NintendObs Thinks: The vindication of the Sequel to The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild.
E3 2021 teaser trailer so good you'd think the original Breath of the Wild in comparison was simply a Wii U game. ...Oh wait.
The Wii U wins again. I mean what I say, the Wii U wins again. That’s the first thing that came to my mind when I seeked to understand the scope of the Sequel to The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild. Sure, everybody was amazed, me too. Asking questions like: How did Nintendo pull that off again? How did Eiji Aonuma and his team manage to outdo, in a minute and a half, what is already the most revered videogame since the launch of Nintendo Switch? The answer is simple: The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild is a Wii U title, its sequel is designed from the ground up for Nintendo Switch.
People do not realize that The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild was never a Nintendo Switch title to begin with. It got ported to Nintendo Switch before it even launched. What that means is, as epic, memorable, gigantic, historic as the game is, the Zelda team at Nintendo could only envision and work on the game within a Wii U framework, and later on enhance it for Nintendo Switch. To put things in perspective, every single DLC for the game was also released on Wii U, even months after the console became entirely irrelevant. They were always “restrained” by the Wii U when they developed this grand game. And I’m putting “restrained” in quotation marks because the same console that prevented the team from doing even more as we’re seeing now, is the console that allowed them to envision The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild we all know and love today.
That’s why it’s funny to me how the original Breath of the Wild game has so many copycats right now, Immortals Fenyx Rising, Windbound, just to mention those available on Nintendo Switch, excluding the many others on competing platforms. They are copying something that, for Nintendo, is already in the past. In mainstream gaming words, that Breath of Wild 1? That’s last-gen. That game which in more than four years, nobody managed to emulate with the same degree of celebration? …That’s the Wii U. It just happened to be ported on Nintendo Switch. Sure, it’s the whole reason why the console got the opportunity to become successful, but under the hood, Breath of the Wild 1 was never a Nintendo Switch production.