#zant talks about e3

[any-old-lie-will-do]

Okay so it’s scream time lads

I watched the botw 2 trailer yet again because one of the theorists I’m subbed to on yt posted about speculations around the audio that we’ve all heard in the trailer so I went back and watched it to refresh myself of what we’ve got to look forward to with the crumb the Nintendo gave us and my Zelda brain reactivated. So, before I really delve into this I apologize if there’s a lot of stuff in this post that ya’ll’ve all heard before probably but these are my personal beliefs.

Okay so right from the start something that got my mind running again, the glowwy letters/symbols. While they look like shiekah they also heavily remind me of the twili, if you look closely the symbols aren’t the usual blue that sheikah tech has, they’re aqua but I’ll come back to that in a sec, not only that but these symbols are speculated to be Gerudo writing, which ties into an old theory that I believe about the twili. The color of these symbols is significant because if you look back at TP not only is aqua a largely recurring color with the twili people but the hand that these symbols lead to looks like some form of twili magic, the golden (what looks like) bracelets look to vaguely resemble Gerudo architecture type stuff which shares similarities with twili architecture as well. Not only that but taking another look at the trailer I remember that this isn’t that fist time we’ve seen twili magic being used in the form of a hand some way or another, yet again we turn our eyes back to twilight princess, midna’s hair turns into a hand when she’s still in her imp form, which is used in many significant ways that we often overlook, she uses it not only for attacking when need be she used it to pull link into the twilight and becon link when need be. Another example is the absolute beast that came out of the fused shadows when used together, this creature whatever it was had not two hands, not four hands, but six from what I recall. There were also those hand things in the twilight palace dungeon too, hands seem to be a recurring theme with these shadow dwellers. Another piece of information that should be taken note of, the twili know how to keep ganon at bay from what it seems, the event of twilight princess bust have been a weak point for them when they had hold of ganon he somehow got let out by Zant long after the sages sent him to them through the mirror, so of course the twili people would know how to keep hold of him for so long, they’ve done it before why not do it again.

Now what evidence could I possibly have to say that the twili even have a chance to be in the game? Buckle in kids I’m about beat a dead horse because I’m gonna talk about the Palmorae ruins. Anyone who’s played botw and got all the shrines should be vaguely familiar with this particular side quest at least. Looking at the shape and fragments of this ruin it’s obvious that there’s a strong reference to the mirror if twilight and it’s broken pieces you find in TP, not only that but it glows, and it doesn’t glow just any color, it glows aqua, the color that was a large part of the twili architecture. Now before you complete the quest and summon the shrine if you look behind these ruins there’s and obvious man made wall there, there are no doors to anything there it’s just a wall, but before the ruins were broken and they weren’t well, ruins this structure had a point to it. My belief is this wall was once used to project the portal that linked the world of light and the world of shadows. For whatever reason the mirror was broken and with no foreseeable future use to the structure the shiekah put a shrine right in the middle of the structure. Since the mirror has long been broken the last of the twili people who were able to come over were stuck in the world of light which could be deadly to them. That’s where I’m going to bring in the whole “Underneath the castle” part of this, the people of hyrule knew that this would be bad for the twili so they brought them down beneath the castle where it’s dark and they could live as comfortably as possible, but they could stay at a cost, they give assistance to holding ganon down there with them. That’s where the magic part comes from, these people have been forced to hold an old rotting mummy for a long time, so naturally the magic is gonna fade over time, even though (and this is completely a personal headcannon bear with me) the twili people could very possibly have much longer lifespans that any other race in hyrule they were down there and kept him at bay for a long time and got old. Then when calamity ganon came back the material that is very malice reminiscent begins to pour out of this mummy, further weakening the twili that still remain to hold him. Now where are these twili? I believe that that stuff pouring out of mummy ganon has them somehow trapped, in a video I saw the audio was messed around with to reveal a whisper of what sounded like “Help us, please” but to me when you listen to the unedited audio not only does it sound reversed but it sounds choppy and jumbled, because when I listened to it backwards I still didn’t make out anything to be heard, and where have we heard speech like that before? Midna, her in game speech in twilight princess was a native Japanese speaker saying lines in English to which then the audio was chopped and mixed to create what we all hear today and that’s exactly what I hear when I listen to the audio from the trailer.

Maybe it’s a reach and I’m overthinking something simple but this has been itching at my mind since it came out at E3 2019. Who knows, I could be right on a few aspects, Nintendo’s said before they’ll consider bringing back the twili people if there’s enough demand from fans to bring them back. I’ll be back tomorrow with my personal take on an old twilight princess theory when I’m able to keep my eyes open.

[inkwatch-blog]

Twilight Princess: A Game Stuck in Time

(AN: The following is an unproduced script for a proposed video series called BKLG (pronounced Backlog), which I unfortunately had to put on hold for the time being. It has been slightly modified to read as an article, but the writing below is perhaps a bit more conversational than it otherwise would be.)

Allow me a bold statement upfront: The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess would not exist as it does today without a demo reel shown at Nintendo’s defunct trade show Spaceworld. At Spaceworld 2000, a demo reel for the upcoming Gamecube was shown to attendees to represent the graphical power of Nintendo’s new console. Twelve seconds of an unannounced Zelda game were shown and the fanbase lost it’s collective mind. IGN wrote a five paragraph essay about the clip, writing, “There's far too much detail to believe that Nintendo would scrap the models and make new ones. So, we think it's safe to say the new Link will look a lot like this. Overall, we're very happy with his new immaculate hero look.” Right.

IGN might’ve lost their minds, but behind the scenes, director Eiji Aonuma wasn’t pleased; in fact, he actually hated the design. A decade later, he told IGN it wasn’t the game he wanted to make at all. To him, it wasn’t Zelda.

So a year later, at Spaceworld 2001, Nintendo announced The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. The internet revolted. This wasn’t their Zelda, they said. This was Cel-da. This was kid stuff. Where was their mature, grounded take on the series? I do wonder if that sounds like any other fanbase out there today.

Wind Waker was released in North America in 2003 to critical praise. Wikipedia has it listed on twenty-three separate Best Of lists. The HD re-release on the Wii U only gained the game further acclaim. The visuals have stood the test of the time, aging far better than similar games released around the same era.

But all of that didn’t matter. To fans, the cartoonish visuals meant the game was meant for children. As a follow up to Ocarina, its sales were disappointing, selling less than half of what the first 3D Zelda had sold. Nintendo directly attributed this slump to the reaction of fans in North America after the graphics were first shown in 2001. So, despite accidentally announcing in 2004 that an upcoming GameCube Zelda game had the working title of The Wind Waker 2, Aonuma became concerned that the game wouldn’t sell well in North America. After the game was announced at E3 2004, Shigeru Miyamoto told IGN that the art style of the new Zelda adventure was created to fulfill that customer demand created six years before Twilight Princess was even released.

So why spend a massive amount of time detailing the history of a decade old game? Because in a lot of ways, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and its HD remake, feel beholden to the demand of its fan base in a way not a lot of Zelda games are. Despite the preceding two games in the series, Wind Waker and Majora’s Mask, featuring spectacularly different play styles, Twilight Princess feels like a reimagining of 1998’s Ocarina of Time, and while this doesn’t make Twilight Princess a bad game by any means, it certainly makes it feel more derivative than any adventure game starring the Hero of Time deserves to feel.

So, in the honor of Zelda, let’s divide this into two needlessly convoluted timelines. There’s also one where I die while writing this, and it never comes out, so if you’re reading this now, please assume you aren’t in this timeline.

One.

Twilight Princess is a good game doing weird things.

Yeah, really, it is. All the fun of Zelda, right there, baked into it. It’s got some dark, goofy undertones and the game is weird as hell. The wolf segments are mostly fun, especially once you gain the freedom to turn into a wolf whenever you please. The characters are all really memorable in a way that I think is underplayed when people talk about Zelda. The Snow Yeti couple who are secretly possessed. Zant is a weird Twilight villain who is being played by Ganondorf. Colin’s storyline of overcoming the bullying and taunting of the rest of his friends makes him my favorite of the four children by far. And Midna is the best - the best - Zelda assistant ever. That’s a really low bar to clear, sorry Navi and Fi, and Tatl. Y’all can buzz off, because Midna has you beat for days. She is excellent, and never really a bother, even when she tells you something you already know.

The swordfighting in this game, particularly when fighting the Darknuts throughout the last chunk of the game, feels spectacular. I’m assuming this is less true with waggle controls on the Wii, but playing through the HD remake felt pretty spectacular. Some of the dungeon design is the best in the series - Snowpeak, for all its flaws and played out ice block puzzles, is perfectly built, and the Temple of Time’s reversal after the miniboss felt really refreshing. It also, and I cannot overstate this enough, had my favorite minigame in all of Zelda: snowboarding.

That’s not to say Twilight Princess is a perfect game. There’s plenty to nitpick - the puzzles don’t feel like puzzles! Why are half of the puzzles just shooting objects on a wall with an item! Why aren’t there more snowboarding levels! Why do half the items have almost no use outside the dungeon! Why aren’t there more snowboarding levels! Why can’t I ride the Spinner everywhere! Why aren’t there more snowboarding levels!

So instead of nitpicking on small things like, why aren’t there more snowboarding levels, let me go ahead and lay out the biggest flaw in this game, the one that everyone probably saw coming before you even clicked on this article: the opening.

Here’s how the opening tutorial for 1992’s The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past plays out: There’s a short cutscene before you gain control of Link. You leave bed and you grab the Lamp from the nearby chest. The guards don’t let you into the castle, so you head around to the right and you move a bush to let yourself into the dungeon of the castle. Your uncle, who has been defeated, gives you a sword and shield. Then you begin your journey through the first dungeon of the game, Hyrule Castle.

Cool. Easy. Done. Now here’s the opening tutorial for Twilight Princess: You talk to Rusl, you watch a cutscene, you run to the Ordon Spring, you talk to Ilia, you get Epona, you run through Ordon, you get to the ranch, you herd some goats in what is one of my least favorite mini-games in all of Zelda, you run back to Ordon, you talk to the kids, you talk to Uli, who can’t give you the fishing rod because she lost her cradle, then you talk to Jaggle, you summon a hawk, you shoot the hawk at a monkey, you bring the cradle back to Uli, and you get the fishing rod. From there, you go fishing, you catch a fish for the cat, you watch the cat run around town and back into the shop, where you can now get a free bottle. If you haven’t already, you run around collecting rupees until you reach the magical number of 30, in which you buy the slingshot and you show the children that you’ve bought it. Now you can re-enter your house and, would you look at that, the sword is there. The kids teach you how to use a sword. Then the kids chase a monkey into the woods. So, you summon Epona, you get the lantern, and you enter the North Faron woods on your quest to find Talo. You make your way through the woods in what is sort of similar to a dungeon, you free Talo and the monkey using your sword, and Rusl thanks you for saving Talo. Then you herd more goats - 20 this time, thanks Fado. Ilia claims that you hurt Epona or something, and she steals your horse. She’s also locked you out of the spring where she’s hidden Epona, so you sneak into the spring in a crawlspace, which triggers a cutscene, and boom, you’re a wolf stuck in prison.Technically, the wolf section is also a bit of a tutorial, but I think the point’s been made.

The opening of this game is terrible. It slows progress in the game down to a crawl right when the game should be trying to get you to sink yourself in. It takes hours to complete, and even longer if you haven’t played the game before and don’t know what you’re doing. And, in some ways, it’s indicative of a larger problem in the more modern era of Zelda games - not trusting the player to figure the game out on their own.

A quick note on the other divisive aspect of this game: tear collecting. I won’t comment much on it because it’s been talked to death and, to me, the tutorial is far more problematic in terms of game structure, but the tears fetch quest isn’t a whole lot of fun. At best, it’s inoffensive; at worst, it’s boring and yet another way to get players to put the controller down before the game reaches its second half. The HD remaster fixes the quest somewhat, lowering the required tear count from 16 to 12. It’s still cumbersome, but ending 25 percent sooner helps alleviate the negative feeling each section leaves on the player.

Two.

Twilight Princess is a good game unable to move beyond its past and its fanbase.

Majora’s Mask was released to critical acclaim, but it sold about half of Ocarina’s numbers two years earlier. Perhaps, Nintendo probably thought at the time, this had to do not with the quality of the game or what the fanbase wanted, but the required usage of the Expansion Pak and the impending launch of the GameCube.

As mentioned earlier, it was Wind Waker’s sales that scared the creative team into redirecting their efforts from a sequel to Wind Waker to an entirely new game with a new, more realistic design.

But Wind Waker’s struggles didn’t just change the art design of the new game. It ensured that the next Zelda game would be more like Ocarina of Time than both Wind Waker and Majora’s Mask, a direct sequel, ever would.

And they did it. Twilight Princess, more than any other game in the series, plays like a reimagining of a former game, in this case, Ocarina of Time. Especially in the first half of the game, both play out in incredibly similar ways, from your humble beginnings in a small village to your travels to Hyrule Castle, to the similarly themed opening dungeons, to your new companion following you around, offering advice. Majora’s Mask was a game that took chances, shook the Zelda formula up in ways no one had seen since Zelda II. Wind Waker stayed more true to the classic Zelda road, while still thinking up new ideas, from its presentation to its high seas setting. Twilight Princess is a good, safe game, seemingly designed to make sure that everyone who owned a copy of Ocarina of Time and had seen the Spaceworld 2000 demo would no longer feel disappointed about the cartoon stylings of Wind Waker.

And it worked. That feeling of nostalgia for Ocarina, combined with the success of the Wii, ensured the game would become the best-selling title in Zelda’s history, assuming you don’t include the 3DS remake of Ocarina into Ocarina’s N64 sales.

Of course, unlike Ocarina, nostalgia for Twilight Princess hasn’t fared quite as well. The game received an HD remaster in 2016, both as a 30th anniversary celebration of the series and as a pseudo-apology from Nintendo for delaying Breath of the Wild to 2017 in order to simultaneously release on the Wii U and the Switch. The HD remaster of Twilight Princess sold a little more than a million copies globally, a similar number to 2015’s forgotten spin-off, TriForce Heroes.

It took nearly another decade to get Nintendo to take more chances on changing up the Zelda formula. Ignoring the portable titles for a moment, 2011’s Twilight Princess follow up, Skyward Sword, was critically acclaimed at launch, but has, for the most part, been largely forgotten about in the five-plus years since its release. Skyward Sword often appears near the bottom of best-Zelda lists, and often doesn’t appear at all when the list is limited to ten games. That game has similar flaws to Twilight Princess, with a drawn out opening section and frustrating collect-a-thons like the music note section late into the game.

All of this is to say, I think we’re about to entire a new era of Zelda, or at least, a return to classic, pre-Ocarina of Time adventuring. Next week’s Breath of the Wild promises an open world with plenty to explore. The opening of the game seems to draw from the original and from Link to the Past far more than from Twilight Princess or Skyward Sword. What we’re looking at isn’t the end of Zelda, but the first of a new chapter.

[ask-the-child-of-twilight]

*twiddles thumbs and remains silent as her dash explodes whilst she's bummed there's no New Kid Icarus game*

[ask-the-child-of-twilight]

It's nice that we have Chrom in the SMT cross over but how about a Demon Emmeryn please