Before the game was announced during E3's 2019 Nintendo Direct, Nintendo went to great lengths to keep the game's development a secret. Not only was the press kept in the dark, but even some of Nintendo's employees didn't learn about the game's existence until it was announced in the Direct.
Within its first three days of release, Tears of the Kingdom has sold 10 million copies, becoming the fastest-selling entry in The Legend of Zelda franchise, while simultaneously the fastest-selling Nintendo Switch game in the Americas, as well as the fastest-selling Nintendo game for any system in this territory.
Princess Zelda's voice actresses voice both her and Phantom Ganon when he's disguised as her in all territories.
Joe Hernandez and Elizabeth Maxwell return to voice Yunobo and Riju respectively, and also voice their ancestors, the Sages of Fire and Lightning.
Sean Chiplock voices the Sage of Wind, and also voices his returning characters from the previous game, Teba and the Great Deku Tree (though the former is only heard grunting in this game).
While Zelda's sage element in Ocarina of Time was not stated, Zelda being the Sage of Time is a popular piece of fanon since, in that game, she used her abilities as a sage to send Link back in time. While this incarnation of Zelda is not her OoT counterpart, she is made the Sage of Time here, canonizing the theory to an extent, since the other Sages retain their predecessor's titles. The one exception is Riju who is given the brand new, but not unexpected title of Sage of Lightning.
The jewel that Ganondorf wears on his forehead in most of his appearances has long been theorized by fans to be magical in some fashion, usually serving as either a source or amplifier for the magic powers he has outside the Triforce. In this game, the jewel is Queen Sonia's Secret Stone, which Ganondorf steals after killing her, magnifying his powers and turning him into the Demon King.
Beam Me Up, Scotty!: The 2nd Official Trailer ends with Zelda saying "Please...lend him your power". However, there was some initial public confusion over the line, as some thought they heard the line as "Please...lend me your power". The official captions for the 2nd Trailer confirmed it was the former. Even so, some still think Zelda said "lend me" instead of "lend him".
Around 3 months before the release, the artbook got leaked, showing elements that included outfits, locations, materials, enemies, and characters.
Shortly after the final trailer a TV advertisement was leaked, showing Link in an underground area, and confirming that the 3 headed dragon seen in the trailers is indeed a Gleeok.
A couple weeks before release, the entire game was leaked when some people received physical copies early and proceeded to stream it on platforms like Discord and Twitch, and release the ROM for download.
The leaks for the game were so widespread, that it even caused the temporary lockdown of this page, along with other Tears of the Kingdom related Tropes pages (Wild Mass Guessing, the Game's main page).
In earlier versions of the previous game, the Sailcloth was used to glide (possibly removed or simply used as a placeholder until a glider was modeled). In the sequel, there is a version of the glider based on the Sailcloth, bringing things full circle.
The announcement trailer at E3 2019 showed Link and Zelda being accompanied by an odd-looking beast of burden that was somewhere between an ox and a dinosaur. While the game begins with Link and Zelda already deep beneath Hyrule castle, the creature seems to still be in the game as the dondons, a rare species of creature in Faron that Zelda set up a sanctuary for; investigating rumors of Zelda riding a 'strange beast' in the Faron region as part of the Lucky Clover Gazette questline points you to this sanctuary.
One idea for the Sheikah Slate in the previous game was for it to talk as Link's Fairy Companion, but it was dropped and left silent. Here, Mineru possesses the Purah Pad as per Zelda's request and briefly talks to Link through it leading up the the Temple of Spirit.
Distanced from Current Events: The Nintendo Direct that revealed this game's final title was livestreamed worldwide... except for in the United Kingdom, due to Queen Elizabeth II having passed away a mere five days prior. Instead, the Direct was made available on-demand. A climactic reveal of a game whose subtitle is Tears of the Kingdom would've come off as tasteless during the Royal Family's period of mourning.
With Star Wars Jedi: Survivor: Both are 3rd person action-adventure games focusing on sword-based combat and exploration, with Survivor taking on more Wide-Open Sandbox elements compared to its predecessor which invited comparisons to Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. Upon its release a few weeks prior to Zelda, Survivor received positive reception that was tempered by criticism of its numerous technical issues including bugs and poor performance despite releasing exclusively on 9th generation consoles and PC. On the other hand Tears of the Kingdom received praise for its complex physics engine and mostly smooth performance despite running on under-powered hardware, with many favorably contrasting it with Jedi Survivor and other poorly-optimized releases around the same time.
With Final Fantasy XVI. Both are action-adventure fantasy games releasing in mid-2023 exclusively on competing consoles (Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 5), with both of them being the long-awaited latest installments in juggernaut video game series. Even their predecessor games (The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Final Fantasy XV) were only released months apart from one another. However, Final Fantasy XVI is a Bloodier and Gorier and Darker and Edgier installment of its franchise, being the first main-series game with the M rating (17+) in North America and the PEGI 18 rating in Europe, while Tears of the Kingdom, despite also being dark at times, has the E10+ rating in North America and the PEGI 12 rating in Europe.
Dummied Out: Tears of the Kingdom's hidden XP system has been set up with a fifth tier of enemies in mind, akin to the gold enemies in Master Mode for Breath of the Wild. However, as of September 6th, the development team has quit on the gamenote specifically it "feels that they have exhausted all possibilities for creating new gameplay"; thus, these slots in the enemy-scaling system go unused.
Irony as She Is Cast: Ganondorf is consistently depicted as a Walking Shirtless Scene in this game, giving him far more attractive aspects to his character than his previous incarnations. In the English localization, he's voiced by Matthew Mercer, who hates being shirtless in real life due to having body dysmorphic disorder ever since he was a child.
Meme Acknowledgement: Cristina Valenzuela has acknowledged the players' eagerness to torture Koroks on Twitter. She even admitted that she accidentally got in on the action herself, having crashed a Korok-attached horse-drawn carriage into a fire fruit plant, causing the carriage to blow up and set her horse ablaze.
Missing Trailer Scene: Several shots from the initial E3 2019 teaser are not present or are changed in the final game, though given the four years between the releases, it's surprising that the overall structure of the scene was still the same.
Zelda was shown riding on a bull-like creature while exploring the depths of Hyrule Castle, with later shots showing the creature drinking from a pond and the three traveling across a bridge. By the final game, the creature in question has been scrapped and is nowhere to be seen in the prologue. The bridge scene is also not present. The creature itself is present in the game as the Dondon.
The entirety of the Mystical Cave is absent, and Link and Zelda are instead only shown in a strange temple like area.
The spectral hand holding down Ganondorf's corpse is not shown grabbing Link's hand in the same way as in the teaser, and the shot itself is not present.
The flash of light that splayed the wall with Ganondorf's mummified shadow is not present.
The Gloom consuming a rat is never shown in the game.
You can clearly see that the secret stones are not present on either Ganondorf's head or on Rauru's spectral hand.
The spectral hand fusing to Link's own hand is not present in the trailer, and you can clearly that his arm is not dessicated by the Gloom.
Ganondorf's finger twitch foreshadowing his revival is absent.
Permanent Placeholder: According to an interview with Polygon, the Ascend ability started out as a debug tool so that developers could get out of caves quickly, and wasn't to be included in the final game. It was put into the game properly after director Hidemaro Fujibayashi realized how tedious it was to backtrack out of caves after completing them.
Posthumous Credit: Elena Shulman, the Russian voice of Impa, died in a car accident after recording Impa's vocal effects a month before the game's release.
Promoted Fanboy: Matthew Mercer has been a huge fan of The Legend of Zelda series since he was a child, and got his start playing Ganondorf in his webseries There Will Be Brawl. A decade and a half later, he'd go on to officially voice Ganondorf in Tears of the Kingdom.
Refitted for Sequel: Tears of the Kingdom realizes a lot of ideas that the Zelda developers had tried to implement in the past past Zelda games but never saw the light of day, because (a) they were part of cancelled games, (b) they were cut from released games, or (c) made into a released game but significantly cut back from the original idea.
The original plan for The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword was to allow seamless travel between the Sky and the Surface, but the technical limitations of the Wii forced the developers to implement the cloud barrier with finite portals between the Sky and the Surface.
In a manner very similar to that of Super Mario Galaxy 2, the game was the result of the development team having too many ideas for Breath of the Wild DLC, some of which would have required significant changes to the overworld in order to realize.
Link building a party of Sage Avatars to assist him on his adventure recalls an unused party system concept planned for Zelda II: The Adventure of Link.
In The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, the Sages' Medallions were going to grant Link additional powers instead of just serving as Plot Coupons; while the functionality was Dummied Out in that game, Tears of the Kingdom would finally implement it.
Tears of the Kingdom shares a concept with Ura Zelda, a planned Nintendo 64DD expansion for Ocarina of Time that would have used the same overworld but with entirely new quests, story, and dungeons. The expansion was cancelled due to the 64DD’s commercial failure, and later partially resurrected in the form of Ocarina of Time Master Quest, which merely altered the dungeons to make them more challenging, so it took until Tears of the Kingdom for Ura's concept to be fully implemented.
The first game's original concept for Tarrey Town was that you were able to create each building's layout from scratch, hence why every house has a cubical "building block" design. This scrapped mechanic was finally implemented for a side quest in this game, in which you get to design your own house in the style of the town’s architecture.
Release Date Change: The game was originally slated for a 2022 release in the E3 2021 teaser trailer, before it was announced in March 2022 that the game would be delayed to Spring of 2023, which would later be solidified as May 2023 in the September 2022 Nintendo Direct.
Sequel Gap: This game was released a little over six years after its predecessor, which is the longest gap between the two mainline games in the series.
Shrug of God: When asked in a Famitsu interview about the timeline placement of King Rauru's Kingdom of Hyrule in relation to the events of Skyward Sword given both claim to tell the story of Hyrule's foundation, director Hidemaro Fujibayashi commented that it was possible that, like in Spirit Tracks, Rauru's Kingdom of Hyrule was preceded by a previous iteration—that of the previous games—that fell into ruin and was forgotten save for a few old myths and legends. However, he did not frame this as a definitive statement, and encouraged fans to keep discussing and debating the subject.
Unspecified Role Credit: The game's credits list the voice actors for all the available voiced languages but doesn't state which character they voiced (though you can piece together the voice actors for a few characters since their placement on the credits is mostly consistent between languages).
Urban Legend of Zelda: The Rito bard NPC Kass was subject to this during the the Content Leak period before the official release. Due to his popularity, many people took his return for granted, only for that to not be the case. This led to many "leakers" claiming Kass was indeed in the game, but never with any visual proof to corroborate their words. Related to this, a screenshot circulated that showed Penn (another Rito NPC) claiming to be Kass◊. While Penn does have a connection to Kass in the game (after completing the Lucky Clover Gazette questline, he calls Kass an inspiration and relocates to the bard's outpost on Washa's Bluff) this piece of dialog never appears in the game and the image is simply photoshopped, as can be told by the solid black box behind the words. However, with the confirmation that there will be no DLC for the game, it is unclear if Kass's fate will ever be touched upon more fully.
What Could Have Been: Ganondorf's infamously memetic Slasher Smile almost didn't make it into the game, as director Hidemaro Fujibayashi considered hiding his facial expressions when he's in the act of killing Queen Sonia. He eventually realized that it was an integral and meaningful part of depicting Ganondorf's character, and kept it in.
The Hyrule Castle that is seen in Breath of the Wild and this game helped Rauru's purification powers to keep Ganondorf sealed for over 10,000 years, but it isn't the same castle that Rauru and Sonia lived in during their era.
The reason Rauru's seal had weakened by the time of this game is because Calamity Ganon's actions in Breath of the Wild severely weakened his body to the point where only his arm was left.
Before Ganondorf came to power, there were still evil beings throughout Ancient Hyrule, and Rauru and Sonia worked hard to eradicate them. The shrines that appear throughout the world were put down where demons were previously defeated so that they wouldn't ever reappear. The Lightroots serve a similar purpose in the Depths.
You Sound Familiar: Amelia Gotham, who previously voiced Mipha in Breath of the Wild, portrays the Sage of Water in this game. This also makes it a case of Identical Grandson, considering the Sage of Water is Sidon's ancestor, meaning she's by extension one for Mipha as well.
, the Ascend ability started out as a debug tool so that developers could get out of caves quickly, and wasn't to be included in the final game. It was put into the game properly after director Hidemaro Fujibayashi realized how tedious it was to backtrack out of caves after completing them.
