Nintendo of Japan







Just ahead of Nintendo's Switch reveal last week, the game maker posted a small update to its official Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild site, complete with video snippets of more gameplay elements. Those previews took on a fuller shape on Monday after Nintendo of Japan posted a whopping 40-minute preview video, and this trailer shows the game in the most complete state since we tried an early preview version in June.

The video's text and speech are entirely in Japanese, but it's not hard to make out what's going on. The sequence opens in the same way as the demo Ars Technica played at this June's E3 conference. The latest incarnation of Link wakes up in a mysterious pool of water while a voice propels him onward. After clothing his nearly nude body and grabbing makeshift weapons on the ground (from giant leaves and tree branches to discarded axes), Link makes his way across a giant landscape.

The new stuff here has been hinted at in previous videos, but it's nice to see a relatively unedited, super-long video of new elements combined in a seamless experience. The game's recipe-crafting system is shown at great length, and in one example, Link has to make and eat a giant stew of spicy peppers before he can survive a super-frigid nighttime zone. Once his belly is full of heat, Link can make a cold climb onto a giant rock formation, where he finds frost-resistant clothing—which looks remarkably like his traditional green tunic.

From that height, Link propels downward by using his shield as a snowboard—and in a radical/gnarly/tubular touch, he does a forward flip as he sets his feet into the shield before landing and coasting downhill. In the video, Link also puts the game's bow to work, and we come to find out that players will have to contend with more severe "bow drop" issues than ever before—meaning, if a foe is too far away, players will have to arc their arrow shots upward to compensate. Giant auto-aiming lasers and a clever river-traversal puzzle (which shows off the giant leaf's non-combat uses) round out the other cool new-ish moments in this video.

The video is hosted by comedian Masaru Hamaguchi, who co-hosts the Japanese gaming-variety show Game Center CX. Instead of following that show's retro-gaming streak, Hamaguchi twists it for this Nintendo-produced video into "Game Center DX" (a letter twist that will be familiar to Nintendo fans, since the "DX" suffix has been used in some Nintendo game re-releases). Westerners may best know Game Center CX thanks to Retro Game Challenge, a 2009 Nintendo DS video game based on the TV series.

Even if you've watched every Breath of the Wild preview video released up until now, it's worth watching Hamaguchi's unleashed take on the game, as he clearly loves pushing games to their limits. Whether he's maxing out Link's climbing-stamina bar, dying stupidly, or just messing around, he's been unleashed to play this game as goofily as he desires. Considering how open-ended this Zelda game appears to be, it bodes well that the video is fun to watch from start to finish.

There's still plenty left to be revealed, particularly dungeon content (which this video lacks), so this long clip isn't necessarily a spoiler bonanza. If you're desperate for more BotW footage, consider this video pretty safe to watch. And while the footage includes a few framerate chugs, the game all-in-all is looking far better optimized on Wii U than the version we saw at E3, which is particularly good news for the 2017 game (also launching on Nintendo Switch).

Listing image by Nintendo of Japan