The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom — all the latest on Nintendo’s huge sequel
Link in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. | Image: NintendoNintendo’s sequel to Breath of the Wild launches on May 12th. Continue reading…
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The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, the direct sequel to Breath of the Wild, is poised to be one of Nintendo’s biggest games of 2023 when it releases on May 12th. First announced in 2019, Nintendo has largely kept the game shrouded in mystery, but a few early trailers revealed that Link will be soaring through the skies, driving vehicles, and dealing with what looks to be the return of Ganondorf.
Tears of the Kingdom looks like a promising follow-up to one of the best games ever, but just know that if you’re going to buy it for yourself, you’ll need to set aside a little extra cash: the game is Nintendo’s first $70 Switch title. If you’re a Nintendo Switch Online subscriber, however, you can get the game for a bit of a deal thanks to Nintendo’s Switch Game Vouchers.
Here’s all of our coverage of Link’s next big adventure.
Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’s final trailer has open skies and lots of drama
At T-minus one day less than a month until Tears of the Kingdom launches, Nintendo has released a final trailer for Breath of the Wild’s potentially life-ruining sequel.
The three-minute trailer featured sweeping vistas of Hyrule, some new friendly faces, and one very old not-so-friendly face. It looks like Link will have some friends to help him along the way, like he did in Breath of the Wild, which is neat because exploring all of Hyrule alone can get pretty boring. It also looks like my girl Riju is back and all grown up, along with Prince Sidon, so I am very excited to see my old friends again.
The final pre-launch Tears of the Kingdom trailer airs tomorrow.
Tune in at 10AM ET / 7AM PT on Nintendo’s YouTube channel to catch the “roughly” three-minute video for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Ahead of the premiere, if you want to watch all of the trailers released so far (there’s only 22 minutes and 15 seconds of footage to watch), I collected links to the first five trailers here and you can watch last month’s 10-minute gameplay video here.
The game releases in exactly one month on May 12th.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of Physical Therapy
With the game almost a month away, Nintendo’s ramping up its Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom promotion. In this clip, Link swan dives from one of Hyrule’s new floating islands into a lake below. But instead of shattering every bone in his body, Link swims it off. (You might have seen this sequence in Nintendo’s recent gameplay demo.)
If only he had one of those neat flying machines.
Here’s where you can still preorder Nintendo’s Zelda-inspired Switch OLED
Image: Nintendo
Last week, after months of rumors, Nintendo finally confirmed that it’s releasing a Zelda-inspired Nintendo Switch OLED on April 28th. The special-edition console will retail for $359.99 and commemorates one of this year’s most anticipated video games, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, which will drop alongside a new Zelda-themed controller and carrying case two weeks later, on May 12th.
For those eager to get their hands on the limited-edition console first, Amazon, Best Buy, and Walmart are all currently still accepting preorders. Unlike the standard Switch, the Switch OLED boasts a vibrant seven-inch OLED display, 64GB of storage, and an improved kickstand, along with a handful of other small updates. The Tears of the Kingdom Edition doesn’t offer any improvements over the standard OLED model, but it comes with gold Joy-Cons and a docking station decorated with classic Zelda iconography.
“We want to explore more of the potential that this gameplay has.”
We all have Zelda on the brain following Nintendo’s lengthy Tears of the Kingdom gameplay presentation. And it got me thinking about this interview from a few years back with the directors of Breath of the Wild, where we talked about the series’ change in direction and the move from the Wii U to the Switch. Perhaps most interesting now is how much they seemed to want to build on the concept — who knew that would turn into meat arrows?
Tears of the Kingdom is going to ruin our lives, and I’m here for it
Image: Nintendo
As the high from watching Nintendo’s Tears of the Kingdom gameplay video fades, I’m left with a staggering thought: “this game is going to ruin lives.”
As much as I enjoy The Legend of Zelda, it’s never really been a series that I get out of bed for. Before today’s TotK (pronounced “tok”) presentation, I figured I’d invest however long it’d take for me to finish a review and never pick it up again. But seeing Link take a monster eye and fuse it to an arrow to create a homing missile, I felt my brain crack open and spill everywhere. It was an “oh... oh no” kind of moment. I could see the nigh limitless potential of the kinds of shenanigans I could get up to running around Hyrule. And I know that, just like I did with Elden Ring, I will spend hundreds of hours futzing about, either creating the stick sword to end all stick swords or maybe a bespoke Hylian Aston Martin. In that one moment, I saw my beautiful doom.
Here’s 10 minutes of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom gameplay
Tears of the Kingdom is only a scant 44 days away. To celebrate the game’s impending arrival, Nintendo dropped a 13-minute mini Direct featuring gameplay and a sneak peek at Link’s new abilities.
Tears of the Kingdom, formerly known as The Sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, was originally slated for a 2022 release. (It’s now coming out on May 12th.) Eiji Aonuma, the game’s producer, released a video in March 2022 stating that Nintendo decided to work on the development a little bit longer “in order to make this game’s experience something special.” We can see some of that specialness in today’s gameplay presentation.
Get ready for tomorrow’s Tears of the Kingdom showcase by watching all five previous trailers.
Nintendo is debuting about 10 minutes of gameplay from The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom on Tuesday, and one way I’m preparing is by watching every trailer released for the game so far. I collected all the links so you can, too:
First Look Trailer (June 11th, 2019), E3 2021 Teaser (June 15th, 2021), Launch Timing Update (March 29th, 2022), Official Trailer #1 (September 13th, 2022), Official Trailer #2 (February 8th, 2023).
Now, the real question: will tomorrow’s showcase top the legendary (ha!) Breath of the Wild trailer?
Nintendo’s first $70 game is The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
Image: Nintendo
Following in the footsteps of Sony and Microsoft, Nintendo is venturing into the world of $70 games with The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, according to the game’s eShop page.
Sony made the jump with the release of the PS5 in 2020, meaning PS5 exclusives like Demon’s Souls and Returnal cost that higher price. Microsoft said in December that its “new, built for next-gen, full-priced games” be more expensive moving forward as well, so if you want to buy games like Forza Motorsport, Redfall, and Starfield outright, you’re going to put aside a little more cash. And the era of the $70 game arguably arrived last fall, with third-party games like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II and The Callisto Protocol carrying that higher pricetag.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is the sequel to Breath of the Wild
Image: Nintendo
Nintendo finally revealed the name and launch date for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’s sequel: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. In a trailer, Nintendo revealed the new name and the game’s May 12th, 2023 release date for the Nintendo Switch.
Nintendo didn’t show a lot of specifics about what we can expect in the new trailer, but we did get to see some more action shots of Link in the game. We got a further look at a new Sheikah Slate power that appears to reverse time — Link climbs on top of a rock that begins to fall upwards. Like in a previous trailer, Link takes a few great leaps into the sky, but in one shot, he lands on a new bird-shaped glider of some kind. And there is a brief moment of Link climbing on his own, so it seems as if we’ll be scaling vast vertical obstacles once again.
Nintendo is working on a full sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Nintendo has announced that it’s working on a sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild for the Nintendo Switch, in a surprise announcement at the end of the company’s E3 presentation.
The news was accompanied by a short teaser, which showed the return of the iterations of both Link and Zelda from the previous title exploring a cave, before encountering what looks a whole lot like the corpse of Ganondorf himself beneath Hyrule Castle.
