New Trailer for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Confirms the Reappearance of Horses
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is the much anticipated sequel to 2017’s The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Considering that the game will release on May 12th 2023 – just over three months away at time of writing – we know relatively little about what the game will offer and what changes will be made from its predecessor.
Official Trailer #2, released during Nintendo Direct on February 8th, confirms one TMQ-relevant inclusion: Horses will be back in Tears of the Kingdom. Horses, or one specific horse?
The trailer contains no information on the steeds beyond including a few shots that features link riding across a Hylian field on horseback. Potentially noteworthy: the horse appears to be the same in all three shots and sports a dark brown coat and light mane – dare we hope that Link’s “canonical” horse companion Epona will be an actual part of this game again?
Sorry for the garbage video-grab image…
…but that horse is definitely Epona-colored
In Breath of the Wild, the player could tame wild horses all across the game world, thereby getting horses with better or worse stats and in different colors. Epona, Link’s trusted mare from previous iterations of the series – she’s most prominently featured in Ocarina of Time and Twilight Princess – was relegated to purchaseable bonus content in the form of an Amiibo.
Both collectible horses with individual characteristics and a canonical horse companion have their advantages for a game, and different players will prefer different approaches. I’ve made my case (and elaborated on my preferences) on the subject a while ago in this article:
The trailer teases other modes of transport, such as potentially player-built vehicles (?) on land and in mid-air, as well as the hang-glider we know from Breath of the Wild. It’s safe to say that horse riding won’t be the only way to cover distances in Tears of the Kingdom.
Both the idea of an official Epona reappearance (perhaps she’ll play a role in the narrative and be featured in cutscenes again?😍) as well as the potential iteration of the BotW wild horses are exciting to me. One page from the Breath of the Wild concept art book suggests that ideas for additional horse interactions were floating around during development back in the day – and who knows, perhaps one of these was revisited for Tears of the Kingdom.
The fact that the horse in this trailer is Epona-colored* at least makes me suspect that she will not be DLC-exclusive content this time around, which I found rather a shame last time.
*As for “what color is Epona, actually?”, that question is harder to answer than you might think, I found this wonderful tumblr post on the subject. The popular guesses are chocolate palomino, silver bay and flaxen chestnut, most likely with some retconning going on between different iterations where she gets and loses black points.
At the moment we can only speculate, even though the game’s release is just about three months away. Would you prefer Epona as a single canonical companion horse, or for the stats and bonding mechanics of BotW to return? How cool would it be if there were a combination of both, where you would have to first gain Epona’s trust or even train her?
I’m trying not to expect a ton of new horse gameplay in Tears of the Kingdom – but at the very least, we now know the game isn’t going to do away with them entirely, and I’m already glad for that much.
Outside of the genre of “horse games”, there are plenty of games in which one or multiple horses are a secondary feature. The horses in games like The Witcher, The Legend of Zelda, Assassin’s Creed or Red Dead Redemption have varying depths of gameplay and serve purposes such as being a means of transport, an important Non-Playable Character or one of many collectible items. Broadly speaking, most implementations of horses in video games fit into one of two categories: Companion Horses and Collectible Horses.