There are all kinds of demographics who are going to be very into the next Zelda game, but this new trailer for Tears of the Kingdom—one that is somewhere between a personal appeal and a personal attack on me, a 43-year-old man—has one very specific audience in mind.
The Week In Games: Return To Hyrule
Yesterday
The kids, they’re gonna buy it. The youths, the young adults, this is a new Zelda game, those people all pre-ordered the game (or bugged their parents to pre-order it) months ago. But old gamers? That’s a different story. Older gamers have jobs. They might have a big house, they might have a family, they might have other things to do instead of play video games all the time.
Sure, they might own a Switch, and have been into Zelda at some point in time—maybe as recently as 2017!—but that was six years ago, and times change. In 2017, for example, I was 37 years old with two kids and was working at a video game website. In 2023 I am…OK, bad example, but there are going to be a lot of people in Nintendo’s crosshairs for this game that might not be as into this Zelda as they were the last one.
For them, Nintendo Australia made this trailer, and it sure is something:
There are two ways you can read this trailer. The first is the way its creators and Nintendo clearly intended, which is that this guy, who has a boring job and a boring life because he’s a boring middle-aged man, can still find some joy in this world. And he can find it by staying up late and playing a video game.
This reading works, especially if you’re the target market! Zelda makes him happy, both at home and on the bus, and it even inspires him to look out the window and appreciate a lovely bit of scenery as he drives past it. “There is still good in this world”, he thinks to himself, and it’s all because he purchased The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.
Yet there’s also something unsettling about the whole thing. It’s shot beautifully, but like IGN’s Brian Altano says below, perhaps too well; it starts making you forget this is a video game trailer and think that, maybe, this is just a very sad movie about a very sad man:
I think both can be true at the same time! More video game trailers like this please, it’s lovely seeing some genuine thought put into one.