Breath Of The Wild 2: 7 Bold Predictions From The E3 Trailer

Excluding Spirit Tracks where she is kind of playable, Smash Bros, and a few spin-offs like the excellent Cadence of Hyrule (we all try to forget Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon), Zelda has yet to be properly controllable.

Fortunately, It looks like this relegation to glorified NPC might be a thing of the past.

The first thing to note is Zelda's short hair. Long hair is very difficult to animate, so if Nintendo is making Zelda playable, making her hair shorter lets them carry across the same physics model as Link's hair.

Link and Zelda are also seen wearing capes, and as capes were wearable items in BotW, it makes sense to have both playable characters wearing them.

Nintendo have slowly been introducing the idea of Zelda being playable too. The aforementioned Cadence of Hyrule features a fully playable Zelda, so perhaps Nintendo is exploring this idea in a third-party spin-off, before having Zelda playable in the main series.

The final piece of evidence comes from an interview with Eiji Aonuma, the producer of Breath of the Wild and its sequel. Here, Aonuma is asked whether you will be able to play as Zelda in the new game, only to neither confirm nor deny it.

Surely if she wasn't playable, he would have said so, as a character not being playable isn't really something that would need to be kept a secret.