The official Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom guide is a 3-pound, 500-page tome launching a month after the game

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
(Image credit: Nintendo)

The official guide for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom was unceremoniously announced over the weekend with a handful of retailer listings, and as you might expect for a guide to a Breath of the Wild sequel, this is going to be one absolutely massive tome.

"Working closely with Nintendo, we have created the authoritative, all-encompassing guide that this game so richly deserves," publisher Piggyback says in the item description. "We have explored all features and facets of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom with a single mission: to help you discover and enjoy every moment of this game." The guide promises a "comprehensive atlas of Hyrule" and a "100% complete" rundown of everything you could possibly need to know about the game.

The guide comes in two flavors: a $30 paperback version, and a $45 hardcover Collector's Edition. Both versions are listed for 496 pages which, for those of you keeping track at home, is substantially more than most printings of the New Testament. The paperback version is two pounds and the hardcover version is nearly three pounds, so either can serve as a light workout tool in a pinch.

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Both versions of the guide will be released on June 16, over a month after Tears of the Kingdom itself. That may be an effort to stem the tide of spoilers if one of the books were to get into fans' hands early - after all, the art book leaked months ago - but given that the entire game is now leaking all over the internet, it's a bit of a moot point.

Piggyback also produced the official guide for Breath of the Wild, which launched right alongside the game on March 3, 2017. If you want an idea of what to expect from the Tears of the Kingdom guide, the publisher has made the first 100 pages of the old book available as a free PDF.

The initial version of the BotW guide was released with what now seems like a paltry 356 pages, though a year later, an expanded edition of the book was released with over 150 pages of additional content, including coverage of the Master Trials and Champions' Ballad DLC packs. We don't yet know if Tears of the Kingdom will get similar expansions, but if you're on the fence about shelling out for a massive guide bear in mind that we could see an expanded version further down the line.

We're getting one more big Tears of the Kingdom gameplay showcase the night before launch.

Dustin Bailey
Staff Writer

Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.