A video of a mobile game copying The Legend of Zelda Tears of The Kingdom is going around the web. Beyond the ad, the game actually bears no relation to Nintendo’s masterpiece.
With its critical and commercial success, The Legend of Zelda Tears of The Kingdom already has the virtual certainty of being the game of the year 2023. A success which will also earn it to be taken as an example by other titles, sometimes approaching plagiarism.
A first example is already making the rounds of the web. The game kungfu saga broadcasts an advertisement on the Internet presenting a ” brand new aerial dungeon which takes up the aesthetics of the starting area of Nintendo’s masterpiece. This is actually an increasingly fashionable marketing technique for certain mobile games.
An ad for a game that doesn’t exist
In the short video, which can be found on the NintendoTime channel, the game kungfu saga presents a new update supposed to add a dungeon.
YouTube linkSubscribe to Frandroid
The players of Zelda Tears of The Kingdom will be able to recognize the starting area, in autumnal yellow hues, as well as two powers presented by the kungfu saga : first a copy of Retrospective’s power then a copy of Amalgam presented as ” a new weapon synthesis function “. As in Zelda, the character merges a tree branch with a rock to create a mallet.
Except that here, the gameplay presented in this advertisement does not really exist in the game. In fact, kungfu saga doesn’t even look like an action RPG game with a camera behind the character as advertised here.
YouTube linkSubscribe to Frandroid
kungfu saga is actually closer to an MMORPG with a very distant camera similar to a MOBA. Even the aesthetic departs markedly from that of the advertisement to return to something closer to a game like Genshin Impact.
An increasingly common practice
This is a real trend in the ecosystem of free mobile games. Advertisements presented on social networks or inside games, often mandatory to watch to receive game time or lives, reflect less and less the reality of the game they present.
Obviously, any advertisement can and must embellish reality to sell its product. However, there is a line that should not be crossed between embellishing reality and presenting a completely different product. More and more free games on the web or on mobile are crossing this border. The case of kungfu saga is the perfect example.
Do you use Google News (News in France)? You can follow your favorite media. Follow Frandroid on Google News (and Numerama).