2023-05-12 04:31:03
Tokyo (awp / afp) – After six long years of waiting, players can get the latest episode of “Zelda”, Nintendo’s action-adventure video game saga from Friday, which relies on the enthusiasm around this release to boost its Switch sales.
This new part, entitled “Tears of the Kingdom”, has already been unleashing passions for several months, each video extract of these new adventures of Link, the elf in a tunic armed with a sword, garnering millions of views on the internet.
Advantaged by jet lag, Japanese gamers were among the first to be able to get the game in stores on Friday, like Yutaka Hirai, 30, who lined up in the morning with several dozen people in an electronics store in Tokyo.
“I hope to find in this new game the wide open spaces to explore, the adventure present in the previous one. The world was so vast,” the real estate employee told AFP.
Mizuho Kawakami, 32, had downloaded the game before bed so she could try it out before going to work. “I was so excited. I can’t wait to get started and I’m sure I’ll be playing it all weekend,” she said.
“Like a crazy”
In other countries, some stores had decided to open at midnight to attract the most ardent fans of video games, and more than 150 people crowded in the middle of the night in front of a Parisian store.
“I’m really crazy actually because we’ve been waiting for this game for six years,” said Taylor Meguira, a 19-year-old student. “Zelda games have accompanied me throughout my childhood and my life until today,” said Emilie Sastre, 18, for her part.
The series focusing on adventure and exploration was created in 1986 by Shigeru Miyamoto, star creator of Nintendo and father of flagship characters like Mario or Donkey Kong.
It has sold a total of some 125 million copies worldwide, inspiring generations of players but also game creators.
“It’s hard to put into words what makes Zelda + so unique,” Katsuhiko Hayashi, editor-in-chief of Japan’s Famitsu magazine, told AFP.
He cites “the puzzles to solve, the action elements, a specific universe” to the series.
“Historical Best Selling”
At the turn of the 2010s, “Zelda” experienced an identity crisis, exemplified by increasingly linear episodes, forcing Nintendo to introspect to reinvent the series while reintroducing the elements that gave it its soul.
The result of these reflections resulted in “Breath of the Wild”, launched in 2017 at the same time as the Switch console, and by far the best-selling Zelda (29 million units) to date.
“This game really set the bar high for the open-world action-adventure genre, and +Zelda+ is still at the top of the genre,” Hayashi thinks.
Nintendo is counting on the new episode of its saga to support its activity in the 2023/2024 financial year, which began in early April, while sales of Switch – already in 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. AFP.
Nintendo, which despite persistent rumors has never confirmed so far that it is working on a new console, expects in 2023/24 a net profit of 340 billion yen (2.3 billion euros) , which would be a drop of 21% over one year.
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