Huge Tears of the Kingdom book reveals 8 scrapped Princess Zelda redesigns, and a loving Rauru and Sonia scene

Nintendo has revealed early concept art for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’s redesigned Princess Zelda, and fans are having a normal one.

Nintendo recently tweeted out the post below, announcing that it would be revealing several new Tears of the Kingdom merchandise items for the game’s upcoming anniversary on May 12. Among the merch is a new ‘Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Masterworks’ book, a hefty 464-page tome that delves into the making of the smash-hit Zelda sequel.

[トピックス]もうすぐ『ゼルダの伝説　ティアーズオブザキングダム』発売から1周年。「ゼルダの伝説」関連グッズをご紹介。https://t.co/TS3wzEqLNxhttps://t.co/TS3wzEqLNxMay 10, 2024

The website link above gives a short preview of the Masterworks book, showing off concept art of scrapped character iterations that didn’t make it into the final game. Notably, there are more eight versions of Princess Zelda, each with different hair, which you can see in the screenshot of the Tears of the Kingdom Masterworks book just below.

Zelda fans are reacting to this with varying levels of excitement. “I am charmed, captivated, enthralled, dazzled, fascinated, mesmerized, spellbound and utterly bewitched,” writes one user of short-hair Zelda. “This is one of the first times where the final design is probably my favorite one?? Some of these are so cool though I love her,” wrote another fan.

“This one looks like shes gonna call the manager,” adds another user, singling out the bottom-right corner Zelda design. For all the enthusiasm of the new concept art reveals, there is an overriding sense of relief that Nintendo narrowly avoided turning Zelda into a Karen.

Elsewhere, there’s a lot of tears shed for the concept art just below of Rauru and Sonia. Both are members of the Zonai people in Tears of the Kingdom, and while we won’t spoil anything here, there’s a pretty significant reason everyone’s in tears at them happily embracing.