Forget a Tears of the Kingdom Sequel: Nintendo Wants to Surprise Zelda Fans

Nintendo isn’t planning to make a second Tears of the Kingdom. The next The Legend of Zelda game should surprise players with new ideas.

Breath of the Wild transformed The Legend of Zelda series, and Tears of the Kingdom expanded on its formula with even more freedom and complex gameplay systems. But Hidemaro Fujibayashi doesn’t intend to reuse that same foundation. The development director wants future games to offer fresh ideas rather than simply improve on the approaches used in the last two titles.

When discussing ideas with his team, Fujibayashi often returns to a simple question: “Will this be fun?” He encourages designers to look beyond mechanics used not only in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, but also in classics such as Ocarina of Time. Developers shouldn’t limit themselves to the ideas the series has accumulated over decades.

That doesn’t mean Nintendo will abandon everything it developed for Tears of the Kingdom. But Fujibayashi’s comments make clear that the next Zelda shouldn’t be a safe sequel to the second game. It’s an ambitious challenge: the studio will have to find a new way to surprise an audience whose series has already redefined adventure games several times.