With its open world that pushed back the barriers of the genre, its poetic creativity and its iconic universe, the opus “Breath of the wild” had already won the hearts of millions of players. This Friday marks the second part of this opus of “Zelda”, this saga created more than forty years ago. This last episode entitled “Tears of the Kingdom” where the players still embody Link, an elf in a green tunic armed with a sword, is already unleashing passions with millions of views for each video extract published on the Internet.
How to explain the success of the series invented by Shigeru Miyamoto, star creator of Nintendo and the Mario character? “It’s hard to put into words what makes ‘Zelda’ so unique,” says Katsuhiko Hayashi, editor-in-chief of Japan’s industry-leading Famitsu magazine. “There are puzzles to solve, action elements, a universe specific to the series.
The discovery in the blood
The first episode of “The Legend of Zelda”, released in 1986, clashed at the time by abandoning the player almost without indications in the middle of a vast country dotted with forests, lakes, caves and mountains, inspired by childhood explorations in the Japanese countryside of Miyamoto, who also said he was influenced by the adventures of Indiana Jones. Released only a few months after “Super Mario Bros”, it is the opposite of the famous platform game where the mustachioed plumber simply runs from left to right.
This title “encouraged the player to explore, discover and map his universe and meet his challenges”, explains Mark Brown, who analyzes game design on his YouTube channel. “At the time, games were still in their infancy, but “Zelda” offered this excitement, this wonder of living an adventure”, assures Katsuhiko Hayashi. “There was already a whole staging, dungeon doors slamming (…), an already accomplished “game design”.
The last Zelda, sales champion
The success of the game – whose name of the princess is borrowed from the American novelist Zelda Fitzgerald – is immediate, and its universe will charm generations of players but also game creators. The series, with around twenty main episodes distributed on all successive Nintendo consoles, has so far sold 125 million copies worldwide. At the turn of the 2010s, “Zelda” however experienced an identity crisis, illustrated by increasingly linear episodes. By seeking to conquer a wider audience, it loses its identity and sales suffer.
“The development team had a sense of crisis” which led them to “rethink the fundamentals”, says Katsuhiko Hayashi. “It was a difficult period for Nintendo, which proceeded by trial and error with various trials. The result of these reflections leads to “Breath of the Wild”, an open-world game, a breath of fresh air in the series that revives the freedom of the beginnings. Launched in 2017 at the same time as the Switch console, it is by far the best-selling Zelda (29 million units).
A tenth of Nintendo’s turnover?
“This game really set the bar for the open-world action-adventure genre, and ‘Zelda’ is still at the top of the genre,” says Katsuhiko Hayashi. Nintendo is counting on the new episode of its saga to support its activity in 2023-2024, while sales of Switch – which is entering its seventh year of marketing – are expected to fall sharply by 16.5%, to 15 million units, according to its forecast released on Tuesday. The new “Zelda” should be “by far the biggest contributor to Nintendo’s sales for this financial year”, anticipates Serkan Toto, analyst at Kantan Games.
For Charles-Louis Planade, analyst at Midcap Partners, it could even become “the best historical sale” of this license. “It’s a game that can approach a billion dollars in revenue, it’s very significant for a company that makes a turnover of just over 10 billion a year,” he said. Overall, for its 2023-2024 financial year, Nintendo expects a net profit of 340 billion yen (2.3 billion euros), which would be a drop of 21% over one year.