Summary
One attentive fan has recently realized that the map of Hyrule inThe Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdomhas a surprising connection to real-world Japan. They soon took to social media to share their discovery, having done so shortly after another player found thatTears of the Kingdom’smap has a random spot that’s extremely hot.
While the newZeldagame inherits a large chunk of its map fromBreath of the Wild,Tears of the Kingdomalso introduces some significant changes to Hyrulecompared to the previous entry. Aside from putting a fresh spin on many locations and adding plenty of other areas,Tears of the Kingdomalso replaces its predecessor’s 120 shrines with over 150 new ones.
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As it turns out,every shrine inTears of the Kingdomis named after locations in real-world Kyoto, one of Japan’s ten largest cities which is also home to Nintendo’s headquarters. This revelation was recently shared by Reddit user Chubby_Bub, who credited Twitter user SO_far_69 as the first person who made the connection betweenTears of the Kingdom’sshrines and real-life Kyoto locations.
Tears of the Kingdom’sshrines do not adopt the full names of the real-world locations that inspired them. Instead, Nintendo seemingly derived each moniker by creating anagrams from individual location names or rearranging just some of their letters while scraping others. For example, one of the Korok Forest shrines is called Musanokir, likely after the Murasakino (purple) district in Northern Kyoto. Meanwhile, the In-isa shrine in Hyrule Field is an anagram for the Saiin train station downtown, and so on.
While the coordinates of the shrines from those two examples largely correspond to the locations of the real-life places they were named after, that’s not always the case. Nevertheless, Chubby_Bub opined that the overall map of Hyrule dating back to itsBreath of the Wildrendition was clearly inspired by Kyoto’s topography, pointing to the fact that locations like the Arashiyama hills and Katsura River have similar geographies to those of the Gerudo Highlands and Hebra regions, respectively.
This is far from the first occasion on which Nintendo devised a naming pattern based on real-life inspirations for aZeldagame. For example, the shrines from the previous installment in the long-running series were named after the developers who worked on the game, while the names of its Divine Beasts were inspired by some iconic characters from pastZeldagames. As is the case with this recently discovered shrine naming pattern inTears of the Kingdom, both ofthoseBreath of the WildEaster eggs were only found by the most hardcore fans.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdomis available now on Switch.
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