Many companies attempt to emulate the success of Nintendo and their world-renowned IPs like Mario and Zelda, but nearly no dev team ever gets it right. Until now, Baldo: The Guardian Owls might have stolen a lot of inspiration from Zelda, but its Studio Ghibli style animation and characters are charming as hell, and the gameplay looks fantastic.
We can’t wait to get our hands on this better-looking Zelda clone, that looks like a handcrafted work of art with dungeon delving and isometric action combat. This game looks like a whimsical fairy tale that was supposed to be a sequel to Zelda: The Wind Waker. The cell-shaded animations look like something straight out of the Ghibli universe, and from the release trailer it looks like your watching an animated feature not a game that you should most definitely play.
You cannot deny that this game has style and charm, and even if it is a Zelda clone in terms of gameplay, the game has its own clear direction. Zelda games are pretty devoid of storytelling at times, and no one is playing them to hear how Link and Zelda triumph over Ganon once again, but for the awesome Zelda gameplay and puzzle-solving, and that fantastic sense of adventure. Baldo has all that, and so much more!
Baldo: The Guardian Owls does exactly what Zelda could never seem to do, tell an actually good story. Baldo mixes a charming story with the excellent gameplay you would expect from a Zelda game. NAPS Team is an Italian game developer and is literally coming out of nowhere with this fantastic-looking game.
Baldo: The Guardian Owls Release Date
Baldo: The Guardian Owls will release on PC, PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and Apple Arcade on August 27
In Baldo, expect to solve puzzles, fight monsters, explore dungeons and meet a strange cast of magical characters along the way. We see a bright future for Baldo and hope that the game lives up to the hype behind this fairytale adventure game.
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