Zelda Tears of the Kingdom Commercial Invokes Our Inner Child

Zelda Tears of the Kingdom releases an emotional commercial that invokes our inner child and a sense of joy.

Zelda Tears of the Kingdom Commercial Invokes Our Inner Child

An emotional TV ad for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom suddenly popped up on the Nintendo Australia YouTube channel. The two-minute footage features a thirty-something-year-old man who makes his way home on a crowded bus. It is then some soft and sentimental background music makes its debut. Our protagonist finds his way home, probably exhausted from the daily grind at work. It seems he’s quite late already, as his wife is already ready for bed.

She bids him goodnight, and the man proceeds to sit down to play a brand new copy of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom. This is when the music picks up the pace, becoming much more whimsical. He goes through the usual motions one would when playing the open-world game, like jumping off cliffs, whacking monsters (with their badly damaged tree branch, I might add!), and drown while trying to swim across a small lake.

Try, Try, Again!

He tries and tries again to cross the body of water, first by building a makeshift boat with only one log. As expected, this doesn’t go over too well and it topples over mid-journey, causing Link to drown yet again. Yet his inner sense of adventure triumphs, as he eventually creates his own fully-functioning three-logged raft with the use of Ultrahand.

Emotional Zelda Tears of the Kingdom Commercial

You can’t help but smile at his enjoyment of the game.

He even brings out his copy of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom into the world during his morning commute to work. He’s visibly much happier this time around, as he’s positively beaming with joy. The way he reacts to the gameplay is also a great touch, where the man’s facial and body movements adjust whenever something big happens in-game.

The ad finishes up with the man looking out into the bright blue sky, this time with a huge smile on his face, as he returns to his game.

Tears of the Kingdom Rolling Down My Face

What’s so surprising is how effective the TV ad is at conveying emotion, despite how simple it may be at a glance. We don’t see too many theatrics, too many unique locations, wild bosses, or even an in-depth dungeon. The footage simply shows off a man having fun, despite the hardships of day-to-day life.

Nintendo is clearly aiming for the older demographic, the ones with the most disposable income apparently. According to Statista, 36% of gamers are between the ages of 18 and 34. An additional 13% is aged 35 to 44 – the exact people this ad is aiming to tug at. The marketing isn’t targeted as your usual kids or filled with family-friendly tones. Instead, it creates an emotional story of someone who’s been ground down by hardship, yet still finds joy and happiness wherever he can find it.

As reported by Kotaku, a member who worked on the ad claims it was inspired by a Japanese Amazon review of the original “Breath of the Wild”. The lengthy review (translated by Google) states that the customer businessman whose forgotten what it was like to feel joy. This happiness was reignited by Zelda.

The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom Design Philosophy

Zelda Tears of the Kingdom is one of the Nintendo Switch’s biggest games – that’s both in terms of gameplay options as well as filesizes. The recent gameplay demo showed off tons of new things that Link can do, such as literally sticking anything together. As long as an item is not nailed down, you can combine it with something else and even create unique and often impractical weapons.

This creates quite an immersive simulation, especially considering how open the previous game was. Players could quite creatively find interesting solutions to problems – oftentimes those solutions were never even intended by the developers in the first place!

Some examples of games with this out-of-the-box thinking are Divinity Original Sin 2, Baldur’s Gate 3, the Dishonored games, and the Deus Ex games.

Breath of the Wild

Tears of the Kingdom will release quite soon, on May 12th specifically. Die-hard fans can try their luck at getting a special Collector’s Edition. This set will include a Steel Book, Poster art, a Pin Set, and an art book. Sadly, we don’t get our own miniature Link or Zelda Statues.