Greatest Game Trailers (Game Trailers Discussion Thread)

[vanguard333]

What, to you, makes a good trailer for a video game? Post some of your favourite video game trailers and say why you think they're good.

Note: this isn't a thread about trailers for great video games, but trailers that are great, regardless of the game's actual quality. Also, when posting the trailer, please put the link in a spoiler tag to make the thread a bit easier to load for everyone (and so that each reply isn't extremely long). 

 

I'll start:

Final Fantasy VS XIII Trailer:

Spoiler

 

 

Fire Emblem Fates: Choose Your Path Trailer:

Spoiler

 

 

Breath of the Wild E3 2016 Trailer:

Spoiler

 

 

For me, a good video game trailer has to do one thing: convey what the game is and what's unique and interesting about it. That may sound obvious, but I do think there are a lot of trailers out there that either don't really show what the game's about, or instead tell the viewer what the games about over some footage that is just showing some neat effects but isn't reflective of the game. These three trailers immediately convey what the game's about and what's interesting about it through showing rather than telling, with any words just adding onto it. 

Edited November 20, 2020 by vanguard333

[Aegius_NaTL]

Oh man, there are some good ones, that's for sure. That VS XIII one is great.

The very best:

Spoiler

 

Runner up:

Spoiler

 

Third place:

Spoiler

 

Honorable mention to literally every other AC trailer because they're all varying degrees of great.

EDIT: Oh right... 'why they're good.' Well, the first one is a reference to a monumental narrative moment for Geralt from the books. It sort of emblemizes his conflicting journey toward being a helper of the people rather than an emotionless bounty hunter. The ending of him saying "killing monsters" makes it doubly more powerful. It's actually a "quieter" trailer and not as over-the-top as something like VS XIII or AC3, but I think it doesn't necessarily need to be that involved visually.

The AC trailers are always nuts. 3's and Brotherhood's are great at telling a contained story and referencing the overarching narrative at the same time, while maintaining maximum badassery. There are a number of AC trailers I could have posted instead of those two, like Revelations', Unity's, and 4's. 

Edited November 15, 2020 by Aegius_NaTL

[Zapp Branniglenn]

It's hard to separate how good a trailer was from the environment in which it was released. Take Twilight Princess E3 2005 for example, it's a pretty average trailer in a vacuum. But I remember losing my mind at any news for the game. The early 2000s were not a great time for the series. People came around on Majora's Mask and later Windwaker, but the Zelda series was just being inundated by experimental games nobody asked for. We didn't want more top down, we didn't want the Windwaker aesthetic, we didn't want multiplayer, we wanted a return to the standards and conventions of Ocarina. People come down hard on TP for being "just another Ocarina", but nine years is a long time to wait. "Another Ocarina"  was precisely the promise that came with Twilight Princess ever since it's reveal. Now, E3 press conferences weren't being streamed or even typically recorded to watch later online back then, but I encountered the 2005 E3 trailer in a demo disc from a gaming magazine. Only it was even longer, much closer to what would be the game's opening demo reel if you idle on the start screen too long. It had shots of hyrule castle town with maybe a hundred NPCs walking around, and more of the new dungeons. I watched that on repeat in the year leading up to release.

But okay, a great trailer, regardless of context, that gets you to say "I have to play this game". I always give it to Fallout New Vegas. I think even if you imagine yourself as somebody who had never heard of Fallout, this is a good trailer at communicating the series. The retro-future 1950s aesthetic, the recognizeable cultural landmarks of americana, the strange mutated creatures that you target with VATS, it's all there. And you're not left wondering if it's representative of real gameplay because the trailer is almost totally gameplay footage. 

I also have to give honorable mention to pretty much any Bioshock trailer. Even when they're cinematic, they're communicating things you can actually do in the game. Even Bioshock Infinite, which rightfully receives flak for having deceitful marketing and propagating the wrong expectations, had great trailers. And a large part of that is the one-take first person aesthetic. 

Edited November 15, 2020 by Glennstavos

[Dandy Druid]

2 hours ago, Glennstavos said:

It's hard to separate how good a trailer was from the environment in which it was released. Take Twilight Princess E3 2005 for example, it's a pretty average trailer in a vacuum. But I remember losing my mind at any news for the game. The early 2000s were not a great time for the series. People came around on Majora's Mask and later Windwaker, but the Zelda series was just being inundated by experimental games nobody asked for. We didn't want more top down, we didn't want the Windwaker aesthetic, we didn't want multiplayer, we wanted a return to the standards and conventions of Ocarina. People come down hard on TP for being "just another Ocarina", but nine years is a long time to wait. "Another Ocarina"  was precisely the promise that came with Twilight Princess ever since it's reveal. Now, E3 press conferences weren't being streamed or even typically recorded to watch later online back then, but I encountered the 2005 E3 trailer in a demo disc from a gaming magazine. Only it was even longer, much closer to what would be the game's opening demo reel if you idle on the start screen too long. It had shots of hyrule castle town with maybe a hundred NPCs walking around, and more of the new dungeons. I watched that on repeat in the year leading up to release.

This was the first trailer that popped into my mind. Not because of the content of the trailer, but how hyped it got the audience and fans of the series. People went nuts over it, and that's why I found it to be so memorable.

But one of my favorite trailers based on the content in it is Persona 5's.

Spoiler

 

It just oozes style, and leaves a lot to the imagination with how the story will play out. Plus, the music is great.

[vanguard333]

17 hours ago, Glennstavos said:

It's hard to separate how good a trailer was from the environment in which it was released. Take Twilight Princess E3 2005 for example, it's a pretty average trailer in a vacuum. But I remember losing my mind at any news for the game. The early 2000s were not a great time for the series. People came around on Majora's Mask and later Windwaker, but the Zelda series was just being inundated by experimental games nobody asked for. We didn't want more top down, we didn't want the Windwaker aesthetic, we didn't want multiplayer, we wanted a return to the standards and conventions of Ocarina. People come down hard on TP for being "just another Ocarina", but nine years is a long time to wait. "Another Ocarina"  was precisely the promise that came with Twilight Princess ever since it's reveal. Now, E3 press conferences weren't being streamed or even typically recorded to watch later online back then, but I encountered the 2005 E3 trailer in a demo disc from a gaming magazine. Only it was even longer, much closer to what would be the game's opening demo reel if you idle on the start screen too long. It had shots of hyrule castle town with maybe a hundred NPCs walking around, and more of the new dungeons. I watched that on repeat in the year leading up to release.

Interesting. Now I finally understand the perspective of those who decried Wind Waker and Majora's Mask and wanted another Twilight Princess. 

I honestly didn't care at all about Wind Waker or Majora's Mask being different; probably because my first Zelda experience was the collector's edition on the GameCube (which had the first game, Adventure of Link, Ocarina, Majora's Mask, and a 20-minute demo of Wind Waker), so I experienced all three games at once. I even thought Four Swords Adventures was a neat idea as I have two siblings and it would allow us to play a Zelda game at the same time (imagine how ripped off we felt when we realized that the multiplayer required those Gameboy Advance cords that we didn't have). 

I never saw the E3 announcement for Twilight Princess, but I did see all the other trailers and ads for it. It never struck me as "another Ocarina of Time"; it struck me as a new Zelda game that, where Majora's Mask was an endless gloomy race against time and Wind Waker was an adventure in the open sea, would instead be a grand fantasy epic and battle of light vs darkness, good vs evil almost akin to something like Lord of the Rings or... I can't actually think of another grand fantasy epic like that off the top of my head. I thought Link now being essentially a werewolf was a great idea with tons of potential. So, yeah; I was just as hyped as everyone else, but I wanted another experimental game while standing alone in a sea of people wanting an Ocarina of Time re-release, and I did not understand why everyone else in that sea wanted what they did.

So, yeah; one can see why I eventually ended up in the crowd of coming down hard on the game for being another Ocarina of Time. Don't get me wrong; Twilight Princess is a good game, and there were definitely moments that felt really epic. I just wish the climate at the time wasn't full of fans that were angry at anything that wasn't Ocarina; perhaps then Twilight Princess could've been something even more. Perhaps Wolf Link wouldn't have been really underutilized as a gameplay mechanic, and perhaps the game could've been even better tailored towards being that grand epic. 

Apparently, both Eiji Aonuma and Shigeru Miyamoto have expressed regrets regarding Twilight Princess; Eiji regrets that he didn't make the game as grand or epic as he intended and the team focused too much on the size of the world and not enough on fully utilizing that space, while Miyamoto feels, looking back, that the game is missing something.