Continue the discovery of the famous game The Legend of Zelda! Featuring in the pantheon of video games, the Breath of the Wild episode of the mythical Zelda saga is fully covered in this new book. Following the first Chronicle volume of a legendary saga, this second part focuses exclusively on the episode Breath of the Wild, decrypting its references, its game system and the inspiration of its developers! EXTRACT Starting production on a title that sought to radically redefine the core elements of a franchise as iconic as The Legend of Zelda involved a certain amount of risk for Nintendo. To fully understand the situation, we feel it is essential to start by determining what was really at stake in this challenging effort by looking at the many promises that The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild carried with it from the earliest announcement of its development until the moment it was released. With this perspective in mind, we will first step back in time to examine any clues potentially found in other recent installments of the franchise as to the creators’ desire to rethink the game’s most basic conventions. We will then consider what fans were expecting from this attempt to go back to basics and revive the ambitions of the original Legend of Zelda. We will also look at Nintendo’s communications strategy by way of the trailers and other official presentations that were used to introduce the game, and consider the credibility of Breath of the Wild’s claim to innovation in its approach to the open world genre. Of course, we will also focus considerable attention on director Hidemaro Fujibayashi’s history with the series, and listen to the development team’s thoughts as we attempt to better understand the origins of this latest Zelda game. We then close the chapter with a look at initial reactions from fans and video game journalists when the game was first released on March 3, 2017. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Better known by her pseudonym Romendil, Valérie Précigout spent 15 years as a journalist for Jeuxvideo.com, Europe’s largest video game website. A fan of Japanese RPGs, she managed to establish herself as an online critic when the Internet was still struggling to keep up with print media. She loves manga culture and Japanese leisure activities and shares her impressions about video-gaming news at Extralife.fr. She is also the author of Dragon Ball: The Tribute, from the Force label at Third Éditions, and contributes articles to the Level Up book series from the same publisher.

We thought we had gone through the topic in the first volume, those two games opened new pists of reflexions. The in-depth analysis of Hidetaka Miyazaki's Dark Souls saga continues with this volume 2, decoding the Bloodborne and Dark Souls III episodes. An indinspensale ebook for all the fans of the game Dark Souls ! EXTRACT "The project, christened Project Beast, began soon after the Astorias of the Abyss DLC was released in August 2012. At the time, FromSoftware was also beginning to build Dark Souls II, its cash cow. Miyazaki kept his distance from this sequel, which was handed off to Tomohiro Shibuya and Yui Tanimura, with support from the FromSoftware president and creator of King’s Field, Naotoshi Zin, who supervised the game system. On his end, Hidetaka Miyazaki formed a trusted team of regular collaborators, such as lead programmer Jun Itô (who had already filled this role for Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls), composer and lead sound designer Tsukasa Saitô (Armored Core games), and most of his regular artists: Daisuke Satake, Masanori Waragai and Hiroshi Nakamura. The success of Demon’s Souls, and the even greater success of Dark Souls, allowed FromSoftware to grow its ranks significantly. In total, no fewer than fifty programmers participated in the project, along with around twenty game system designers and fifty people working on visual creation (animation, scenery, characters, etc.). Thanks to financial support from Sony, many Japanese, Chinese and Taiwanese studios were sub-contracted during the production to help with graphics and visuals." ABOUT THE AUTHORS Passionate about films and video games, Damien Mecheri joined the writers team of Gameplay RPG in 2004, writing several articles for the second special edition on the Final Fantasy saga. He continued his work with the team in another publication called Background, before continuing the online adventure in 2008 with the site Gameweb.fr. Since 2011, he has come aboard Third Éditions with Mehdi El Kanafi and Nicolas Courcier, the publisher’s two founders. Damien is also the author of the book Video Game Music: a History of Gaming Music. For Third Éditions, he is actively working on the “Level Up” and “Année jeu vidéo” collections. He has also written or co-written several works from the same publisher: The Legend of Final Fantasy X, Welcome to Silent Hill: a journey into Hell, The Works of Fumito Ueda: a Different Perspective on Video Games and, of course, the first volume of Dark Souls: Beyond the Grave. Curious by nature, a dreamer against the grain and a chronic ranter, Sylvain Romieu is also a passionate traveler of the real and the unreal, the world and the virtual universes, always in search of enriching discoveries and varied cultures. A developer by trade, he took up his modest pen several years ago to study the characteristics and richness of the marvelously creative world of video games. He writes for a French video game site called Chroniques-Ludiques, particularly on the topic of RPGs, his preferred genre.