Captain Kinopio wrote:Well it’s certainly not the Skyward Sword one.
People go strawberry floating bananas over the Breath of the Wild one, which is indeed fantastic but trailers are so much an instant reaction kinda thing and I was still in an apprehensive mind about BotW at the time and being very cautious to avoid spoilers. It’s the Wind Waker or Twilight Princess ones for me. Probably the latter because at the time it had a ‘Zelda is coming home’ kinda vibe.
Objectively probably the BotW though as even watching that now gives me goose bumps. I don’t know how I managed to keep the Great Deku Tree being in the game a surprise for me as it’s very obvious watching the trailer. I must have watched it from behind my fingers. The music is incredible. It does kinda right cheques for the story that the game can’t cash though.
I love the Skyward Sword one, though I suppose it's less of a trailer proper than a sort of vignette, a flavour of some of the game's tone and vibe.
I'm not one of the true BotW believers but deffo agree that the BotW trailer is goosebumps all over.
Agree though about the story, the trailer makes it look like a proper journey arc when in reality it feels way looser, with less momentum from the story events.
But I reckon that's also down to the use of music - the trailer's music and its use of the Zelda theme gives a sense of coherence and continuity to everything. But in the game proper not only is the use of music often more ambient, intermittent and sometimes only suggestive, without resolving into full melodies (unlike the omnipresence of area music and so on in past games, which I think made everything feel 'centred' and significant, as part of this Legend?), there's also the fact that the BotW main theme (which is great! but appears mainly only in trailers?!) isn't used throughout much until the set-piece ending.
This suits the game's view of nature and landscape and feeling off-map whilst exploring, in the wild. But it's a big difference to something like SS where the Ballad of the Goddesses is sung by Zelda in the intro, and keeps appearing in various forms right the way until the end (see also: variations of Fi's theme etc.) which gives a thread of continuity but also fixes you at the heart of the events, the events themselves elevated by the music accompanying them.