Zelda games were always religious, but Tears of the Kingdom pushes it even further

polygon.com:

Chapter 6 of the 1992 Japanese guidebook to The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past contains what might be the strangest officially licensed image of Link ever created. In a black-and-white church, bathed in the holy light of an arched window, our hero kneels in worship. He’s not wearing his usual pointy hat; instead, you see the long Hylian ears poking through a thick Joe Dirt mullet. But it is Link, tunic and all, and he isn’t worshiping Din, Nayru, the goddess Hylia, or any other figure in the evolving Zelda pantheon. He’s worshiping Jesus Christ.

This illustration has made the rounds over the years, usually alongside other bits and pieces from the early history of the Zelda series that hint at Christian origins. In the original Legend of Zelda, Link’s shield has a cross on it, and the “Book of Magic” was called “Bible” in the Japanese version. In Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, the cross is an item that allows Link to see invisible enemies. In A Link to the Past, our hero enters a sanctuary with stained-glass windows and pews.

Does this mean that Shigeru Miyamoto and co. originally intended for Link to be a Christian warrior, or that The Legend of Zelda is “about” Christianity in some fundamental sense? Not exactly. Max Nichols, a Bungie developer and Zelda superfan who maintains the Hyrule Interviews archive, said he wasn’t aware of any explicit statements from the developers about religious themes or symbolism in the early years. Instead, he said, it’s more likely that Nintendo reached for Christian references “in a careless, off-the-cuff way” because “they were drawing inspiration generally from pastoral Europe/medieval/fairy-tale imagery, legends, etc., and that source material would have included some of this