The Legend Of Zelda

This page is not about the original game that gave the series its name. It is the record of what we reported on the Zelda series across one particular stretch: the years when Nintendo had a new Zelda in development for the Wii U, then a console it would only call the NX, then a Nintendo Switch that launched alongside Breath of the Wild, the game our later stories record on both Wii U and Switch. Eight news stories cover that stretch, and one guide sits beside them for a different game altogether. Read on their own, the stories are scattered headlines. Read in the order below, they are a single arc, so this page puts them in sequence and says at each step what Nintendo had said and what we were reporting.

A note on dates. Most of these stories are older than the dates shown on them, so the only reliable dating is what each one says about itself: a console name, a trade show, a month. Where a story pins itself to a date, the table says so. Where it does not, it is placed by the event it reports.

Stories five to eight all belong to the stretch after the Switch arrived, and nothing in their text settles which came first, so they are grouped rather than ranked. Story five leads that group only because it is the one that looks back at the launch month itself.

Before the NX had a name: who would make the next Zelda

The earliest story here predates the whole console question. Fans had been hoping that Retro Studios, the Metroid Prime team, would be handed the much-rumoured mature Zelda for the Wii U, and our report on Shigeru Miyamoto's answer closed that door. Retro was busy on something he would not name, and his reasoning is worth reading in full: the Zelda team has always worked closely with whoever is building a Zelda, coordinating that with a studio in the United States would be hard, and he would have to be deeply involved himself, to the point of joking that he would need to move to Texas. Our writer took it as Retro being chalked off Zelda for Wii U and asked readers whether Nintendo should be pushed towards a more western take on the series anyway.

The mystery console and the missing date

The next story is the one that gives this page its question. Nintendo had confirmed a console it called only the NX and said almost nothing about it, while promising it was not a Wii U replacement. Satoru Iwata, still president at the time, put it in terms of installed hardware: with so many 3DS and Wii U units already in homes, it would be inefficient to stop making games for them the moment the NX launched. Our analysis of whether Zelda Wii U was being deliberately delayed read that carefully. It did not say the two machines would run in parallel, only that Wii U support would not be cut off, and the likelier outcome was an NX that started level with the Wii U and retired it over a year or two.

What made a delay plausible was arithmetic. Nintendo had said it expected the NX to sell around 20 million in its first year, and a target that size needs a launch title people already want. The new Zelda was known to exist, had not been shown at that year's E3, and was absent from the company's financial listings for 2016. The piece stops short of calling it an exclusive, because Nintendo had already confirmed the game for Wii U, but it lays out the middle path: a parallel release with certain features held back for the newer hardware. It also records what Nintendo had said about the game itself, that it was a main entry rather than a spin-off, and it sets the bar the game would have to clear at Ocarina of Time.

Spring 2016: a golden handheld and an E3 with one game

Two stories share the spring of 2016, and their text does put them in order: the handheld first, then the leak. The lighter one is the 3DS XL Hyrule Edition, a gold system with the Hyrule Crest embossed on its front panel, dated to March 24, 2016, one day before Hyrule Warriors: Legends reached North America and Europe. The handheld shipped without the game. Legends itself was a Nintendo and Koei Tecmo 3DS port of the Wii U Hyrule Warriors, carrying Story, Free, Challenge and Adventure modes, with download codes in the box for Skull Kid, Tetra and Toon Link among others. It is a reminder that while the main series waited, the Zelda name was still reaching shelves through Hyrule Warriors.

The heavier one answers the delay question from the previous section. A leak ahead of E3 2016 said the NX would not appear at the show at all, would be discussed later in the year and would launch in March 2017, and that the new Zelda would be the only game Nintendo brought to the conference. Our report on the NX skipping E3 is blunt about the mood: Iwata had died the previous year, and a company whose past few conferences had been full of games now looked to have one title. Zelda was still due that year and still a launch title for the NX, which left anyone waiting to play it on the new hardware looking at roughly 300 more days. Counting 300 days back from a March 2017 launch lands in late spring 2016, which is what places this story after the handheld. The same story notes Nintendo's promise that the NX would not be sold at a loss, and points out that a console still needs games to sell it, however popular Zelda is.

March 2017: the launch, and the publisher who blamed it

The delay resolved the way the leak said it would. Our later stories describe a Nintendo Switch that launched alongside Breath of the Wild, and record the game as released in March 2017 on both Wii U and Switch. The leak had attached exactly that month and that launch title to the NX; the three later stories that name a console at all simply call it the Switch. For the game itself, our Breath of the Wild hub holds our guides for it; this page stays with the reporting.

The strangest story in the set is a Mass Effect story as much as a Zelda one. Asked on Game Informer's Anthem episode whether Mass Effect Andromeda had been given a fair shot, Andromeda developer Mark Darrah said it had launched in perhaps the busiest month the industry had seen, with five RPGs in the same window, and named Zelda. Our response to EA blaming Zelda for Andromeda, written with a bad launch month, poor reception in the following months and a bad year for the game already on the record, takes the claim apart: the only major RPG released in March 2017 was Breath of the Wild, the other big releases that month were Nier Automata plus Ghost Recon Wildlands, and Zelda is an action adventure before it is an RPG. The piece then lists what actually sank Andromeda, from the facial animations that produced the tired-face meme and the problems early EA Access players reported, to EA dropping support early and Kotaku's account of a five year development on an engine built for shooters, with most of the game rebuilt within a year and a half after much of it was scrapped. The story carries a later update in which Darrah conceded the game was flawed while calling reviewers harsh.

After the launch: ports, the next game and the hiring

The remaining three stories come from the same period as the Andromeda piece, when Breath of the Wild was out and the question had become what Nintendo would do next. Their text does not order them, so take them as one stretch.

The first is a rumour and is presented as one. Grezzo, the studio that had already brought Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask to 3D, posted a job listing asking for people with HD experience in Unity and Unreal to work on a Legend game, and a VGCultureHQ report read that as older Zelda titles, possibly Majora's Mask, Ocarina of Time and Skyward Sword, heading to the Switch. Our report on the HD Zelda rumour tells readers to treat it with a grain of salt until Nintendo says otherwise. The same story rounds up what was happening around Breath of the Wild at the time: a multiplayer mod by Fooni, shown on a Discord server and only runnable through the CEMU emulator because neither console allows modding, Nintendo's continuing updates and DLC, and Eiji Aonuma's word that a sequel was a long way off while the team was still thinking about it.

The second is Aonuma again, this time on the hardware. Our story on the next Zelda being built for Switch reports his view that the follow-up to Breath of the Wild would most likely arrive on the Switch and be designed to use everything the hybrid console offers, which the previous game could not, because it had not been made primarily for that machine. He gave no date and no details, and our writer's reading was that the game was years away. The story frames the decision with the platform picture as it stood: Twilight Princess had straddled GameCube and Wii, Breath of the Wild had straddled Wii U and Switch, and the Switch had passed 18 million units with 20 million expected by 2019, numbers being compared with the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 rather than with other handhelds.

The third is the closest thing to confirmation. A Twitter user called BlackKite posted a Nintendo recruitment page for level designers on the Zelda series, and our report on the level designer hiring lays out what the job covered: events, dungeons and the field, from proposals and specifications through adjustment and implementation, plus the same for enemies, with console production experience and Japanese language skills preferred. The story sets that against how Breath of the Wild was doing, including four wins at the 21st DICE Awards that February, decided by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences' 30,000 voting members, and concludes that Nintendo was working on the series with more intensity, not less.

The one guide in the set: Tri Force Heroes bosses

Alongside the news sits a single piece of play content, and it is for a different game. Tri Force Heroes is a Zelda built around three Links stacking into totems, and our Tri Force Heroes boss battle guide walks fourteen boss entries across its eight worlds, from the Electric Blob King in the Woodlands to The Lady at the end. The through line is height: nine of the fourteen entries call for a totem somewhere in the fight, and four of those start with a two-Link totem and need a taller one as the boss grows or its weak point rises out of reach. Beyond that, the tools change with the world: the Water Rod to force the Electric Blob Queen back to the surface, the Gripshot to pull Arrghus's eyes, the Fire Gloves against Freezlord and Blizzagia, the Gust Jar to return the Hinnox Brothers' bombs, and the Boomerang to bring Vulture Vizier's head down.

Two details help before you open it. World 5's Lady's Pets are reworked versions of Margoma, Moldorm and Arrghus, so the guide points you back to those three entries rather than repeating them, and Vulture Vizier is the one fight the guide says needs only two Links. The guide also mentions our challenges guide and costume material locations for the same game; neither is on the site today, so those references are plain text.

Where to go from here

If you came for history, read the eight stories in the table's order and the arc holds together: a studio ruled out, a console with no name, a delay argued from a missing date, a leak that named the month, a launch that a rival publisher found convenient to blame, and then rumours, a producer's promise and a job page pointing at whatever comes next. If you came for help playing, this archive is the wrong door. Our Breath of the Wild guides cover the game these stories were waiting for, and our Tears of the Kingdom guides are the other Zelda we cover in the same depth.