For a long time, the title of The Legend of Zelda: Kingdom Come was kept secret for fear of spoilers, and apparently because it used to have a different name.
The following content contains major spoilers for “The Kingdom of Tears”, so please read at your own risk.
Back in 2019, Nintendo accidentally revealed that a sequel to Breath of the Wild was in the works, but it didn’t have an official name at the time. For years, everyone just called it the sequel to Breath of the Wild (which is what Nintendo usually calls it), or Breath of the Wild 2. Finally, in 2022, Nintendo gave it the awesome name Kingdom of Tears, but a year ago, the developer said they didn’t want to reveal the name yet for fear of spoiling the game. I was one of the many people who was confused by this, as the title Kingdom of Tears doesn’t really tell you anything. But as the recently released book Masterworks reveals, it turns out that’s because the game had a completely different name late in development.
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Spoiler alert: At the beginning of the game, when you’re on the tutorial island, you’ll quickly spot a brand new dragon, a white dragon with a golden mane, which is obviously a bit odd since there are only three dragons in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. It turns out, through some time travel and other shenanigans, that dragon is none other than Zelda herself. According to a translation by Nintendo Everything, Master Works revealed that the game was originally titled “Dragon’s Tears,” but series producer Eiji Aonuma was concerned that it would “emphasize the dragon of light.”
Aonuma continued, “It would have been a problem if it had been accidentally revealed that the Dragon of Light was Zelda, and that also had an impact on the title. One of the candidate titles that was ultimately killed was Dragon’s Tears. However, it wasn’t a good idea to put the keyword ‘dragon’ in the title, and we originally wanted to put a dragon pattern in the logo, but decided not to do so in the end. After all, it would have emphasized the Dragon of Light (laughs). But we couldn’t think of any other good ideas, and we were running out of time for development…
“We thought of many words, and at one point a staff member suggested, ‘How about a kingdom?’ With ‘Tears of the Kingdom,’ we felt that the phrase could be connected to the dragon of light, and we could use a dragon in the logo. Once the title was decided, the logo ended up being what it is now.”
Without going into too much spoiler territory at first, considering you make memories through tears in this game, and all of them are Zelda-related, it might be easier to connect the two than its eventual title.
Kingdom of Tears was just released last year, but Nintendo is already preparing to release another game, Echoes of Wisdom, which is the first game in the series where players can play as Princess Zelda.
