Welcome back!! Here we are for part two of this visual journey through time. Last we looked at the Nintendo and Super Nintendo days of the zelda franchise, if you haven’t read it yet here is a link(click here), and now we will be looking at the Nintendo 64 and the GameCube commercials. Let us start with the fan favorite of the series, Ocarina of Time.
It seems Nintendo at this point finally learned how to balance the attitude they wanted to display in their commercials and the actual need to show the game itself. We get to see a lot of the game play elements while it shows off the graphics that the N64 had to offer, and all well allowing Nintendo to show off how epic they can be. One wonders though, if Nintendo wanted it to be so epic, should they have really have included “or whilst thou suck”? Kinda ruins the atmosphere.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSzaraz5RVU
Ugh are you serious Nintendo? I thought we were past the days of “all attitude no game play.” What happened to showcasing how beautiful your games are? What happened to even showing the game?!? The only reasoning behind a commercial like this is if they were worried since the game play was so similar to Ocarina of Time, Ignoring the whole turning back time and masks aspect, that people would think it was just a repeat of the last game. Too bad though since Majora’s Mask had some spectacular scenes that they could have used.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UO0qPFvTB5w\
Now we enter the GameCube days and the era where game commercials consist of more people acting out the story than they do of the game play itself. This is a trend that continues on even today, look at any war game and you see more people dressed as soldiers than you do in-game soldiers, but at least Nintendo did show off the main appeal of Wind Waker which was the absolutely beautiful cell shaded art style. What surprises me most about this commercial is it doesn’t even show a boat which is one of the most prominent elements of Wind Waker. Possibly they already realized traveling between islands would get annoying throughout the game so decided to keep it out of the commercials.
It seems that Nintendo started to get the idea right in the N64 days of showing more of the game itself in the commercials than trying show off the attitude of the system but they lost track of that somewhere along the way. Which doesn’t really make sense when Ocarina of Time did so well. You would think they would want to at least have a similar formula to one that worked so incredibly well. Lets see if they resort to their old tricks or keep with more of the same next time when we look at the Wii Zelda titles. To close here are some more Japanese versions of these commercials.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qb7SW0XaxWc
This post brought to you by:
“Steven Henderson is a narcoleptic insomniac with an obsession with video game history. He spends all his time playing video games and no time speaking to other humans. Who needs them anyways.”
You can contact Steven on twitter, his handle is @ragon306.
This rules. Thanks for this.