Zelda: Breath of the Wild’s official guide released for free

In 2023, Polygon is embarking on a Zeldathon. Join us on our journey through The Legend of Zelda series, from the original 1986 game to the release of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and beyond.

With The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom just a couple of months out, Nintendo — seldom noted for giving stuff away — has made a guidebook for its predecessor, Breath of the Wild, available for free.

The Breath of the Wild Explorer’s Guide, previously only available in a print edition as part of the Explorer’s Edition of the game, is available to download as a PDF from the Zelda website in its entirety — well, almost.

Pages 73 to 84 of this 100-page tome are, for some reason, missing. At first, I thought this might have been to avoid spoilers, but the missing chapters — on things like horses and great fairy fountains — don’t seem particularly spoilerific. Some later chapters are marked with a spoiler warning, and do make it into the PDF. So the missing pages are probably just a clerical error.

The Explorer’s Guide is more of an expanded manual than a full guide, featuring a walkthrough for the opening Great Plateau section, as well as more general introductions to some of the concepts and features of the wider game, like cooking and hunting for hidden Koroks.

For players new to Breath of the Wild who don’t want to go in totally blind — especially younger ones — it’s a useful little handbook. For seasoned players, paging through the guide is bound to give you an itch to explore Hyrule again, plus there are a couple of nice bits of art to look at. I’d never seen the lovely illustration opposite the content page before, which shows the very young Link of the first Legend of Zelda game proudly offering Breath of the Wild’s Link the Master Sword.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom will be released on May 12, and frankly, it can’t come soon enough.