For a long time, the title of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom remained a secret for fear of spoilers, apparently due to the fact that the game once had a different name.
Tears of the Kingdom contains major spoilers, so read at your own risk.
In 2019, Nintendo surprisingly revealed that a sequel to Breath of the Wild was in the works, but at the time it didn’t have a proper name yet. For a good few years, everyone called it either the sequel to Breath of the Wild, as Nintendo usually called it, or Breath of the Wild 2. Finally, in 2022, Nintendo gave it the awesome title Tears of the Kingdom, but a year earlier, the developer said that I didn’t want to reveal it yet because I was afraid of spoiling the fun. I was one of the many people who felt confused at this point, because Tears of the Kingdom as a title doesn’t really mean anything to you. But as revealed in the recently released Master Works book, it turns out that’s because the game had a completely different name quite behind schedule in development.
Manage your cookie settings
For a bit of spoiler context: right at the beginning of the game, when you’re on the tutorial island, you’ll quickly spot a brand novel dragon, a white one with a golden mane, which is of course a bit odd considering there were only three dragons in Breath of the Wild. As it turns out, thanks to some time travel and other shenanigans, that dragon is Zelda herself. And as translated Nintendo EverythingMaster Works revealed that the game was originally titled “Tears of the Dragon,” but series producer Eiji Aonuma was concerned that it would “emphasize the character of Light Dragon.”
Aonuma continued, “It would have been a problem to share that Light Dragon is Zelda, and that also affected the title. One of the candidates for the title that ended up being “Tears of the Dragon.” But putting the keyword “Dragon” in the title would have been a bad idea, and we wanted to have dragon patterns in the logo, but we decided otherwise. After all, it would have emphasized Light Dragon (laughs). But we couldn’t think of anything else good, and we were running out of time to develop…
“We went through a lot of words until one staff member suggested, ‘What about Kingdom?’ With ‘Tears of the Kingdom,’ it seemed like the phrase could connect to Light Dragon, and we could use dragons in the logo. Once we settled on the title, the logo eventually became what it is now.”
While there aren’t many spoilers here at first, considering this game’s memories are all through tears and they all involve Zelda, it’d probably be easier to connect the dots than it would be in the final title.
Tears of the Kingdom was released just last year, but Nintendo already has another one in the works, Echoes of Wisdom. It’s the first game in the series in which players take on the role of the titular Princess Zelda.
