Let’s Talk: Zelda U Preview Shows a Gigantic Map

For years, fans of the Zelda series have clamored for bigger and better game worlds. When Nintendo tried to deliver on that with a massive overworld in Twilight Princess, many complained it was too empty. In Skyward Sword, Nintendo presented a Zelda game with virtually no overworld, and instead made other areas much larger. This, predictably, led to an outcry from fans that Skyward Sword was missing one of the key components of a Zelda game. While this dramatic shift between Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword was most likely due to the fact that the Wii wouldn’t be able to handle the kind of open world that people wanted, it has become apparent that with the added power of the Wii U, Nintendo EAD has had no problem in finally realizing their dreams of making a rich, vast and beautiful open-world experience.

In fact, when I watched this demo the map and traversal, I was reminded a lot of the original The Legend of Zelda. No matter where you go, you run into new and undiscovered secrets, dungeons, etc. It’s hard to go directly to where you’re heading because there just always seems to be something else to do on the way that you get caught up in.

As you can see in the picture above, compared even to just the waypoint made by Eiji Aonuma, the map is absolutely gigantic. Even though the video is sped up and skips lots of travel time, Aonuma still never makes it to the tower. Whether that was because of him messing around on the way or because the map is truly that large we don’t know, but from what we’ve seen so far, this is shaping up to be the game that many of us have been clamoring for. What do you think about the size of this world?