Now that 2025 comes to a close, we’re looking at an important year on the horizon for The Legend of Zelda – the franchise’s 40th anniversary. Aside from this fact there’s very little we know about what’s planned, or even what the next Zelda games could be like for the Switch 2, save for one exception. Eiji Aonuma dropped a significant clue last weekend in an in-depth interview he and the other Zelda and Koei Tecmo teams had with 4Gamer. The next Zelda game could be inspired from Age of Imprisonment!
“Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment is the first Zelda title on Nintendo Switch 2. To be honest, we wanted to be the ones to release the ‘first’ one ourselves,” Aonuma laughed. “Still, the inspiration we’ve gained from collaborating with Koei Tecmo like this may be reflected in the next Zelda we create. “Please picture this while playing Age of Imprisonment, and look forward to our next Zelda game.
As the interview went on, both teams shared their unconfined excitement in collaborating to create Age of Imprisonment. The Zelda team wanted to make a Hyrule Warriors game as soon as Tears of the Kingdom released in 2023, but joked in the interview how they needed Koei Tecmo’s pitch first. Then Koei Tecmo sent a pitch to Nintendo immediately after they played Tears of the Kingdom that weekend, the pitch was happily accepted, and ideas flowed naturally from there. Some concepts for Age of Imprisonment were conceived during the development of Tears of the Kingdom and fleshed out even further with the Koei Tecmo team. “it was incredibly fun,” said Hidemaro Fujibayashi, director of Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. “They always had ideas we never would have come up with on our own, it was truly stimulating.”
“It’s humbling for us to receive the first reaction from Nintendo,” said Age of Imprisonment’s director Koki Aoyanagi on their testing experience. Since they were doing a test play, we wanted them to be very surprised and impressed.” Indeed, they were.
Plenty of other juicy tidbits were revealed from the developers during the interview, including who Fujibayashi’s and Aonuma’s favorite Age of Imprisonment characters are, why the Sages were masked in Tears of the Kingdom in the first place, and more. You can read our complete review of Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment here.
