New Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Advert Reminds You That You're Never Too Old For Video Games

@tsunami2311: Not to put too fine a point on this, but was Wind Waker your tipping point? Because if it was, you might have fallen into the "isn't anime for kids?" trap of assuming an intended audience without consideration for all of the relevant factors.

If you're looking for deep enough gameplay that an intelligent adult can be engaged with and challenged by it, I'd argue that Zelda games have had that since the start. I didn't get around to beating the original Zelda until I was in grad school in the late 2000s. While it was limited by the technology of the day, the core gameplay loop holds up well and laid a foundation that has lasted for decades.

If you're looking for something that doesn't necessarily hold your hand or put you on rails, skip the guides and/or try one of the more open-ended entries. A grad school housemate suggested I couldn't get all of the masks in Majora's Mask without an FAQ, so I decided to prove him wrong. It's honestly some of the most fun I've had in my gaming career. I still have the Excel spreadsheets I put together to track NPC schedules, note inflection points that could alter the timeline, track my progress at solving in-game clues, and annotate anything else that seemed off. And exactly 80 hours to the minute later I did manage to get all of the masks without any help, thankyouverymuch.

If you're looking for something that is thematically aimed at adults (e.g. gore, sexual aggression, horror elements, etc.), don't hold your breath, because it won't happen and frankly isn't necessary. Zelda games already explore topics of violence and oppression, but they choose to portray it in a manner that allows for wider participation.

All of which is to say, it's fine if you simply don't like Zelda games. After all, we all have preferences. But it may be worth re-exploring the why behind that preference if you haven't in awhile. Doing so may challenge your previous assumptions and cause you to reevaluate whether they are still true or were ever true*, or else it may open new avenues up to you that you wouldn't have explored otherwise**.

* E.g. A lot of people dismissed Wind Waker on appearance alone at the time, but in the years since its reputation has largely done a complete reversal. While it certainly has its faults, the gameplay mechanics are solid, the exploration is deep, and the emotional depths were greater than any preceding games in the series. That last point is actually what drove the adoption of cel shading in the first place, since it allowed for more emotive character models within the technical limitations of the day.

** E.g. Perhaps you initially dismissed Zelda as being aimed at kids because it didn't feel dark or gritty enough. On retrospection, you now realize that the real reason you didn't like it had nothing to do with aesthetics per se, but was rather specifically because the lighthearted manner in which evil was presented felt wrong. Thanks to that realization, you would then realize that you may actually enjoy other games that you had previously dismissed. For instance, Okami has a watercolor aesthetic that led you to initially dismiss it, but evil in that game is treated with more gravitas than it is in Zelda, so you now realize that you should maybe consider playing Okami.

*** If you haven't yet, you should seriously consider playing Okami regardless, because it's great. The game holds up—mechanically and aesthetically—decades later, though I'll admit that I nearly bounced off the first 30-60 minutes of gameplay myself.

@tsunami2311: If you mean a rated M zelda game, or even one that pushes the limits of T, I wouldn't hold my breath. It would be awesome, for sure, but Nintendo doesn't DO that. Hell, remember how shocking it was that Bayonetta 2 was a Nintendo exclusive? It was shocking because, well, Nintendo doesn't DO that. It certainly wouldn't do that with one of its most beloved franchises, no matter how awesome the game would be.