The latest trailer for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom adds more fuel to the fire of speculation that there will be a whole underworld to explore.
Fans have been theorizing about a vast underworld in Tears of the Kingdom since it was first announced as simply the ‘sequel to Breath of the Wild’, when the first trailer focused on Link and Zelda entering a cave where someone’s mummified remains. – presumably Ganondorf – were sealed. Given that much of the surface world we saw in Tears of the Kingdom looks quite similar to the Hyrule we saw in Breath of the Wild, everyone is hoping for a little more, and an underworld beyond- above all those places in the sky might just be the ticket.
The latest Nintendo Direct trailer contains some hints about the underground areas. There’s a shot where a Hinox is chasing Link through a small cave, but maybe you could justify it as a bigger cave. There’s a more compelling shot (opens in a new tab) later where Link attacks a rock golem with a hammer, but although this cave is much larger, it still seems possible that it’s another region of the world.
It’s much harder to ignore the wide shot at the start of the trailer, where we see a Bokoblin extracting a rock (Opens in a new tab). At first glance, it looks like an outdoor area at night, but look again: all those “trees” are actually mushrooms, and if you listen carefully, you can hear sounds in the area echoing, just as you would expect. . underground complex.
As Zelda YouTuber Monster Maze points out, the little wandering flames in this shot are particularly interesting. They look exactly like the spirits of Twilight Princess’s Twilight Realm. Whether or not there’s a direct connection there, the Zelda series often reuses imagery without relying on previous lore, implying that it’s some kind of alternate world hostile to non-creatures. monstrous.
This leaves us with the idea that it’s either a large underground area or, just as interestingly, an underworld of dark mirrors, a concept that comes up constantly in Zelda games. Either way, it looks like there’s a lot more to explore in Tears of the Kingdom than we previously thought.
The new trailer also hints at the the return of the reds and the comes out of link’s dead arm.