Front Burner - Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom changes the game, again

Episode Date: May 12, 2023

When it comes to classic video games, there are names everyone’s heard of. There's Mario. Donkey Kong. And of course there’s the Legend of Zelda. The game made its pixelated debut over thirty-five years ago and, in the decades since, the Zelda series has come to represent the spirit of adventure for millions of gamers. But, six years ago, the influential franchise managed to outdo itself with the release of Breath of the Wild – a game that redefined gaming for the modern age by giving players unparalleled control and creativity. Today, the long-awaited sequel is out. Lucy James, a senior video producer for Gamespot and Giant Bomb, joins Front Burner to explain the hype of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and the series’ influence on the highest grossing industry in entertainment. For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. When it comes to classic video games, there are names everyone's heard of. It's me, Mario!

There's Mario, there's Donkey Kong, and of course, there's the Legend of Zelda. Over 35 years ago, a generation of gamers entered a cave. A pixelated man in a robe offered them an ill-shaped sword. In the decades since, the Zelda series has come to represent the spirit of adventure for millions of gamers. Playing as the hero Link, they've used their sword to explore perilous dungeons, uncover secrets in vast worlds, and of course, to save Princess Zelda and the Kingdom of Hyrule.

Whoever gets both Triforces will rule this land forever. You must help me, Link. Hey, for you, Zelda, anything. You could say it's been influential. The games have launched tens of thousands of works of fan fiction. They've spawned a short-lived cartoon in the 1980s. Actor Robin Williams even named his daughter after the game's title character. Yes, Zelda?

Are you mixing me up with the princess again? Hard to say. You're both pretty magical. And then, six years ago, this series that shaped so much of what modern gaming has become managed to redefine it again. gaming has become, managed to redefine it again. You see, usually there are limits to where you can go in a video game, but in 2017, Breath of the Wild changed all of it. It let players go anywhere and try things like tackling the final boss on their own timeline. People played for hundreds of hours finding new ways to defeat monsters, and some are still trying to find new ways to break the game and beat it faster. And here, dear listener,

is where I make a confession. At FrontBurner, we have some passionate gamers on staff, and I am not one of them. I haven't owned a game console in almost 30 years. I just found out yesterday what a Nintendo Switch is, and that is the system that hosts the sequel, The Breath of the Wild, the most anticipated game of the year. It's called The Legend of Zelda, Tears of the Kingdom, and it's out today. To explain Zelda's influence on the highest grossing industry in entertainment, I'm joined by Lucy James. She's a senior video producer for GameSpot and Giant Bomb. Hi, Lucy. Hi, thank you so much for having me. So for those of us who aren't up to the latest on

gaming, I'm hoping you can paint us a picture of how much hype there is for the new Zelda today. Some YouTubers in New York lined up for like three days before the release. So this is actually going to be the longest from my recollection that I've ever waited out in line and have not left. There are people dancing with glee on TikTok. What's that dance for, honey? It's for Zelda. Zelda's coming out in three days. No, four days. But it's OK. I'm excited. I'm excited. Getting Zelda. So how have your colleagues been anticipating this release? I mean, so Breath of the Wild, when that game came out a few years ago now,

it immediately changed what the gaming industry and what gamers thought a Zelda game could be. And immediately it gets tens across the board. It gets incredible critical acclaim. Commercial acclaim. It's one of the best-selling Nintendo Switch games of all time. Gaming is such a weird, and I absolutely adore the industry, but it kind of goes in ebbs and flows

while there'll be these quiet periods, and then there'll be a period where a release like Breath of the Wild comes out or Tears of the Kingdom or Elden Ring, and it's just all hands on deck. And so that's where we're at at the moment, basically. To understand the series, I just want to ask you about the sort of the legend behind The Legend of Zelda. How was one of the creators' childhood experiences said to have inspired the first game? So Legend of Zelda is in part created by Shigeru Miyamoto, who is the

greatest living video game designer. I don't think anyone would really have any issues with me saying that, you know, he's the man behind franchises like Mario, Pikmin, and worked on Zelda. And so actually back in the mid 80s, you know, he was still on the up and up. He was working on games for the Famicom, and he was working on Super Mario Brothers, a small game, you might have heard of Super Mario Brothers. And when he was creating it, he, and designing and working on it, he was like, it's a little bit, it's a little bit linear. I would love to make a game where there are more options, it's more open.

And Mimoto-san grew up in the Japanese countryside, and that is where he got the inspiration for this adventure of being a young boy again, adventuring, going out. And so, you know, obviously the classic story of rescuing the princess and all this kind of came together. But also, you know, he takes inspiration from his life. Pikmin came from the fact that he loves gardening. And so, you know, it's really it's really cool to see that just like there is this very authentic bond between this game developer, this game designer, and then the title that would end up, he'd end up making, obviously with the, with the team at Nintendo. So there's the open world, the inspiration of

the countryside. For those who aren't familiar with the games, how was that adventurous spirit reflected in the way you played the first Zelda game in a way that felt different from Super Mario Brothers, you know, where you mostly just jumped across the screen to reach a flag yeah I mean like you say so Super Mario Brothers is very much you go from the left hand of the screen to the right hand side of the screen and you're uh you're dodging enemies and jumping on them along the way but with Legend of Zelda it was a little more open-ended and you could uh you had to explore you had to do things like save the world and you had this kind of loose narrative thread pulling you through

uh you know Princess Zelda has been kidnapped and there is an evil bad guy called Ganon um and basically it's just you know exploring solving puzzles uh battling through the enemies that get in your way and so Nintendo at the time didn't really necessarily have a game that really captured all of those core tenets. And so it meant that when it came out, people were like, oh, this is something new. This is something exciting. And it did really, really well commercially and critically. It sold really, really well.

And it just, you know, it basically showed Nintendo that, hey, there is a market for this kind of thing. And the thing that kind of will be the core thing you realize about Zelda games through the history is that they try something new. And that's a core tenet of Nintendo. Nintendo, my friend was saying this, Nintendo zigs while everyone else zags. And what they do with their new games is that every time they try something new they try something big so with Majora's Mask it's introducing this um it is the the way that time works in the game or in Link's Awakening for example it's you know basically making a Twin Peaks style story or in Ocarina of Time it's introducing a new way to target and to attack enemies it's you know they're always trying something new and then you get to something like Breath of the Wild

which is a vastly different departure and truly one that really speaks to the core of what Zelda is, which is those adventures. And so by giving you that tool set and just saying, hey, go out, you find your own adventure. It's amazing that they've kept to that core ethos ever since the very first game. You know, I do remember this insane commercial

that Nintendo had for the first Zelda in North America. Did you see the latest Nintendo newsletter? Whoa, nice graphics. I'd like to get my hands on that game. You mean you haven't played it yet? We can play it on my Nintendo Entertainment System. It's the legend of Zelda, and it's really rad. Those creatures from Ghana are pretty bad.

Octoroks, Tektikes, Leavers too. But with your help, our hero pulls through., Tekteks, Leavers too. But with your help, our hero pulls through. Yeah, go Link, yeah, get Zelda. Awesome. There have been some incredible Zelda titans over there. I mean, the latest trailer for Tears of the Kingdom is, I'm not sure if you've seen it, it's wild.

It's all about this guy who's just very unhappy with his life. You know, he takes the bus to work. He's very upset. You know, he and his wife seem to be struggling. And then he just boots up the switch and plays Tales of the Kingdom. And he kind of gets a little pep in his step again. So they've got pedigree with making cool and interesting trailers. Okay, so players play as Link. Now, even if you're not a gamer like me,

you'd probably recognize his green getup, his blonde hair, his elfish ears, but he doesn't actually say much, right? Like, compared to your Marios, your Sonic the Hedgehogs, your Lara Crofts, like, how does Link function as a protagonist? So Link, the thing is, is that, you know, back on the Famicom, you couldn't necessarily have fully voiced characters, is that, you know, back on the Famicom,

you couldn't necessarily have fully voiced characters or, and even, you know, there's issues of translation and localization later on it because, uh, you know, that stuff is expensive and adds onto a development, uh, budget. But the thing with Link is that as this kind of vessel, I guess you could call him, you can really pour yourself into the character. It's, it's honestly part of the reason why I really love silent protagonists. Some people might find it weird, but I think especially when you are really trying to get that immersive experience, you want to feel like you are in the shoes of that character, like I'm the one doing the adventure. I actually really appreciate it when the character doesn't say too much, because you can sometimes go the other way,

where you have a character that has a little bit too much personality, and it doesn't really gel with the player. It's a testament to Nintendo, really, that he's become such an iconic character despite not really having a catchphrase like Mario. Like, he doesn't have a let's-a-go or anything or a woo-hoo, you know? But he's still incredibly iconic. And obviously Princess Zelda 2. Okay, so now I want to talk about how the game's evolved over the years.

Here is where I admit I have only played one Zelda game. It was around 1989. It was Zelda 2, The Adventure of Link. And it was, like, frankly, my most hated game. It was kind of weird. Zelda! Use your sword.

Find the crystals. Rescue the princess. Zelda! Zelda! Zelda 2, The Adventure of Link. Only from Nintendo. Now you're playing with power. And I said, to heck with this game and these magic potions and all this stuff. I'm just going to go play Mike Tyson's Punch-Out. But apparently, I've been missing out. The Zelda formula got perfected with time, with some of what people call the greatest games in history,

like A Link to the Past and 2D, like the first game. Then it jumped to 3D with the Ocarina of Time, hugely influential. So what's the legacy of these later games, and how did they inspire the action-adventure games of today? I mean, yeah, so Zelda 2, a very different type of Zelda game. There are some things they introduced in that one that they didn't necessarily revisit. But it's still a very kind of important game. But yeah, it was definitely kind of the odd cousin.

Like I said earlier, the thing about Zelda is the way that they innovate. And so when it comes to Ocarina of Time... You are launching on the N64 and you want to get that feeling of a grand adventure and so how do you do that? You introduce like this huge open field like Hyrule Field and these kind of vast planes and you mix in clever dungeon design, clever puzzle design, but then also you kind of add in a whole new combat system. And the way that the team did it really kind of revolutionized 3D third person action for a long time. You know, it is still well regarded

as being this very revolutionary combat system. So we're in a place now with video games where everything has to be bigger, everything has to be better because video games are incredibly incredibly expensive to make they are a huge investment on the part of the publisher and the developer and what they want to do is they want to capture your attention and they want to keep you as engaged as possible for as long as possible and so a lot of the times that means these games are packed with what we refer to as bloat, as uninteresting things, checklists, towers to climb, you know, oh, I have an area here, I've got to mark off all of the collectibles in this area, but it's not necessarily interesting.

with Breath of the Wild was they revolutionized that. They didn't tell you everything that was there. It was up to you to find it and up to you to figure it out. And that is possibly the most influential thing it could have done because we are already seeing, like game developers chase trends a lot. And we're already seeing the positive impact that Breath of the Wild has had on action games, just as we've seen the impact

the previous iterations have had before. Amazing. So you've just had me reevaluate a childhood memory. I didn't realize all these years that I'd been playing like the outlier in the entire series. So, okay, we're now going to skip over a ton of beloved games and games that followed this formula. Link stopped the moon from crashing into the earth. He sailed the seas. He shrunk. Zelda was a ghost. I want to talk to you about the rest of the gaming industry. Through the 2000s, many big budget games had gone to a so-called open world design, some of them inspired by Ocarina of Time.

For those non-Zelda games, what did open world often mean? I mean, so open world can mean a lot of things. It can just mean, you know, sometimes there'll be a game where it's not necessarily an open world. It's sort of hubs, but these hubs are big and meaningful. So something like Dragon Age Inquisition, for example. And it means, you know, you can have different sort of weather effects, different biomes, different parts of the story can be in this particular place. Or in other traditional open worlds, you know, you can have things like Far Cry, where it is just this big sandbox.

And like I mentioned earlier, you know, a checklist of things to do. It feels like... And so open world just means that, you know, you as the player, you are dropped in it and you could theoretically go and just do whatever you want. But the thing about it is, like I said, it can be filled with bloat. It can be tiring. Just do whatever you want. But the thing about it is, like I said, it can be filled with bloat.

It can be tiring. You've talked about 2017, the Zelda series response to open world games. The Legend of Zelda, Breath of the Wild. That game launched like a thousand think pieces compared to other open world games. What was it like to step into Hyrule? I remember the first time I played it. I actually played it at a preview event in London, and I'd seen a couple of the trailers, but I don't think the trailers really got across the feeling of what it was like, because you start out in a cave.

Open your eyes. Wake up, Link. You wake up and you step outside and there is this beautiful vista. And it is genuinely sort of the anywhere you see you can go moment. And then what it does is it shows you that it teases you with with it and then you realize you're at the top of a very tall cliff and you can't get down so it very cleverly introduces uh it uses that to introduce the systems to you so you know the way that you find the glider and a bunch of the powers and everything and like interact with the key systems. And then as soon as you glide off the plane and you just realize, oh, this is all open for me to do.

You know, I've never really had a moment like that. And it's one of those kind of core gaming memories and you know, playing that game. I actually, you know what, to be true, I haven't finished it. I've put 35, 40 hours into Breath of the Wild, but because I've had my own adventure, I don't necessarily feel like I need to go beat Ganon, you know? For me, it's not the story, it is the adventure. And a lot of people actually weirdly do that and have

felt that way. It's a very unique game in that regard. Amazing. It's the antithesis of what people would have thought of as a video game. And actually as a matter of fact you talked about never having beaten ganon but conversely if i understand correctly you could just go fight the final the boss like right away right you could go skip right to the end of the game at the beginning if you wanted is that am i am i correct there you are yeah i mean like i said earlier the there are some incredible systems in this game and you can open it up and you can go fight Ganon straight away because if you're good enough, you can beat him, which is so wild and you see that so rarely, but it also kind of feels like Nintendo did that for a reason, like a little nod and a wink. Yeah, you can do that. Optimization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections.

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I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just of the Wild, got into gaming. Some people's parents or our producer, Derek, he says his sister had never played a Zelda game before. And they basically got through the pandemic by playing hundreds of hours of Breath of the Wild together. So why did this reach people outside the world of role-playing game fandom? You know, it's an interesting one. I think part of it comes from the critical praise, certainly. You know, you get that real word-of-mouth thing.

And I think the thing that Breath of the Wild does that really excels is that a lot of times these days, traditional gaming RPGs, you know, you look at something like Destiny or even The Witcher, there's a lot of text, every item has all of these stats, there's lengthy tutorials, and so as, you know, if you are a gamer, you are kind of brought up and you learn the language of gaming. You know, if I'm playing a Mario game, I understand if there is a gap in the ledge, I'm going to jump, or if there's an enemy, I'm going to swing with my sword and hit it. You know, if I'm playing a Mario game, I understand if there is a gap in the ledge, I'm going to jump. Or if there's an enemy, I'm going to swing with my sword and hit it. You know, that is the kind of video game language that you are brought up to understand. And you've seen that evolve over time as games have gone from 2D to 3D. What Zelda did with Breath of the Wild, which I think is incredibly clever, was just

peel all of that back and make it much more approachable it didn't tell you any more than you needed to know and it tells you everything that you need to know and then it's up to you to just experiment and try it and so I also have friends who obviously all of my my gaming friends were immediately oh it's a new Zelda I'm absolutely going to play it but I've also had it where friends of mine who aren't necessarily gamers or who maybe got into gaming later in life have picked up Breath of the Wild and just understood it because it wasn't trying to be too complicated.

It was just trying to get back to that childlike joy of adventuring. Okay, so today it's release day for the sequel to Breath of the Wild, Tears of the Kingdom. It adds some abilities that take the forge your own path aspects of the game to another level. So what are these new aspects? I think probably the biggest one

is Ultra Hand. So in Breath of the Wild, Link had a bunch of abilities. He could throw bombs, he could use magnesis, and he could take magnetized items and move them around and use it to solve puzzles. but ultra hand in this one it's it's kind of taking that magnesis, but you can pick up pretty much a bunch of items and objects and Attach things together, so there's this element of building that's now in the Legend of Zelda Which means you can make vehicles so you can make you can make a boat you could make a rocket powered Flying machine or you can even make some kind of car and a rocket-powered flying machine, or you can even make some kind of car. And so there's other things too, you know,

you've got fuse. So a big thing in Breath of the Wild that is kind of divisive is that weapons would break after a certain amount of usage. That is still a very hotly debated thing because a lot of people don't like that. They would just, you know, want to pick up a sword and want to keep using it, but in Tears of the Kingdom you can use an ability called fuse, and you can fuse objects to your weapons, your current weapons, to kind of change how they work. So you can add sort of like a fire thing to it to mean that you're constantly kept warm if you're in a cold environment because you have a fire thing attached to your weapon. And so there's a bunch of other stuff that that that that you can do if you want to fiddle around with fuse

so there's so many new ways to interact with the world and i'm just already feeling like i'm not creative enough uh well please so you're you're definitely more creative than me when it comes to this so uh well i just i guess i want to finish off by asking you about the potential legacy of this game and we like we've seen the impact that zelda games from decades ago have had on games still being made today so like what do you think the influence of breath of the wild and tears of the kingdom might be in terms of how games are designed in the future i think yeah we've already seen the impact of breath of the wild on games like elden ring which are open you know taking that open world design and filling it with interesting things, like teasing and encouraging the audience to explore.

And so I think what I hope for is that Tears of the Kingdom will also reinforce the fact that open world games don't need to be bloated. They just need to be you don't need to handhold the player the whole time you can just let them follow their own intuition and that to me as a player is much more exciting i don't need endless tutorials i don't need a map with a little dotted line telling me where to go next all i need is is just a well designed interesting game and i hope that a lot of game designers and game developers will see the success of Tears of the Kingdom, especially off the back of Breath of the Wild, and just kind of go, yeah, let's try something like that. Okay, you know what? One last question. What about people like me, people who aren't really big gamers? Why might they want to give this one a chance?

I think just to lose yourself in an adventure, honestly. I mean, gaming is huge. You know, it's bigger than, you know, all the other industries pretty much combined at this point. It really came into its own in the early days of the pandemic. And a lot of people discovered that it is just this incredible interactive experience. And you can just have these adventures without necessarily going outside. And obviously obviously time is at a premium for everyone but I think some of the most worthwhile stories that are being told are being told in games some most worthwhile experiences are being told in games and there's really no better series than to try and explore and try that out with with The Legend of

Zelda you know you also have this incredible community of people who are discovering new and cool ways to interact with this game the review scores came out for for tears of the kingdom and again it's tens across the board and people were worried that nintendo weren't going to be able to sort of recapture the magic you know how do you improve upon one of the best games ever made and luckily it seems like they've done it so maybe i will will try. Thank you so much, Lucy. Of course. And that's all for this week. Frontburner was produced this week by Imogen Burchard,

Derek Vanderwyk, Lauren Donnelly, Rafferty Baker, and Jodie Martinson. Our sound design was by Matt Cameron, Evan Kelly, Nick McCabe-Locos, and Will Yar. Our intern is Constantino Varlokastas. Our music is by Joseph Chabison. The show's executive producer is Nick McCabe-Locos. I'm Alex Panetta. Thank you for listening. We'll talk to you again next week. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.