40th Anniversary Direct Roundup

This was it, the first ever Zelda Direct, going for 30 minutes. You can watch the whole show on and you probably should, before you keep reading this blog... Though, there is not much to spoil here, really. In fact, even after yesterday's from Nintendo, I'm personally somewhat underwhelmed. The beginning with the orchestra was very beautiful and certainly getting me in the mood, where I especially liked that they showed a clip of every single mainline Zelda games, all 21 of them. Now, they are bringing back the all over the world, which is good news. The last ones have been over ten years ago and I'm looking forward to visit such an event again, given that there will be one in a city close enough. But we had this before with the 25th Anniversary, so this wasn't some mind-blowing reveal. Then they just briefly talked about the , which surprised me probably the most, but not in a good way. I fully expected to see some casting news and a first real trailer, likely as the ending of the Direct, but we will have to wait a little longer. Of course, the movie will miss the 40th Anniversary, but I still think that the anniversary will mainly serve to hype both it and the remake. The only real news here was that it's just going to be called "The Legend of Zelda", which most had assumed anyway. Don't care about the museum and café announcements. Maybe one day I will go to Japan, where this will be relevant, but I have no plans for that. And afterwards they've skipped over a bunch of new merchandise, but most of it was just a bunch of collaborations with a variety of companies: a new LEGO set, another smaller one for figurines by Hasbro, the "Heroes of Hyrule" collection A Hylian Shield statue by Huzzle The Legend of Zelda trading card collection by Panini The only two things from the Nintendo in this reel were the already announced Mineru amiibo and a playable Ocarina, which is going to be released alongside the remake. Aonuma then took the time to play some . There have been lots of discussions about whether this is going to be a 1:1 remake or a re-imagining, but somehow it's neither. It's quite faithful, but they have changed and expanded the environments to a degree where they are almost unrecognizable at times. There will be also more character interactions, but for the most part it looks to be the same game, with the biggest change being that Link now can sprint and jump at any time. The visuals, however, are certainly divisive. Some will love them, but to me this looks exactly like one of those ambitious Unreal Engine fan projects. It is impressive on first glance, but it lacks the soul that you would expect from a Nintendo project. It just doesn't have the same charm and some of the characters look awfully soulless. But more on that later on. Something that probably no one saw coming is that the game will make use of the app, just in a different way than . It will automatically take photographic evidence of all your Game Overs, because that's what everyone always wanted. There is also some Hyrule Guesser thingy (which would have been a lot more interesting with the open world games), as well as an actual quiz about the game, and a guide for playing your actual ocarina. As already mentioned, they will release a physical ocarina alongside the game, which you can get from the Nintendo Store. There will also be two new , for Young Link and Young Zelda, which do actually unlock new masks in the game. And we also finally got the official reveal of the 40th Anniversary Edition This hardware gets released on October 29th, one week before on November 5th, which is similar to how they did with . This way you have one week to prepare for your shiny new Zelda system. Finally, the Nintendo Direct ended with a first real trailer, which was really awesome and showed a lot new details, where I probably could spend the rest of the week analyzing it all if I had the time. But individual posts about all these topics will follow in the next days.