I’m just gonna say it; I’m not impressed with this year’s official Legend of Zelda calendar. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still planning on proudly displaying it in my room but, at the same time, I can’t help but compare it to the designs of previous years. The 2025 calendar features official art from Tears of the Kingdom, and while I enjoy the detailed illustrations of each character, I wish there was a little bit more variety. Past calendars incorporated a similar design of only featuring one character per month, however, the difference between those past designs and the 2025 design has to do with variety and color usage.
Let’s look at the 2016 calendar for reference. While the 2016 calendar is creatively stunted compared to the designs of other years, it still is (in my opinion) way more innovative than this year’s calendar. The 2016 calendar presents single characters for each month’s artwork, however, they are from multiple games and each have their own unique colored background. The games featured include Twilight Princess, Skyward Sword, The Wind Waker HD, A Link Between Worlds, Majora’s Mask, Phantom Hourglass, and Ocarina of Time. That’s artwork from seven Zelda games! The 2025 edition only features art from Tears of the Kingdom and each illustration has the same green and black color scheme. Meanwhile, the 2015 calendar incorporated different hues of blue, green, yellow, red, and purple, making it visually more appealing to look at.
After 2016, the featured monthly artwork became much more immersive. Instead of single characters being the only focal point of each month, we were now treated to poster-worthy artwork that’s much more fun to look at. And again, each year hosted illustrations from multiple Zelda games, with the exception of 2023 which, for some reason, only showcased artwork from Breath of the Wild (a bold choice considering the game was 6 years old by that point). While I prefer a Zelda calendar to feature art and characters from multiple games, at least the 2023 calendar had the audacity to present a creative blend of single character months and months with full detailed scenes that remind you of the game’s gameplay and story.
Now, I understand that the 2025 Zelda calendar exclusively features illustrations from Tears of the Kingdom probably because it didn’t get any representation in 2023, but I still don’t understand why that was the case for 2024. Last year’s calendar had artwork from multiple games with an iconic piece of Tears of the Kingdom artwork in December. Why wasn’t Tears of the Kingdom represented more in the months for last year? We’ll probably never know the answer to that.
I’m also disappointed that Echoes of Wisdom wasn’t featured at all in this year’s calendar, but I theorize that next year’s calendar will either be exclusively Echoes of Wisdom, or a creative blend of multiple games with Echoes of Wisdom being the more prominent. We’ll just have to until 2026 to hopefully see some Echoes of Wisdom representation!
