Nintendo Launches Zelda 25th Anniversary Campaign Site; UPDATE: Official Zelda Animation Contest

We’ve had some fun talking Metroid for the past two days, in honor of its silver anniversary, but it’s about time we got back to talking about some Zelda. Nintendo, while ignoring Metroid, has continued on with it’s 25th anniversary celebration of The Legend of Zelda series. As of today, the company has launched a Zelda campaign site.

The website includes a basic run down of the history of Zelda, with links to information about each game and what system they were originally released on. The site’s top banner cycles through the various incarnations of Link, while citing the game of that particular Link’s appearance. There are also links to the Zelda Symphony website, the a video of the E3 orchestration/25-year retrospective, and links to several very nice Zelda-themed wallpapers.

Of most interest is a page with information and a trailer for Flipnote Studio, a free animation and drawing application for the DS (the trailer shows artists drawing Zelda characters). It’s hard to say, since it’s in Japanese, but it looks like there will be a special Zelda-themed event for the software that will run through September 9th. The page also includes three tracks from the Zelda franchise that can be used over images and animations. Additionally, there is a sample Zelda animation that was made using Flipnote Studio.

While the site is nice to look at, it is entirely in Japanese. It is unclear whether or not Nintendo plans on releasing the website in English, but you aren’t missing much. You can easily find the wallpapers if you’re interested, and the history segments of the site aren’t wordy. The whole website leans towards the visual side of the spectrum.

The website itself was probably made to encourage fans to replay the games, but I only see links to Ocarina of Time 3DS and Link’s Awakening DX for the eShop. Hopefully Nintendo will end up releasing all the older Zelda games on the eShop, so all that 3DS owners can enjoy some Zelda goodness while waiting for Skyward Sword and the next 3DS Zelda game.

UPDATE: The Australian version of the site can be accessed here. And behold, there are links to the virtual console versions of each game.

As for the Flipnote event, it’s actually a contest. However, that portion of the site still says “coming soon.”

Source: andriasang