Nintendo Giving Away Zelda Book That Used To Be In Special Edition

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, successor to 2017's Breath of the Wild, is out soon. And while there’s a big fancy collector’s edition of the sequel available, which includes a book, Nintendo is this week taking the time to revisit the original, releasing for free a book called The Explorer’s Guide.

It used to be the whole point of the special Explorer’s Edition of the game, but with Breath of the Wild now six years old Nintendo figures we’ve all explored quite enough, thank you, and so instead of the book helping us find our way around a post-apocalyptic Hyrule for the first time, it can now help us remember the good times instead.

As Polygon report, Nintendo have released the book as a pdf on their company site, and you can read/download it here. It’s...OK? I mean it’s typical limited edition filler, in that it’s not useful enough to be a true guide, there’s not enough art for it to be an art book and it’s not specific enough to be the game’s manual.

It’s still a nice little thing to thumb through though, even after all these years, though weirdly not the whole book has been uploaded. For reasons known only to Nintendo, pages 73-84 are missing, an omission that’s not for plot reasons because there are spoiler warnings present on pages that did make the cut (If you’ve got this book at home from 2017 and can tell us what’s on the pages, that’d be great!).

If you want to check it out, note that most of the book is dedicated to explaining the broad concepts of Breath of the Wild’s open world design to newcomers, and so may not be the most interesting thing you’ll read today, but the intro section is still fun, if only because Nintendo had to try and wrangle the series’ convoluted timelines and history into a couple of concise pages!