Nintendo has not yet published the first sales data for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, but there is no doubt that the new installment of this veteran saga, which went on sale last Friday around the world, is having success. colossal. This is a case worth studying, because far from being a brand whose celebrity has diminished over the years, the title starring the hero Link and Princess Zelda continues to win fans year after year, even though their first adventure is on its way to turn four decades.
Here we try to unravel the keys behind the enduring success that has turned a critically acclaimed and enthusiastic game into a true cultural phenomenon.
Since its debut in 1986, the sales of each installment of The Legend of Zelda have always been very good, especially for games that are exclusive to Nintendo consoles and can only be played on these platforms. However, it is from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017) that sales skyrocket more than significantly.
Until 2017, the ten best-selling installments of the saga had had an average of 5.5 million units sold each. The best seller, Twilight Princess (2006), had placed a whopping 8.7 million units, a really good figure. However, with Breath of the Wild things get out of hand. The last main installment until the arrival of the brand new Tears of the Kingdom has sold almost 30 million units so far.
After years of some stagnation, Breath of the Wild broke with the franchise’s own conventions to offer a new concept of adventure that gave players much more freedom. This new direction for the Zelda saga not only excited critics and the public, but also had a great impact on the industry itself and on developers, who have seen in this title a reference within so-called open world games.
That this past Friday we saw queues in video game stores as they had not been seen for a long time, has more to do with what Breath of the Wild achieved than with how much (and very good) Tears of the Kingdom achieved.
A few days ago La Vanguardia had the opportunity to interview Eiji Aonuma and Hidemaro Fujibayashi, the two top managers of the franchise in the last twenty years, on the occasion of the launch of Tears of the Kingdom. One of the ideas that these two Japanese creatives highlighted during the interview is the importance of adventure sharing, that is, that players share their gaming experiences in order to help each other advance.
The importance given to the fact of sharing is not just nice words, nor is it a new concept within the series. In fact, since the beginning of the franchise in the mid-80s, its creator, the legendary designer Shigeru Miyamoto –the father of Super Mario– already highlighted that the game had been created with the idea of ​​players communicating with each other. . Back then, The Legend of Zelda was a very cryptic game, and at a time when there was no internet, it was essential for players to share their adventures in order to discover new secrets.
Breath of the Wild not only recovered this adventurous spirit and dazzled players with a world full of secrets, but also knew how to take advantage of social networks to make players take sharing to a new level. The freedom of action and the amazing physics system of the game caused the networks to be filled with videos in which the players showed their amazing feats.
The last Zelda development team has been able to detect how much it worked for players to share their videos on social networks, and that is why Tears of the Kingdom takes the protagonist’s skills much further when it comes to building all kinds of devices and Motor vehicles. The proof is that, in just three days on sale, the networks are full of amazing and creative videos made with Tears of the Kingdom.
It is notorious that Link, the hero of The Legend of Zelda, is a character of few words. In fact, he’s so quiet that he hasn’t uttered a word in 37 years. Now, what for many is an incongruous anachronism – a character who does not speak in 2023? – is actually some more curious and special features of the saga.
Link is not only a hero without a voice, but since his origins he has been represented on several occasions as a gender-neutral character. We are not saying it, but Eiji Aouna himself, who in an interview stated that the Link from Breath of the Wild (and therefore the Link from Tears of the Kingdom) is represented in an androgynous way so that it does not stand out due to the masculine features of he. Officially he is a boy, and everyone refers to him using the masculine article, but at the same time his neutral appearance and character make everyone relatable.
Another factor that adds up to the fact that the game has an increasingly wide audience is the franchise’s own longevity. With almost forty years behind it, The Legend of Zelda is a series that has been accumulating fans of different generations. Thanks to the universal themes, motifs and archetypes that the series handles, and which are none other than the feeling of adventure, the thrill of exploration or the fight of good against evil, this franchise has a connection with players that transcends the age. The best example of the latter is the famous Tears of the of the Kingdom ad published by Nintendo Australia which can be seen below.
Zelda is one of the franchises with one of the most creative fan communities in the world of entertainment. Days before Tears of the Kingdom hit stores, all you had to do was search for the name of the game on social networks to discover the enormous amount of drawings (fan arts), interpretations of the music or super elaborate costumes (cosplay) made by enthusiasts. of the series
Nintendo is aware of the importance that visual (and sound) art has in its franchise and that is why it has created a cast of characters that seem designed to connect with the community. One of the best recent examples is the popularity that the new design of Ganondorf, the antagonist of the last game, gained when it was revealed around a month ago. A few hours after the character was made public, the networks were already full of illustrations based on it.
Fujibayashi himself, the director of the latest Zelda installments, has stated that the work of the fans in recreating the elements of this universe is something that has motivated the team during the development of Tears of the Kingdom.
It is the most obvious point, but also the most important. Although it also has its detractors, The Legend of Zelda is a saga that has always been associated with great quality. Proof of this is how well placed the most iconic installments of the franchise are in almost all the lists of the best games. When The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was released in 1998 – the first to make the leap to three dimensions – it was quickly crowned the game with the best scores of all time. For many years Ocarina of Time was a practically unattainable title, but in 2017 Breath of the Wild was that long-awaited replacement.
On Metacritic, the popular page that aggregates the scores of a multitude of media specialized in videogames, Breath of the Wild reached an average of 97/100, a real savage, especially considering that it is the average score of 109 critics. . Tears of the Kingdom currently has a rating of 96/100 with 87 reviews to date, but the rating could change slightly in the coming days.
Considering that any video game could be the best in history is something as absurd as trying to ask that question, but what is unquestionable is that the Zelda saga has always been synonymous with quality due to its playable values, with very extraordinary exceptions. artistic and innovative within the interactive medium. Unlike other artistic disciplines, such as cinema, generally well-rated games are also the best sellers.
