to just not watch the trailer and go into the game with what little we know at the moment. Ignorance can be a bliss. But I'm personally too curious not to watch it and I also want something to write about on this site, so I won't be able to ignore it. Let's see how it goes.

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