For a long while The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’s title was a secret for fear of spoilers, and that’s apparently because it used to have a different name.
Big spoilers ahead for Tears of the Kingdom, so read at your own peril.
Back 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. For a good few years everyone just referred to it either as the sequel to Breath of the Wild, which is what Nintendo generally referred to it as, or Breath of the Wild 2. Eventually, in 2022, Nintendo gave it its great title, Tears of the Kingdom, but a year prior the developer had said they didn’t want to reveal it yet for fear of spoiling the game. I was one of the many people that felt confused by that point, as Tears of the Kingdom as a title doesn’t really tell you anything. But as revealed in the recently released Master Works book, it turns it that it’s because the game had a completely different name quite late into development.
For some spoilery context: right at the start of the game, when you’re on the tutorial island, you’ll quite quickly spot a brand new dragon, a white one with a golden mane, obviously something that’s a bit curious considering there were only three dragons in Breath of the Wild. As it turns out, through some time travel and other shenanigans, that dragon is Zelda herself. And as translated by Nintendo Everything, Master Works has revealed that the game was originally called “Tears of the Dragon,” but series producer Eiji Aonuma was worried it would “emphasise the Light Dragon.”
Aonuma continued, “Letting it slip that the Light Dragon is Zelda would have been a problem, and this had an effect on the title too. One of the candidates for the title that made it to end was ‘Tears of the Dragon’. But it would be a bad idea to have the keyword ‘Dragon’ in the title, and we wanted to have dragon patterns in the logo, but decided otherwise. It’d emphasize the Light Dragon, after all (laughs). But nothing else good was coming to mind, and we were running out of development time…
“We went through many words, and then one time a staff member suggested, ‘What about Kingdom?’ With ‘Tears of the Kingdom’, it felt like the phrase could connect to the Light Dragon to us, and we could use dragons in the logo. With the title decided, the logo finally became what it is now.”
While it’s still not overly spoilery at the outset, considering the way you find memories in this game is through tears, and all of them being about Zelda, it’d probably be easier to put two and two together than with the title it ended up with.
Tears of the Kingdom only came out just last year, but Nintendo already has another one lined-up in the form of Echoes of Wisdom, the first game in the series where you get to play as the titular Princess Zelda herself.
