Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom "Exclusive Edition" Statue Officially Revealed, Here's A Look

Part of my goal in putting together Guiding Key, Kotaku’s year-long Kingdom Hearts book club, is to interrogate how much the memes about Square Enix’s supposedly convoluted Disney and Final Fantasy crossover series have distorted what it actually is. That means seeing just where it is in this 25-year-long journey that Square Enix decided Kingdom Hearts was going to be more than just an anime-inspired jaunt through Disney worlds, and was instead going to become a decades-long epic. And now that I’ve started replaying the original Kingdom Hearts, I want to call out something that was disorienting and even perhaps frightening to me as a child: the tutorial. Immediately after the still-stunning opening cinematic set to Utada Hikaru’s “Simple and Clean,” Sora, our plucky protagonist, falls into an abyss, landing on a giant stained-glass platform adorned with Snow White’s likeness. At this point, Sora hasn’t met her, and won’t meet an actual Disney character for many hours, but he and his allies would return to places that looked like this many times throughout the series. This is the Dive to the Heart, which is essentially a physical space that symbolizes one’s heart.

Image: Square EnixFamitsu has shared the latest look at the Japanese physical gaming charts, and there's another newbie on the podium. Despite not even reaching the podium in the UK, Kingdom Hearts Collection [I~III] nabbed the top spot in Japan, with just 23,411 units to its name. Not all that many sales for a debut, but it was a pretty quiet week out there, with Rhythm Heaven Groove landing in second and last week's champ, Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve flying into third.

Image: Jim Norman / Nintendo LifeAs we tiptoe ever closer to the Ocarina of Time Switch 2 release date, my playthrough of the N64 original continues. Indeed, this week tips me past the halfway point, so there's no turning back. If you missed weeks one through four, I'm revisiting OoT, one dungeon a week, and sharing all the things I loved (and the things I didn't) on my replay.

Every Zelda dungeon runs on the same promise: find a tool, open a door, find a better tool. A whole genre of games borrows that loop without Hyrule’s precise theme music, and every few years one of them, like Tunic or Death’s Door, breaks out and lands on everyone’s recommendation list. This list is for the games that usually don’t make the cut. By the genre’s usual definition, a Zelda-like is an action-adventure game with mandatory puzzle solving, progression gated by new abilities or items, and dungeons that stand apart from the overworld. These nine games hit at least three of those criteria — usually with a bit of an oddball twist. Grab your sword (or yoyo, or large key), it’s time for an adventure! Zelda, but: A girl searches a world of islands for her missing father. At one point, Tilia’s biggest problem was dealing with dirty dishes. Along with her father and sister, Tilia runs the family tavern in Limestone, a village on a small island — until disaster strikes. Pirates raid the island and kidnap her best friend…and then her father, in hot pursuit of the pirates, vanishes outright. Tilia grabs a sword and starts following their trail.

As Nintendo has pulled back the curtain on The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake, we’ve begun to get a better understanding of how this Nintendo Switch 2 exclusive will look and feel to play. IGN has already got you covered with an extensive hands-on preview, as well as a roundup of all the changes we’ve noticed so far compared to the N64 masterpiece. But now, Nintendo has released two new trailers (TV spots for Japan) that, while brief, reveal a tantalizing glimpse at some never-before-seen characters, chief among them Dark Link.[任天堂HP]Nintendo Switch 2 ソフト『ゼルダの伝説 時のオカリナ』のCMを公開しました。#時のオカリナ #ゼルダの伝説40周年https://t.co/Y0gB7x0RUN— 任天堂株式会社 (@Nintendo) October 16, 2026 Warning! Potential spoilers for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake follow… Fans of the original game will know Dark Link well. He’s a shadowy, mirror-image doppelgänger of Link who serves as the mini-boss of Ocarina’s iconic Water Temple. You fight him in a fog-filled room with shallow water and a dead tree in the center, in what is one of the more memorable battles in the game.

How to p*** off Nintendo fans in four words Image: Nintendo LifeWith most upcoming games fleeing from the November release window to avoid Grand Theft Auto VI, Nintendo is bucking the trend with the launch of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on the 5th – two weeks ahead of Rockstar's epic.