Zelda occupies a curious place in the series that shares her name; despite it ostensibly being her legend, she’s rarely been playable. Tears of the Kingdom’s initial reveal trailer raised hopes that she might be more of an equal partner at last with the hero Link, but those hopes were dashed once more information began to emerge about Nintendo’s most recent adventure.
Zelda ended up having her own story to follow in Tears of the Kingdom, but the question remains: will she ever be playable? Speaking with producer Eiji Aonuma and director Hidemaro Fujibayashi in a wide-ranging interview shortly before The Game Awards, which will be published in full on Monday, we touched a bit on Zelda’s role within Tears of the Kingdom and the potential for it to grow in the future.
“Yeah, it is interesting when you think about the name of the series, the Legend of Zelda, but Link is always the main character,” Aonuma admitted when asked about the potential for Zelda to be playable in the future. “And Link has been the main character, and Zelda has always been involved, and they have a relationship and their own rules in each of the games. But it is true that, I think there's always room for thinking about this type of thing and Zelda's role. And there may be some sort of possibility for something like that in the future.”
Aonuma, who was speaking through a translator, then interjected in English, “Maybe. Maybe, maybe.”
Warning: This section contains major spoilers for Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom!
Zelda came up more than once in the course of the interview breaking down Tears of the Kingdom, which was met with widespread acclaim when it released earlier this year (we gave it a 10 out of 10 in our review). While she wasn’t playable, she still experienced significant development throughout the story, with a key moment being her decision to transform into an immortal dragon in order to regenerate the Master Sword and convey it to Link.
Asked at what point the team decided to have Zelda become a dragon, Aonuma said that the decision was made “very early on in the planning stage,” with the idea of her carrying the Master Sword coming “probably immediately after that.”
“So this story has this great time paradox as a theme that goes through it,” Fujibayashi said. “And so we were thinking, ‘Okay, well how can we use the Master Sword with that theme as the background and get the Master Sword into Link's hands once he no longer has it?’ And I remember that we, at some point, stumbled onto the dragon being a way that we can deliver the Master Sword to Link in a kind of grand fashion.”
The remarkable part of this twist is that it can be discovered at any number of points throughout the story. Players who decide to uncover all of the memories scattered through the world will eventually uncover the truth, but it’s also possible for an enterprising explorer to make their way to the transformed Zelda relatively early on and discover the Master Sword for themselves (even if they can’t retrieve it right away). This form of non-linear storytelling requires an intricate layer of design work, but if that proved stressful to Tears of the Kingdom’s development team, they’re not admitting it.
“We built the game so that it's an enjoyable experience for the player. And we certainly spent a long time discussing this with some of the main contributors to the game, and really thinking about how we would build the game such that if someone were to, say, discover the dragon without having seen anything else, that we could maybe perhaps conceal it a little bit, make it a little bit mysterious,” Fujibayashi says. “There's a lot of hard work in figuring out how to accomplish all of this. But this is all tied to this idea that there's this certain sense of accomplishment and joy when you're working hard towards something and you unravel this deep mystery. We want the player to be able to enjoy that and for us to be able to enjoy that as well. So in that sense, I would say it's certainly a lot of work. It's certainly a lot of hard work, but it wasn't stressful.”
He added that “in creating this game, we didn't want to create a game where we create the game so that players can't do something because we don't want them to see it. We wanted to create a game where people can explore in their own way.”
But while Aonuma and Fujibayashi were willing to discuss most elements of Tears of the Kingdom’s story, they’re remaining quiet on one persistent fan question. Earlier this year, Zelda voice actor Patricia Summersett seemed to imply that Link and Zelda were in a romantic relationship before walking back her comments. Still, fans continue to speculate on whether Link and Zelda are in fact a couple.
“I will leave it to everyone's imagination [whether Link and Zelda are in a relationship,” Aonuma said. “I don't think that Zelda is a type of game where the development team says, ‘This is what Zelda is, this is what the story is, this is what the game is.’ Everything that the development team wants to convey has already been placed into the game. And the rest is up to the player's imagination, and their reflection on how they feel… what they've experienced in the game.”
Aonuma and Fujibayashi had plenty more to say in our Tears of the Kingdom interview, so stay tuned for the full discussion soon. For more, check out 60 things we loved in Tears of the Kingdom, as well as everything announced at The Game Awards 2023.
Kat Bailey is IGN's News Director as well as co-host of Nintendo Voice Chat. Have a tip? Send her a DM at @the_katbot.
