#HOWEVER I have never actually played oot sorry!!!! | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

yridenergyridenergy · 11 months

Note

Hi sorry it may sound stupid but I just got an exclusive ticket to their live concert on 3rd June in Nagoya and this is my first time to visit them! (and alone lol so I'm bit nervous right now)Wondering what preparation should I do? like how early should i arrive at the venue and can I use english when i buy merchandise etc.

thank u!

Hello! It is not a stupid question at all. I don't kow if you ever went to see Dir en grey outside of Japan even, but there are definitely differences to know about.

Chronologically, if you are interested in merchandise, be prepared to dedicate almost your entire day for that. People usually line up from 8-9AM until the venue staff distributes numbers. When the merchandise table actually opens, usually around 3PM (but 2PM in the case of the June 3rd show), then you come back and you will have the priority based on your position in the morning's line. However that's IF the venue does distribute number papers. I have gone to a Zepp Nagoya show where we were forced to line up right until 3PM without ever being given numbers, which was very problematic because we weren't prepared for that and had no food, and I think it started raining at some point.

Eventually, not sure if only around 3PM or some time after noon or something else, the day's panel will be set up and you can take pictures of it. Technically, it will be there until after the show too, but it can be nice to capture it in photographs while the light/shadow contrast is not too high.

When 2PM comes around and the merchandise begins selling, unfortunately don't expect the staff to speak English. However, the table will usually have plastified sheets listing all the goods with pictures, so you can probably understand each other by pointing to what you want and gesturing how many you would like. In Japan, when ordering something, most places/people will double-check with you what your final order is before charging you. Just don't appear rude despite the language barrier, and make sure to finish with a kind "Arigatou gozaimasu" of course! If you're worried about the impression you leave, you could probably start the conversation with "Sumimasen" too.

From what I remember, they accept credit cards, not just cash.

The only thing left after that is the actual start of the show. Seeing as the June 3rd concert will take place in a venue with seats, then you literally don't have to show up before 6PM. By then, most of the fans will have already entered the venue, so you will avoid the rush. Also, Dir en grey almost never starts their shows on time, but it can be fun to be there ahead of time and get impregnated with the playlist they decided for the music playing before the concert starts. This tour's playlist has some really 'intimidating' songs. I would really recommend going early (the doors open 45 minutes before 6PM) to experience it, because it gets you in a certain mood for the show!

Unlike numbered tickets, seat-assigned concerts probably just have people enter based on first-come, first-served basis, in a disciplined line (or two). No need to rush, nobody will take your seat. By the way, try to look at the venue's seat map ahead of time to know where you are seated, in case it is a bit confusing in person. For example, I think it was the Yokosuka hall this month that had AA and BB rows in front of A, B, C, etc.

Inside the venue, keep in mind that food is usually prohibited, but you can bring (non-alcoholic?) beverages in bottles. Seeing as you will have a seat, you don't need to worry about being lightweight like in general admission venues. Any bag you bring and the exclusive goods bag that you will receive can be placed in your seat while you stand up during the show.

In the last two seated shows, for some reason the venue staff checked everyone's bag to make sure that there was no filming equipment. Not sure if something oot leaked throughout the first half of May, as they did not do that in Yokosuka. Those checks usually don't occur for general admission standing venues.

Last thing I can think of: the exclusive goods bag is usually at a table inside the venue. You can technically get yours before or after the show, as they should have enough for all exclusive or VIP ticket holders, but it might be good to get that taken care of before the show starts, to be at peace of mind and not forget. There should be a sign up somewhere mentioning the exclusive goods, but if you don't read Japanese, try to look around not too far from either the venue's or the concert room's doors for a table that has many rectangular bags lined up. Once you locate it, you will need to present the paper ticket that you were handed when you entered the venue, as the staff member will stamp the back of it. That prevents people from frauding and trying to get more than one bag per ticket.

Perhaps half of this was totally unnecessary and is obvious, but I prefered to list everything that came to my mind. Have an awesome show and let loose vocally and spatially! Nyaaagoooyaaaaaaa!

#ask #anon #Dir en grey #guide #Japan

29 notes · View notes

goopi-e · 11 months

Text

Aaaanyways, who wants to hear my pitch for a pre-flood Zelda game that'll never happen. It was, like, the first thing I came up with as soon as I joined the fandom (...and it shows), but kept it for myself, mostly bc for some reason I was never able to design any visuals for the thing.

No, I don’t think that’s what actually went down in canon while the flood was happening. Yes, the story contradicts some facts from WW and OoT. I just tried to make it as much of a playable experience as possible. It's not perfect, but has its' moments.

The Legend of Zelda: The Unnamed Pre-Flood Game

Prologue cutscene features visuals similar to WW's intro and goes like this: "There is hardly anyone in Hyrule who hasn't heard about the Hero of Time. Half a century after his triumph over Ganon and the subsequent disappearance, the deeds of the Hero started to fade into myth, yet there are still people who knew him and remember him fondly. The legacy of his kindness and valiance led the land to an era of prosperity under the rule of none other than Queen Zelda. However, recently she stepped aside from the throne with no explanation, never to be seen again, and rumors of concern started to creep across Hyrule. If both the Hero of Time and the Princess of Destiny had left their people, who will protect the land in case the unthinkable happens?.." It fades into black, not-so-subtly hinting that the unthinkable will happen really soon, and that it'll be none other than Ganon.

The playable character is preteen and can be named. It may either look like your average Link or nothing at all like him, doesn't matter – but throughout the game you're constantly made aware that this kid is not a Link. You know how in the Child half of Ocarina many NPCs are dismissive of Link on behalf of him being a kid? That attitude is carried over here. No matter who you talk to, in the eyes of almost every character, the kid you play as is not the Hero of Time, so you have no business running around pretending to be one; even those sympathetic to your cause will make that distinction. That is a key concept. For that reason, I'll be referring to the playable character as, well, Kid.

Kid lives in Kakariko village, which has grown into more of a town, but not by a lot, and the Sheikah are beginning to recover from their near extinct status, though the majority of residents are still Hylians. Kid has parents! But they're both Royal Guards, and therefore are absent most of the time. For that reason, Kid is mostly left under the care of their neighbor, Auntie Malon – sadly, she had to sell her ranch and move, but that doesn't stop her from keeping some livestock. Kid's best friend is Nopiko, Auntie Malon's adoptive daughter who has a knack for sewing and getting into trouble; if you remember two Gossip Girls from Windfall Island, she looks exactly like the blond one, and is just as young. Mid-game Auntie Malon reveals that Nopiko is actually a Kokiri who wandered off from the Lost Woods; she took the girl in to honor the memory of her beloved Fairy Boy. Due to that, Nopiko is sensitive to the magic of the world – and one day, she informs Kid that something is off, and that they have to meet Nopiko's other friend, who lives all the way at Hyrule Castle. It's not the Castle you know from OoT, though: since Ganondorf emerged his Tower in its' place, the ruins of the Tower were considered cursed, and the new castle was built at Lake Hylia.

To get there, first you have to clear the game's tutorial dungeon – Sheikah Secret Archives. It's a secret police department with some similarities to the Shadow Temple, including the monsters, but also a giant office full of overworked Sheikah employees processing legal cases and such. It has some typical stealth sections where the guards can catch you (sorry), however, most of the time you can talk to the employees scot-free; they're all so overworked they have no energy to be bothered by an intruder and are mostly glad to vent to anyone willing to lend an ear. From their dialogue it becomes clear that they aren't happy with their job, but have no choice, being servants of the Royal Family and all. The amount of arrests the Sheikah Secret Police currently performs is abnormally high, too: Queen Zelda is gone without a trace, and for many her absence means something in the world is about to get really, really wrong, but none can place their finger on what exactly is about to happen, and that air of paranoia leads to civil unrests left and right. The prisoners are also there, ready to talk.

Sheikah Secret Archives is where you get the main (and only) item of the game, the Parasol. It's not a magical item: Kid just grabs some random Sheikah's umbrella in an act of self-defense, but you receive an item get pop-up all the same. You can use its' pointy tip as a makeshift sword or open it to create a makeshift shield.

The dungeon has no boss, so once you clear it, you arrive at the Castle Courtyard. Somehow, Nopiko is already there, talking to her mysterious friend about you. On your arrival, she introduces you by name and comments on how many times you've been caught in the dungeon: "See, Kid has gotten through the Archives and hasn't been caught/got caught only n times! They're so brave, and smart, and capable – if there's anyone in the whole world who can do this, it's them!"

This is where you get introduced to Nopiko's friend, Regent Princess Hepta. She, too, is drastically different from your average Zelda, with deep red hair in a pixie cut and a deadpan snark; she's also a bit older than Kid. Overall, she resembles a teenage version of Tetra's mom, sans the pirate clothes. Hepta sits in her room, talking with Kid and Nopiko through a window. It's clear that she is not amused by Kid, but begrudgingly accepts their help.

"I am of a Royal bloodline," Hepta explains, "but that blood connection is very weak, and I have very few magic powers, no match to those of Queen Zelda's. I have a gift of premonition, though, and it tells me something terrible is about to happen. I don't know what it'll be yet; however, I had a vision that the future of this land shall be revealed tonight at the Unicorn Fountain. Unfortunately, I won't be able to go there: you see, I am locked away by..."

Suddenly, Hepta shoos Kid and Nopiko away, and jumps off the window. They oblige, but catch a glimpse of a menacing middle-aged Sheikah woman, who seems to be angry with Hepta. The woman throws a glance at the courtyard, but doesn't notice anything out of the ordinary and leaves. Hepta, visibly distressed, reemerges and continues:

"My uncle, Daphnes Nohansen (and for anyone curious, yes, it's that Daphnes Nohansen) is the current king, but the actual power over Hyrule is in the hands of my nursemaid and the chief of secret police, Captain Byrna, who governs the land with an iron fist. She decreed that tomorrow I'll be officially crowned as the new Princess of Hyrule and take the name of Zelda in an attempt to quell the fears of the people. This is why I am locked in my room. But you, Kid, must understand that it is of utmost importance the vision at the Unicorn Fountain is seen by someone. You just might be the only hope that Hyrule has right now. Now please, lend me your hand".

Kid hesitantly offers their hand. Hepta kisses it, and an item get pop-up appears: "You got Regent Princess' Blessing! This magical gift will allow you to see the message of the gods!"

Then, a green fairy pops out from Hepta's room. This is Brimm, Nopiko's guardian fairy. He served as a messenger between her and Hepta – this is how they were able to keep up their friendship – but now will accompany you. Not only will Brimm deliver the vision you'll recieve to Hepta, he can also enhance your Parasol with the power of flight, allowing you to fast-travel to any check-point you discover. One of them is conveniently located at the courtyard; throughout the game, you'll be able to visit Hepta freely – she'll give you progression hints like the fortunetellers in Zelda series commonly do, provide some additional lore and lift your spirit with a sarcastic joke or two.

The Unicorn Fountain is your first proper dungeon. There, your Parasol gets a new ability: you can use it as either a boat or, using lilypads or any other flotsam to stand on, as a sail to glide across water. As the name implies, the dungeon is themed after a fairy fountain, is obviously full of healing fairies, and even the boss is a corrupted Great Fairy – she saw a glimpse of the revelation you're about to recieve, and it drove her mad.

After beating the boss, Kid emerges at a little clearing above ground somewhere in Hyrule Field, adorned with columns and such. It offers a view at the ruins of Ganon's Tower. It's midnight, the sight is beautiful and the air is very quiet. The three disembodied voices greet Kid, one of them weaker than the others, and are about to introduce themselves, but suddenly, a giant, ominous fissure cracks open throughout the Hyrule Field–

Ganon has returned.

His emergence is seen and heard throughout the land. From Gorons to Zora, from Sheikah to Gerudo – everyone covers in fear and desperately prays:

"Hero of Time! Come and save us!"

The voices seem to hear these cries for help and are distressed by them. "It's not in my power anymore!", the weaker voice exclaims in despair, "The Hero of Time was sent away from this world by a magic that I can't reverse – not in my current state!"

"Then", the other voice suggests with a calm that betrays the fury, "we have no choice but to fight Ganon ourselves until the Hero finds the way back".

"Ganon has the Triforce of Power at his side", the third voice solemnly responds. "We cannot fight him, but we can seal him away. That seal, however, will be a heavy burden on this land".

And so, the Hyrule was sentenced to the Great Flood.

The voices then address the terrified Kid. They crest them as the Guide, and their job will be to place the Beacons for the Hero to return to. With that, Kid is sent back to Kakariko, and Brimm flies away to bring all these news to Hepta.

From that point forward, the weather on the overworld is always rainy, and the ground starts to get covered in water; the water level rises with each dungeon you beat. Sometimes, Ganon can be seen roaming around like a big kaiju and wreaking havoc, but you can’t interact with him. Another thing that appears on the overworld in a similar manner is a structure that looks suspiciously similar to the Tower of the Gods, but with mechanical legs.

There is, of course, a long trading sequence sidequest spread through the game, but this time it comes with a twist: it only consists of Kid’s parents making them run some errands for themselves, Auntie Malon and Nopiko. Since they’re the Royal Guards, they’re constantly being relocated all across the country, and it’s Kid’s job to find where their parents end up. Parents also update you on what Captain Byrna does to stop you from doing your work, as she doesn’t believe the flood is happening and considers anyone who believes otherwise a threat to the public. She essentially has the same shtick as Jolene in PH, a random overworld encounter, just not as comedic.

There are four dungeons overall, each in a classic Zelda dungeon flavor: one in the Lost Woods, one in Zora’s Domain, one inside the Death Mountain and one in the Gerudo Desert. You are free to beat them in any order. Each dungeon comes with a settlement for an appropriate race. In each of them, you meet a key NPC – the type of person that usually turns out to be a Sage/Champion/whatever in any other Zelda game, but here they’re just ordinary people who are willing to help Kid despite them not being the legendary Hero. They all provide you with a little something to augment the powers of your Parasol, though: a magic rope you can tie to it to create a hookshot of sorts, a special handle that’ll allow you to zip across ropes, or a patch of fabric that’ll give the Parasol a magical property. Yes, it’s the kind of game where you obtain (some) items before the dungeon and not inside them.

(Btw, you do get to meet Laruto and Fado, they’re just too busy with the Sagely business to help you. They do acknowledge your hard work, though).

In Lost Woods, this person is a Deku Scrublet with a crush on one of the Kokiri. Kokiri themselves can’t grasp the direness of the situation: “How can a little rain hurt anyone? Water is what makes the plants grow, silly!” The Scrubs are more realistic about the situation, though, as they know they qualify as monsters and would be eliminated regardless of whether or not they actually serve Ganon. While most Scrubs fend for themselves, Scrublet in particular wants to save their crush above all else. By reuniting these young lovers, you help Kokiri realize that there is a way to save both races by uniting them with the magic of the Deku Tree. This is the origin story for the Koroks.

In Zora’s Domain, it’s a sweet elderly couple with an adult son. Zora, under the false assumption that the floodwater won’t hurt them, volunteer everywhere they can to protect other races, but that couple is among the few Zoras banned from volunteering due to their age, and they’re ashamed of their helplessness. Eventually, their son dies in a heroic accident, and it serves as a wake-up call for the rest of the Zora to start worrying about their own safety.

In Goron City, this person is a wise, yet nihilistic Professor. Gorons know for certain they’ll most likely survive the flood purely due to them not needing to breathe, but are too selfish to help other races (yes, I’m aware that Gorons end up as an antagonistic force far too often, sorry). Kid’s proactiveness makes Professor change his mind, though, and he suggests to the rest of the Gorons to leave the Death Mountain to the apparently vunerable Zora and evacuate elsewhere.

In Gerudo Fortress, it’s a young street artist. With Ganon’s return, Gerudo are obviously super conflicted. Some of them even start a doomsday cult, claiming that Ganon will surely come to his senses and save his people, and sabotage any and all attempts of evacuation. This leads to lots of infighting. The street artist knows that the doomsday cult people are in the wrong, but doesn’t think she can do anything to help – until proven wrong by Kid, that is.

With each dungeon cleared and Beacon restored, you get to see Ganon come and destroy the settlements. His arrival at the Gerudo Fortress is particularly blood-chilling: he insults his kin, calling them traitors and claiming that he is the only real Gerudo left – all while remaining in his beast form.

After you finish all four dungeons, the walking tower stops wandering, and you’re able to undertake the final gauntlet – the Royal Museum. The moment Kid steps inside it, a voice forbids them to advance any farther; Kid proceeds anyway. The final upgrage for the Parasol obtained here is the silver coating, making it essentially a Mirror Shield. The Museum, accurate to its’ name, hosts a plethora of artifacts from Hyrule’s rich history. The boss of this dungeon, then, is the curator and the one trying to stop Kid – and it’s none other than Sheik. After being defeated, Sheik shamefully admits that he left his life as Queen Zelda and stepped off the throne in an attempt to essentially bring the Triforce of Wisdom to his grave. He hoped that, with the Triforce of Courage shattered, the Triforce of Power sealed away with Ganon, and the Triforce of Wisdom buried in a safe spot, the Triforce will be effectively unable to reassemble back without being outright destroyed, stopping any future conflict over the relic.

Since the plan didn’t work out, Sheik decides to get more proactive. He bestows upon you an artifact that used to belong to a powerful mage from ancient times – the Wind Waker, and instructs you to bring it to Daphnes. While you deliver the Wind Waker, you are stopped by Captain Byrna for the final time. Upon the inevitable defeat, she notices the baton, realizes that you’re affiliated with Sheik, and it’s revealed that Byrna is actually OoT Impa’s descendant. That makes her snap back to her senses, she vows to stop letting down her honorable ancestor and starts evacuating Kakariko. The Wind Waker is safely delivered to Daphnes, and Kid gets to see him conduct before Fado and Laruto, performing the Song of Storms.

With that, Sheik appears behind Kid and, while acknowledging they’re not the Hero he used to know, still admits their exemplary courage and asks them to fight Ganon by his side.

The battle unfolds like any final battle in the series where Link and Zelda are fighting alongside one another, except now it’s Kid who serves as a support while Sheik deals most of the damage. The fight is split into several phases, and with each Ganon turns more and more humanoid. With the final hit, you get to see him fully becoming Ganondorf again. He is donned in the black robes that he’ll continue to wear up until WW, yet physically he still resembles his post-timeskip Ocarina self, but even more disheveled. He points out that, sooner or later, he will return, but the damage caused by the flood will have a greater impact than any damage he was capable of. Sheik, clearly not amused, ends him. All this time, Kid hides behind Sheik and is not acknowledged; the latter, done with Ganondorf, apologizes for the unfair world Kid gets to inherit, and expresses hope that they’ll right the wrongs of their ancestors, before willingly stepping into the rising waters.

Kid is also suddenly swept off their feet, only to awaken in an unidentifiable void that resembles the Sacred Realm more than anything. The three voices from the beginning reappear, now angrier than ever. They claim that, by helping Sheik, Kid interfered with fate itself, and, once again, remind that Kid is not destined to be the Hero… and then the owners of the voices materialize out of thin air.

Turns out, Ganon(dorf) was only a penultimate boss. The final obstacle of the game are the Golden Goddesses themselves; appropriately, the battle is frantic and harsh, and is focused more on surviving than dealing damage. Notably, only Din and Nayru are actively fighting Kid; Farore, while participating in the group attacks, seems to be in a lethargic state at first, and her signature green color is initially dull – but as the fight goes on, she gets more and more awake. Suddenly, she intercepts and urges her sisters to stop, as for the first time since the Hero of Time’s disappearance, she felt the surge of true Courage. She reaches out to Kid and says:

“It’s true that your actions defy fate and cannot be allowed to pass. For that I’m sorry. The world must awaken anew with no memory of your deeds. But I promise to remember the courage and kindness that sprouted from a place nobody expected, and I swear that the next time this world needs a Hero, it won’t be us gods who will forge him – he’ll pave that path himself!” With that, the whole world around Kid fades into pure white.

The final cutscene shows them waking up alongside Nopiko on a deserted island – the island that is revealed by a panoramic shot to be none other than Outset. In their hands lays the Parasol, quilted out of all the patches collected throughout the game.

#legend of zelda #loz au

23 notes · View notes

flipseed · 1 year

Text

The Reworking of the Family Tree

Like I said in my intro post, my main driving force was eliminating as much incest as possible. I would like to say I am successful in that goal. Most of the cats are only related through marriage. So yay for me!

I also wanted to make things make more sense plot-wise. Heathertail being Onestar's daughter was scrapped because it makes zero sense for him to have had another family after Smoke and Darktail. To me, at least. It's not necessary for his treatment of Crowfeather and it's not necessary for his character arc as a whole. However, I do think Darktail having children makes sense. In my rewrite, he doesn't know Twig and Violet are his since Echosong ran away as soon as she realized she was pregnant. He'd only realize it after meeting both of them for the first time. Twig looks just like Echosong and Violet looks just like him. And he'd want to he a better father than Onestar was, to include his children in The Kin. That is a whole other topic to explore for another time, though.

I also wanted to connect the first arc cats to the cats that appear in Bluestar's Prophecy and such in a way that made more sense and didn't create problems for future generations (Brindleface and Frostfur being sisters...). I also just want to say that it was never confirmed that Dustpelt was a Robinwing/Fuzzypelt kit in any book, ever. Only Ravenpaw in Bluestar's Prophecy and Longtail in Spottedleaf's Heart. Not Dustpelt. The authors had no intention of any of the cats in the Into the Wild allegiances to be related at all, which created problems when it was time to write prequels and such. Shuffling around litters fixes that problem, though. Sandstorm never had any relationship to Brindleface or Redtail. And she didn't with Dappletail, but Dappletail does reference having multiple litters before to Fireheart and she is ginger and white.

Speaking of, I eliminated Lilyheart's canon litter. Leafshade serves no purpose and has no personality, also Leafpool is still living in ThunderClan at the time of her birth and I don't want prefix doubles. I kept Honeyfur because I like that name and shuffled her over to Lionblaze and Cinderheart as part of their second litter. I gave Larksong to Daisy because I wanted to make her Twigbranch's foster mother. And Lilyheart seemed awfully young to me to be having children and being a grandmother before Lionblaze. And I really don't want Lionblaze being a grandfather yet because that makes him old to me, which he's not. And being a grandparent means some level of maturity, which he definitely does not have in my rewrite. So, I gave Sorrelstripe's litter to Lilyheart and Stormcloud. I really like Stormcloud and I want to give him more purpose because he kind of just stops existing after Bramblestar's Storm and that should be a crime.

I also gave Spotfur and Flywhisker to Birchfall and Whitewing because CinderLion don't need that many kids and I wanted to give Dovewing and Ivypool little sisters. FernIvy is also scrapped because she is very related to Lionblaze, sorry second cousins are still cousins speaking as someone who grew up playing with my second cousins. And I know they're third cousins. Not second cousins once removed. Direct third cousins. Besides FernIvy and the treatment/normalization of incest in the warriors fandom is a whole other conversation. Making Fernsong an outsider also felt like a cop-out to me and I wasn't sure how to narratively fit him in a way that made sense. Besides, I plan on Ivypool doing actual spy work on the DF plus its trainees, which includes Mousewhisker. They become friends in my rewrite during OotS and aren't revealed as mates until AVoS. And MinnowMouse seems like a short-lived fling to me, which is what it is in my rewrite. Sort of like a Bluestar and Oakheart situation minus the kits (and my personal favor...).

I had to scrap Blossomfall/Thornclaw since I made Spotfur a Whitewing kit, but that was fine by me since I don't really see Thornclaw as someone who wanted kits or to be a father. I made Rosepetal and Toadstep kits of a loner and Daisy instead of Spiderleg because I personally do not like Spiderleg and having kits with a cat who wasn't Clanborn does not seem in character for him, considering which cat raised him (Dustpelt... 😒). I made Gorsetail and Beechfur mates since it was an author suggestion (the only good one) and I like Sedgewhisker a lot and want her to be important to the plot in some regard since she shows up so much in PoT and OoTs in canon. Whitetail and Owlwhisker are the parents of Heathertail, Harespring, Whiskernose, and Larkwing. Fernstripe and Featherpelt are Sedgewhisker and Emberfoot's daughters. Larkwing being their daughter is a mistake the Wiki NEVER fixed. She was a warrior by the end of OoTS and Sedgewhisker isn't pregnant until Bramblestar's Storm.

I think those are all the important changes I've made, and they're really not that big? In the future I might erase Alderheart and Sparkpelt as BrambleSquirrel offspring just because I might want to keep Squirrelflight infertile and I definitely also want to keep BrambleSquirrel divorced. I think we should normalize cat divorces.

#warriors au #au #rewrite #warrior cats #wc au

0 notes

underthedekutree · 4 years

Text

Young Link might have PTSD - Part 2: Termina is NOT a Parallel World, Technically

This is a continuation of my last post so if you’re seeing this and haven’t read it, go here.

This is the part where I somewhat smoothly segue into Majora’s Mask. Link, lonely and filled with unprocessed trauma, leaves Hyrule in search of Navi. According to most sources (which take from Hyrule Historia probably? don’t quote me on it), Link falls down a hole into Termina, a parallel world to Hyrule, that contains many familiar looking denizens of Hyrule, but playing different roles. And well, if you probably guessed by the title, I have a rather different interpretation.

Okay, so in a nutshell my theory is that Termina is in fact all a dream, kind of like Koholint Island. Except the one dreaming up this world isn’t some deity like the Giants or Skull Kid or the Moon. It’s Link.

(big explainey hoo hah below)

Evidence 1: Link begins the game sleeping. Yes, I know literally every Zelda game begins this way and it’s a whole tradition thing. I am beginning with the weakest points first and working my way up to the strong ones. We’ll get there.

Evidence 2: The reuse of character and environment models from Ocarina of Time. The literal IRL reason for this is of course the game famously being given only one year of production time, which meant that the most practical method was to reuse as much material from MM’s predecessor as possible (eg. Romani Ranch sign is the Kakariko Village sign, and still says Kakariko Village on it). It seems like a rather offhand afterthought for Nintendo to chalk it all up to “oh its just a parallel world like Link to the Past or something. But think of it like this; when we dream, we often see familiar people from throughout our lives put in strange and unexpected situations, like that irritable old farmhand you hated so much is now a depressed circus master for some reason. Dreams don’t make sense. Things you know will mix with other strange inexplicable things, fleeting thoughts in your mind, all roughly tied together by whatever emotions you had been feeling when you went to bed. Malon is split into two people, Romani and Cremia, her older and younger self. This might reflect how Link feels about Malon, that she changed so much in those 7 years that she’s like a different person entirely, that it’s hard for him to process that they are the same, because the change was so shockingly sudden for him.

Evidence 3: Gorons in the snow, Gerudo by the sea. Yes, I know that sounds a lot like good evidence for a parallel world (that’s why the idea is widely accepted in the first place, it has merit), but it also works in as dream world evidence too. As a child, my family was obsessed with skiing. We would go to the same mountain every winter, and we would stay at the same lodge. It almost became like a second home for me. So much so, that one night I dreamed that my house had been replaced by the lodge, so it wasn’t on a snow-capped mountain, but in a bushy Australian suburb. Okay that kinda got off subject but I’m bad at conclusions so in summary Dreams Just Be Like That (tm). You get what I’m saying right? No? Sorry, let’s just move on.

Evidence 4: The Milk Bar. AKA my favourite location in the game! It’s often overlooked as the “haha funny they couldn’t put alcohol in kids game so its kiddy milk hee hee”, but it is actually a strong thematic pillar of Majora’s Mask. As I mentioned in Part 1, if you put a 9 year old in a 16 year old’s body and call him an adult before ripping that all away is probably going to leave the kid with an identity crisis. What is a mature place open at late hours when children are sleeping? A bar. What is a drink associated with the young, being produced for the purpose of helping children grow? Milk. No please don’t go I swear there’s more to this, stay with me. In order to gain access to the bar, Link must prove he is mature enough by wearing a mask, a disguise, like Adult Link is to Young Link. Being adult isn’t earned through years of natural living experience and mental development, it’s a thing you are given by adults to just BE when they deem you worthy, at least from how Link sees it. So that is the amalgamation of dream thoughts that is the Milk Bar. Is it mature? Is it childish? What is the line between the two? Is there one? It’s the culmination of his anxieties and confusions that he doesn’t know how to express. Another, smaller expression of this anxiety is the Clock Town Guards. When Link is a Deku, the guards say they don’t allow children outside the gates. When Link turns back however, the guard goes to stop him because he looks too young, but sees that he has a sword, and lets him pass. Why the sword? Well, in one way this is a callback to Kokiri Forest, where Mido doesn’t let Link see the Deku Tree until he has a sword. But also, what is the item that lets Link travel through time and become an adult in OOT? The Master Sword. Link seems to believe that adulthood is measured by the things you have, physical markers of maturity, which is how lots of children see adulthood. You’re an adult if you can drink, if you’re tall, if you’re married, if you have a house, a car etc. But in reality this isn’t how it works. Heck, I’m technically an adult but I sure as hell don’t feel like one, because I know I still have things to learn about responsibility, patience and all the other things, that can only come with time, which is the moral conclusion of OOT, but clearly Link missed the memo. Don’t get me wrong, there are some indicators to show he’s grown a bit. He can ride Epona, use the bow, do flips like some kind of acrobat etc. But those strange and confused feelings linger, and manifest in the young boy’s dreams.

Evidence 5: The four transformation masks. The four masks represent different aspects of Link’s self, and the way he grew and changed in OOT. Deku Scrub the Innocent, Goron the Confident, Zora the Mature and Fierce Deity the Hero. Link began only knowing the Kokiri Forest, and nothing of the world outside. As he set out on his journey, he grew more confident in his skills and defeated greater foes. When evil took over, he learned from his fatal mistake and worked to right it. And when it was finally time to face the greatest threat, he was ready, with all the heart pieces, bottles full of fairies, Biggoron Sword in hand. At that moment he struck the final blow he probably felt like the strong and unstoppable hero everyone in Hyrule told him he needed to be. And that feeling of pure uncompromising strength, with the whole world behind him, manifested in the Fierce Deity. Fierce Deity is much taller than Adult Link, and packs so much of a punch that he can beat Majora without batting an eye, like some overpowered Super Saiyan. It reminds me a lot of Undertale, with young Asriel becoming what he imagines to be an all-powerful godlike being, like something you’d see as a children’s drawing. Fierce Deity gives off those vibes, like “he has a HUGE SWORD that SHOOTS BEAMS OF LIGHT and he’s 8 FOOT TALL and CAN KILL ENEMIES IN A SINGLE BLOW!!” Before the final battle on the moon, when Majora gives you the mask, he childishly asks if you want to play a game of good guys and bad guys. And the good guy always wins, no matter what. Fierce Deity makes the final boss a cakewalk, but its supposed to.

Evidence 6: Anju and Kafei. Short one, because it falls a lot into everything else I’ve said regarding childhood vs adulthood. Kafei is effectively a switcheroo of what happened to Link in OOT. An adult shrunk back to childhood, uncomfortable in his new body and looking for a way to fix everything. He’s a reflection of how Link now kinda feels like an adult in a child’s body, because he had started to be used to being called an adult.

Evidence 7: The Moon. I haven’t super touched on the main meat of the game yet, so here it is. The moon and the 3 day mechanic is an allegory for constant mounting pressure, that builds and builds, never ceasing, because the world is in danger, and there’s only one person who has been chosen to save it. I’ve always been interested in the Chosen One narrative, and how different media explore the idea of the world’s very existence being pushed onto one person. How at the end of it all, they can never be the same again after all they’ve gone through. When you’re somehow expected to hold up the Moon itself single-handed, and your life and everything you care about suffers because you’re putting everyone else before yourself. That feeling of complete loneliness under a crushing weight, and although other characters may come to help you, in the end its still all down to you, and you never had a choice in any of it, as all the decisions were made by someone else. You must do what they tell you. Believe in yourself, believe...

Evidence 8: Skull Kid. The story goes that long ago in Termina, the Skull Kid and the Giants played together, until one day, the Giants left, leaving the Skull Kid alone and heartbroken, with nobody to turn to. As life moves on, things may change, and people always come and go from your life. Your friend might move overseas, or stop texting you, or you might fall out of friendship after an awkward event from which you could never recover (no, these have totally not all happened to me, shut up i’m fine), or your fairy companion might just disappear without so much as a goodbye after their task is complete. And it feels like you didn’t matter at all. That they never really cared about you, and you’re as easy to drop and move on from as a child’s toy. You might get angry, and want to shut them out, and give them a taste of their own medicine. Majora’s Mask teaches you that this isn’t the case. Life is ever changing, but you will always have the memories of times with your friends, and a chance to make more with new friends, like a sassy talkative fairy sprite and her shy brother or a child made of wood who wants to destroy the world. Friends come from unlikely places, so accept that change will happen and hope that wherever the people you knew are, they’re okay. You’re thinking about them, so they might be thinking about you too. And who knows? Life is unpredictable. They might just come back one day, and it’ll be like they were never gone.

Evidence 9 (the final one, I promise): The Song of Healing. At the end of all things, after losing ones you love, connections to family and friends, memories of things long past... you need time to heal. Link’s journey through Termina is a constant gauntlet of running into his own past traumas, forced to relive them again, and again, and again. But sometimes you should take a deep breath, gather your thoughts, and take time to heal. Although it can be important to confront your fears and learn to surpass them, it is exhausting, and you can end up more emotionally broken than when you started. The three masks all had regrets of powerlessness; unable to protect your community, your loved ones, or even yourself. Troubles you’ve gone through that keep plaguing your mind, and you’re wondering if you’ve done enough, seeking answers where none can be found. And the best thing you can do... is accept and move on. Be kind to yourself, and give yourself time to heal. Link’s way of processing his grief and trauma is to create an entire hellscape world in his own head, but not everyone processes it the same way. Sometimes you feel like you need to busy yourself, or listen to soothing music, or talk to people you trust, or spend copious amounts of money, or make some angst art, or cuddle your plush toys until their stuffing squeezes out. Sometimes life hits you in the face and you want to blame yourself for standing in the firing line, but it’s not your fault. It’s okay to feel however you feel, whether you’re drenched in a pool of tears or you just feel numb, it’s okay and natural. You’re okay. You’re here.

Okay so it got kinda personal at the end there but I hope it was informative, and made you think a little bit differently about Majora’s Mask and Ocarina of Time. You probably want to go back and play them now. Me too.

So was this all just an excuse for me to gush about how cool Majora’s Mask is? Hell fucking yes it was. Congratulations for making it through my monstrous ramblings, you get the secret prize of looking at my weird art on my DA. Here you go. Have a nice day, Zelda Nerds.

#long post #legend of zelda #majoras mask #young link #fierce deity #zelda theory #wow i cant believe i never realised i wrote fuckig outset island instead of koholint im dumby af

24 notes · View notes

sally-mun · 4 years

Text

(Sorry anon, Tumblr screwed up my draft of your ask, so you’re a screenshot now.)

I hope you realize what you’ve done, because this is going to be a VERY long story. Get a drink and strap in.

Before I can get into this too deeply, we first need to talk about Ocarina of Time. There are a lot of issues I had with OoT that I was VERY excited to see were later addressed by Twilight Princess, whether it was an intentional link or not. There are a handful of things involved here, but for me the biggest one by far is the Temple of Time.

Waaaaay back in the late 90′s/early 2000′s, the internet was still relatively young and, in a way, more simple and innocent. The standard for using it largely boiled down to, “I like [x], so I’ll search for [x]” and just seeing what mess of crap you ended up with. I did this mostly with Sonic and anime stuff, but every now and then I’d do it for things like LoZ as well. One of the sites this brought me to was called The Odyssey of Hyrule, which at the time utterly blew my mind with its content. It was a hotbed of Zelda oddities, glitches (some of which I now see often in speed runs), hoax debunks, and most importantly for this discussion, screenshots from early builds of the game.

We can probably trace the origin of my fixation back to this screenshot:

Those of you that know Ocarina of Time well can probably tell right of the bat that this is not an area that appears in the final game. The website posited that this was perhaps an area behind the Temple of Time, since the setting elements all look the same and the camera appears to be in a fixed location. After all, when you look at the building from the front, there’s a clearly visible path running along the side, and it does appear that the fence has a “gate,” although we can never open it.

See it there, behind the second gossip stone from the left? There’s a gap on either side of that bit of fence, right where the path happens to be. The rest of the fence on the right side doesn’t have gaps like that, suggesting that this bit of fence wasn’t originally there and the path was once traversable; my personal hunch is that the “gate” is actually a copied instance of the smaller bit of fencing on the left to save themselves the headache of redoing the fence entirely. The gossip stones, if they were originally there at all, were probably supposed to start from the far right wall instead of the left, which would also open up access to the path.

The longer this stewed around in my brain, the more it drove me absolutely crazy, because I realized that this could possibly explain a lot of seemingly disparate elements. For example, there’s a peculiarity in the Temple of Time that’s easy to miss if you’re not taking your time and paying close attention. After you remove the Door of Time to gain access to the sword chamber, the initial view of said chamber is actually much smaller. It’s especially easy to see when you switch to first-person, because you can more easily see how close the walls are on the left and right.

(My apologies for the shitty quality of these pictures, I took them back before we had decent digital cameras. I’ll get better ones when I post this as an actual article on my other blog.)

As you run into the chamber, the tight walls abruptly disappear and give way to the massive chamber we’re all familiar with. In fact, if you take your time and walk forward through this hallway, you can easily see the moment when the room changes from small to large before your eyes.

When comparing this oddity with the beta screenshot and the website’s suggestion that the path may have allowed you to go behind the temple, I became convinced that something else was supposed to happen back there, but was cut from the game for one reason or another. My guess is that the sword chamber really was originally very small as it first appears, and the larger chamber was a separate area behind it, which was used for... well, what? It obviously wasn’t something small and simple, like a chest with a heart piece; not for a room that grand. It was clearly for something big, something important, because it had to have a large enough scale of work that the designers looked at it and realized they couldn’t finish in time. After a LOT of mulling it over, I became convinced that it was most likely the entrance to the Light Temple.

You see, something else that always struck me as odd was the fact that you’re just given the Light Medallion as soon as you become an adult. You do absolutely nothing to earn it; it’s all part of the same cut scene that plays after you remove the sword for the first time. You meet Rauru, the Light Sage, pretty abruptly as he infodumps about what’s going on, and then he just forks over the Light Medallion without hesitation.

From a narrative perspective, it sticks out to me because Rauru is the only person you do not interact with at any point in the game. You don’t meet him at all as a child, and as an adult you only see him within the Sacred Realm. All of the other sages are people you have both a child and adult connection with in some way, and it’s up to you to awaken them to their powers by ridding their respective temples of evil. Why would they just skip that process with Rauru?

Perhaps they never meant to; maybe you were supposed to go through that same process, but the Light Temple got cut. When you’re designing a video game, there’s a practice that’s recommended before you start actually building it where you make a list of all the elements you want included, then you organize it by importance, and then you cut it in half. The top half is the one you focus on first, because it’s stuff you absolutely positively have to have in the game in order for it to work. The bottom half is stuff you get to include if you have enough time, and it’s added in the order you listed it because top items are more critical. It could very well be that the Light Temple was either on that second half of the list, or it was never on the second half at all but development time simply ran out and it got bumped.

Either way, at some point in the process I think they realized they weren’t going to be able to complete the Light Temple, so they blocked off the side path and expanded the sword chamber to eat up the extra space. After all, you can see how long the building is from the outside, so it wouldn’t make much sense for it to be a reverse Tardis and be smaller on the inside. Once the back path was removed, I imagine they reworked Rauru to reduce his role; my head canon has always been that he was some kind of high priest who oversaw the Temple of Time, since it IS essentially a church. I mean, just look at that garb. He certainly appears to be some kind of holy man.

Having him as a priest at the Temple of Time that you could actually meet and talk to as a kid would’ve finally made his presence make sense. It would explain who and what he is at all, since he just kind of appears out of nowhere as the game currently stands, and it would’ve aligned with the other sages insofar as meeting them when they don’t realize their powers, then saving them as an adult and awakening them as a sage. In fact, Rauru disappearing from the Temple of Time would’ve been the game’s first big red flag that something has gone terribly wrong in the last seven years, versus having to go outside to see all the decay and the dark energy around Death Mountain. Furthermore, each sage is someone that the game explicitly positions as a person that makes sense TO be each temple’s respective sage, and to me, a priest from the Temple of Time is the obvious choice for the Light Sage when you consider that the Light Temple is probably part of the same building.

Speaking of the Temple of Time, it has a lot of clues of its own that it may have once doubled as the Light Temple. For one thing, consider the songs that warp you around the game: The Minuet of Forest takes you to the Forest Temple, the Bolero of Fire takes you to the Fire Temple, the Serenade of Water takes you to the Water Temple... but what song takes you to the Temple of Time? It’s not a song with time in the name anywhere, it’s the Prelude of Light. This would make perfect sense if the Light Temple was supposed to share space with the Temple of Time, right?

Another clue is the warp points themselves. Each time you warp to one of the temples, you land on a large pedestal bearing the Triforce. However, there’s another image overlayed on them too: That temple’s medallion. If you play the Prelude of Light to warp to the Temple of Time, the pedestal you land on features the the Light Medallion, as though this is where you were supposed to have earned it.

I later discovered that this is even more prominent in another old beta screenshot, which is much more heavy-handed with the symbol on the pedestal.

Something else to consider is the fact that the Temple of Time is actually where you acquire the Light Arrows, the final item that you need before you take on Ganon at the end. Like the medallion before it, the Light Arrows are again just given to you without requiring any work. The other temples all have a critically important item inside that you must obtain to not only finish the temple itself, but that is then needed in other areas in the game. Doesn’t it seem like you’d have to complete the Light Temple to get the Light Arrows, and they’d follow the same pattern of being used to finish the temple and then go on for further use elsewhere (namely, Ganon’s Castle)?

Getting the Light Arrows last also lends credence toward the idea that the Light Temple was in fact lower on the development list, because it would’ve necessarily been the last temple you visited in terms of game progression. They’re not going to give you the ultimate holy weapon early on in the game; they have to save that for the end so you don’t blow through the rest of the temples without a sweat! Additionally, the Light Temple being last would only increase the tension of wondering where Rauru went, since each time you warped between the past and the future you’d have to pass through the Temple of Time and note once again that Rauru is missing.

If it were me making the priority list, the temples would be listed in the same order that you play them in-game, because obviously you need to go through [dungeon 1] before you can go through [dungeon 2] or [dungeon 3].* In this particular instance, chronological order and order of importance happen to be the same thing, and if the development team used the same reasoning, then yes, the Light Temple would be much lower on the list than the others. It’s entirely within reason to think that they had planned for it, but realized they weren’t going to have time to fully implement it, and instead blocked it off and handed over the items you would’ve obtained there so they could focus on getting other, more critical things done.

It’s also worth noting just how much infodumping happens at the Temple of Time. As the game currently stands, there’s very little to actually do at the ToT, but there are many long conversations that take place there. You talk to Zelda, both as herself and as Sheik, you talk to Rauru (as that technically happens while you’re at the ToT), and even Ganon monologues a bit there at the end. You end up spending a LOT of time spent standing around while other characters pelt you with information in this particular location. I’m not saying that there shouldn’t have been any big conversations here, but rather that I feel like there are more than there probably should’ve been. Some (possibly most) of that information could’ve been obtained more gradually and actively if the Light Temple had managed to be a thing.

And look, I’m not saying that what we ultimately got in the game doesn’t work; there’s nothing specifically wrong with the way Ocarina of Time handles the Temple of Time. I agree that getting the Light Medallion and Light Arrows in the ToT isn’t completely out of nowhere since the ToT is connected to the Sacred Realm. I’m only saying it doesn’t come across as the original design to me; as far as I’m concerned, it clearly, obviously screams that what we got was a back-up plan. It works just enough to make sense, but it would work so much better if they did it this other way. Everything just clicks together a little more snugly when you consider that there may have been a sixth temple. It’s not that what we got doesn’t make sense, it’s just that I believe these ideas make more sense.

This topic is something I used to go on and on about back in the day, to pretty much anyone who would listen to me. I was met with about as many different kinds of feedback as you can imagine; some people agreed that I was on to something and had maybe solved a mystery, whereas others thought I was reading way too much into details that just don’t have that deep of a meaning. Unfortunately, it’s obviously not something I could take that far in an argument because there was no way to prove my hypothesis. It’s all just a guess, and even though I think there’s some pretty strong evidence to back it up, in the end I have no way to actually verify it. Sure I could contact Nintendo, but I highly doubt they’d tell me anything one way or the other.

SO NEEDLESS TO SAY when Twilight Princess eventually came along and had a Temple of Time that was a for-realsies playable dungeon with monsters and puzzles and items to collect, I went through the fucking roof.

At the EXACT moment that I realized that this is what the game was giving me, I literally screamed and shouted and cheered because I felt so... vindicated, in a way? It felt very strongly like a soft confirmation of what I’d been saying for all these years -- ESPECIALLY since the Twilight!ToT ALSO makes heavy use of the Light Medallion symbol. I feel like that’s about as clear of a connection as you can get.

Like, I know the Temple of Time being playable in Twilight Princess doesn’t absolutely confirm that it was supposed to be that way in Ocarina of Time, but it gives me that vibe because it feels like Twilight makes a point to ‘right’ a lot of ‘wrongs’ present in Ocarina. It gives me the sense that they were making up for some of the things they didn’t (or couldn’t) do the first time around. The fact that they were willing to delay the release of Twilight Princess just to make sure everything was just right also gives me that vibe. They could’ve just cut things again, but this time, they wanted to make sure everything was there, and that it was good.

One other thing I’d like to mention before completely moving on from this topic is something that I admittedly can’t confirm, but it’s another point that’s been on my mind: Back when I was playing Twilight Princess for the first time and I was screaming about the Temple of Time, a guy I knew back then mentioned to me that the ToT that we see in Twilight is, canonically, the same ToT that we see in Ocarina. He said that he’d heard somewhere that the Ocarina world map actually fit perfectly when overlayed against the Twilight world map, and the major world features/locations from Ocarina of Time lined up exactly with landmarks and ruins in the Twilight Princess world. I did attempt to look this up for myself before writing this post, but most of what I found was a big mess; I may attempt to line the maps up myself sometime if just to be able to better wrap my brain around what might (or might not) work here. What I can definitely say, though, is that the idea is at least supported by the theme of the series in general, given that it’s based around the notion of history repeating itself. Zelda games reference other Zelda games all the time, so it’s far from unheard of.

Anyway, as I mentioned earlier the Light Temple isn’t the only thing that makes me feel like Twilight Princess is trying to make amends for things that were missed in Ocarina of Time; it just happens to be the one I was most prominently fixated on. Another big thing that Twilight Princess appears to be rectifying is the City in the Sky. Going back again to my old stomping ground The Odyssey of Hyrule, there was another beta screenshot that got a LOT of attention back in the day, because it 1) was an animated gif, 2) involves the Triforce, and 3) appears to be some kind of ‘Sky Temple,’ as it was known.

(Once upon a time that gif was reasonably sized, but since computers have roided the fuck out since the days of Windows 95, I realize it’s not the biggest or clearest thing in the world and I apologize.)

As I recall there were a couple of other screenshots that appeared to also be from this alleged Sky Temple, but sadly I don’t seem to have any of them myself, and although The Odyssey of Hyrule technically still exists, it looks like its images are all broken. In any case, the question of whether or not Ocarina of Time was supposed to have a sky temple was a HUUUUGE hot topic among Zelda sites for years. So many people spent enormous amounts of time and energy trying to find the so-called Sky Temple, largely because there was a sizable sect of the fanbase convinced that the Triforce HAD to be hidden somewhere in the game. Amazingly enough someone did eventually find the Triforce obscenely hidden in the game files (I wish I still had the pics of that, the amount of glitching needed to get to it was insane), but nothing was ever ultimately discovered about the Sky Temple. It just became one of those bits of gaming folklore that got passed around from person to person over time.

Which, of course, is why the inclusion of the City in the Sky in Twilight Princess, much like the expansion of the Temple of Time, feels a lot like Nintendo is making up for something they may have intended to do but were unable to complete.

Not gonna lie, when I played this area for the first time I couldn’t help thinking that the small glimpse in the gif above feels like it could feasibly fit in here, and it was just the coolest feeling of, “I knew it!”

Another thing that really bugged me about Ocarina of Time (and in fact still does to this day) is the fact that, even after you beat the Water Temple, Zora’s Domain remains frozen. I never understood how this could be, since every other area reverts back to its original, beautiful form after you defeat the evil in the associated temple. Not Zora’s Domain, though! It’s thoroughly unsatisfying to have gone through what is arguably the most hated temple in the game and not have a full reward for your efforts.

This, again, is something it seems Twilight apologizes for; not only does it actually replicate the original problem of the Zoras getting frozen, but IN THIS ONE YOU ACTUALLY THAW THEM OUT!! And not only that, you thaw them BEFORE you even do the temple! That alone feels like Nintendo practically coming out and saying, “Yeah, we messed up, our bad. Here, have the restored Zoras right away as our apology.” It was such a huge mental release to see that ice melt and the Zoras come back to life! My brain was finally able to let go of a frustration I’d had for years!

My last one isn’t so much something that I felt was supposed to be in Ocarina of Time, but rather something I just plain wanted to be there. I was always sad that, even though you do technically get to enter Hyrule Castle, you don’t really get to go in there. You get an extremely limited and very linear track to follow, and at best you just get glimpses of some of the other areas that probably would’ve been really cool to explore had the game been designed that way.

I always felt like the fact that you didn’t get any real exploration of Hyrule Castle upset some of the balance in the game, considering that you do have to fully traverse Ganon’s Castle as a solvable dungeon. Being able to get a thorough sense of what Hyrule Castle was originally like before evil fell would help reinforce just how much things had changed in the seven years that Link was in the Sacred Realm, especially since that contrast is such a strong theme everywhere else in the game.

So, much like my reaction when I realized I was actually entering the Temple of Time as a level, I had a very similar reaction when I realized I was getting Hyrule Castle in the same way.

I may not have freaked out quite as much, but DAMN if that wasn’t another enormous payoff for me! Getting to really look around inside of Hyrule Castle, and furthermore in a version that’s really able to convey the scale and grandness OF a castle, was an absolutely magical moment of overdue gratification.

What’s even better is that Twilight Princess almost gives you a sort of a fake-out in this regard, since at the very beginning you kind of go through Hyrule Castle but, like Ocarina of Time, it’s extremely limited and linear, so it seems at first like they’re going to do the same thing.

I remember playing this for the first time and thinking, “Well, at least I’ve gotten a little closer to seeing inside of Hyrule Castle, but I really wish they’d just friggin’ let us ACTUALLY go in.” IMAGINE MY CHAGRIN when later on that’s exactly what I ended up doing~ I’m sitting there fan-screaming and the game is going “AH HA I GOTCHA!!”

Soooooo yeah... This ended up being an extremely long post and probably way more than you were ever interested in knowing, but, yeah, I think that’s why Twilight Princess felt like such a bookend for me. Even though I did technically have the original LoZ as a child, my life as a Zelda fan really began with Ocarina of Time, and that game left me longing for several very specific things that Twilight Princess later fulfilled. I’ve never had so many large unresolved issues with any other game, and the fact that Ocarina of Time was the Zelda game that I ‘imprinted’ on, those issues left a very deep impression on me. Having Twilight Princess essentially go back and ‘fix’ those things was incredibly psychologically calming for me, and I think it’s a major reason why I haven’t particularly sought out other Zelda games in the last 12 years. Twilight Princess gave me the things I’d been looking for since 1998 -- a decade of hemming and hawing finally resolved.

I honestly feel like playing Zelda games may be different for me in some way now as I move forward, because I won’t have a part of my brain mentally searching for a way to fill those little voids in the back of my head. I have both Skyward Sword and Breath of the Wild, which as I said in that other post I’ve actually never tried out, so I guess we’ll find out how I relate to them whenever I finally decide to take that leap!

If you actually made it to the end of this post, THANK YOU SO MUCH and I hope you enjoyed it~

*Fun fact, this isn’t necessarily true when it comes to the Fire and Water Temples. The game wants you to do Fire first, but it’s completely possible to do the Water Temple if you want to!

#I TOLD YOU THIS WAS GOING TO BE A BIG ONE #Legend of Zelda #Ocarina of Time #Twilight Princess #anonymous

36 notes · View notes

sibyl-of-space · 4 years

Text

Finished a binge re-play of Ocarina of Time (3D) for the first time in a very, very long time. Long-winded thoughts below.

Disclaimer: I played the original n64 version (red blood Ganondorf and all) ad NAUSEUM as a kid. It was by far in my top 3 most-played video games, and if you all know me you know that I don’t play a lot of video games, I play the same few over and over and over and become obsessed with them. As such, OoT is not new to me. I also played the 3D version once before, but it was over the course of several years when I was in college and that was a no-lens-of-truth run for the heck of it. I have not touched either since though, so this is the freshest eyes I’ve had on the game since I was probably about 6-7 years old seeing it for the first time. Do keep in mind though that I already knew virtually all the easter eggs and secrets and story and progression and had a vague recollection of the vast majority of dungeon concepts/puzzles before going in, because this game was my entire world for many formative years.

This game has really excellent dungeons. I ranked them below because I was inspired by my friend ML’s ranking (in fact a desire to rank them myself is what caused me to binge replay this in the first place), but honestly I found all of them engaging. My least favorite was ice cavern but even ice cavern has a really cool atmosphere and an interesting concept, it’s just a bit tedious and bottle management gameplay is not particularly fun to me.

1. Spirit Temple - unlike Shadow which uses invisible walls as a mechanic to trick you, Spirit subverts every single mechanic and puzzle you've encountered so far to really throw you. It's extremely clever. The ambience and overall design is also just excellent.

2. Forest Temple - gameplay wise it is fine but as the first adult temple it REALLY sets the scale and tone for the latter portion of your adventure; the vibe in this temple is just so fucking cool. The sacred forest meadow honestly does come off as sacred, ancient, and haunted but in an ethereal way as opposed to a spooky way. Ooh, I love it.

3. Ganon's Tower - the concept is excellent and the execution is solid, the medallion portion is interesting but the gauntlet up to Ganondorf with increasingly loud organ music and hallways filled with bats and just cool fights and great atmosphere makes this one of the sickest final dungeons I can think of. I was starting to be like "eh maybe the medallion rooms are a bit underwhelming" and then I got hit with the fakeout room in Light that just won me over with how cheeky it was. All the medallion rooms felt a bit like Spirit temple with how they played with expectations, which (ironically?) made the spirit portion actually the least good.

4. Gerudo Fortress - I'm counting mini dungeons and the whole espionage thing is just SO much fun. Break into a thieves’ hideout, jump across rooftops and shoot people with your bow to sneak past them?? WHAT IS NOT TO LOVE?????

5. Water Temple - okay I gotta say this replay really sold me on water temple. It's a cool concept and a fantastic atmosphere, and 3DS quality of life changes (boot swap ease of access + very clearly visually marked water level change rooms) made me actually thoroughly enjoy playing it. Also Dark Link is rightfully hailed as one of the coolest, if not the coolest, miniboss(es) in the game, so extra points there.

6. Bottom of the Well - Shadow's invisible wall mechanic is much more interesting when you can't see through them and everything is a potential trap. Falling down to the basement does get frustrating but that room where you light torches to open coffins and a FLOATING GIBDO EMERGES makes up for it, holy crap. Shadow Temple is underwhelming because Bottom of the Well already did what it tries to do but better.

7. Dodongo's Cavern - hey man I like blowing up dinosaurs this dungeon is just solid 0 complaints

8. Fire Temple - Fire Temple is also solid I just a) am so used to the original music that this version feels empty and lacking atmosphere by comparison, and b) find the above temples cooler. Shout out to dragon whack-a-mole boss fight though.

9. Shadow Temple - this suffers from being the only temple I really had completely memorized (I think my weenie friends* must have made me beat it for them as kids) so playing it this time was really just going through the motions; it didn’t get the chance to win me over because I remembered all of it and nothing particularly stuck out to me as being super clever. The boat ride, however, is sick as hell.

(*disclaimer: I was also a weenie. Shadow Temple scared the absolute pants off of me. But I clearly played it enough times that the entire thing was etched into my memory regardless, so.)

10. Deku Tree - does its job as tutorial dungeon, nice atmosphere, thats about all there is to say.

11. Jabu-Jabu's Belly - redeeming feature is using Ruto as a projectile. Throwing her at the ceiling switches will never not be hilarious. Honestly not a bad dungeon, merely gross and I like the other ones better.

12. Ice Cavern - I used to dread Ice Cavern; this time around I just found it tedious. The atmosphere is successful - it really feels cold and chilling - but not appealing enough to make up for it being dull and kind of annoying. Has the potential to be really cool if the blue fire were used in a more interesting way than “fill your bottles and dump them elsewhere.”

BUT, I feel it would be a complete disservice to my younger self and my younger self’s reasons for playing this game so much, if I focus completely on dungeons and disproportionately on gameplay in a review. Because while gameplay is a huge reason I kept going back to it (hard to want to go back to a game if it isn't fun to play), that’s not what made me love it so much, and a replay has given me fresher eyes to enjoy everything else it has to offer.

Ocarina of Time creates a world and a story that I deeply cared about, and revisiting as an adult, I find if anything I have more take-aways than I did previously. I have always really enjoyed coming-of-age narratives when done well, and this is a coming-of-age narrative done REMARKABLY well. You see dumb bratty kids doing dumb bratty kid things and then see the mature people they’ve grown into 7 years later; the game does not make the mistake of projecting a personality onto a voiceless protagonist, but it does imply a narrative arc for him (and you) regardless just through how strong and cool and awesome you get by the end and all the rad shit you’ve accomplished over the course of the game. It manages to very, very successfully make its story about other characters who DO have personalities, but also make you as the blank slate mc cool guy hero very much have a part in that story that feels very earned and satisfying.

Link doesn’t have a personality. You can project whatever the hell you want onto him or nothing at all. Ocarina of Time makes that *work*, because it doesn’t try to frame him as either ~adult in a child’s body~ or ~child in adult’s body~, it just lets you experience the literal growth from a kid who has to jump to reach ledges and has to thwack things twice with a slingshot and tiny sword, to an adult who can LAUNCH MASSIVE PILLARS INTO THE AIR and one-shot previously difficult enemies, and interpret that however you will. I think the most powerful example of this is going back in time again after doing several adult temples, and entering the bottom of the well, where you see enemies you’ve previously only encountered as an adult, and feel confident that you can tackle them as a child, too.

I really love these kinds of narratives. Where the growth of the main character is purely in the sense of you as the player becoming more adept and stronger, and the context of the story makes that mean something, but the game doesn’t try and pretend the avatar itself has a 3-dimensional personality.

I also think the balance between narrative and gameplay is excellent once it hits its groove. The beginning is very hand-holdy (Navi taught me how to open a door after I had already opened a door elsewhere because she’s scripted to do it at a specific door even though you can technically get to a later one first. lol), and I very firmly believe that with Saria’s Song as a device that lets you seek advice when you want to, it is completely unnecessary to have Navi yell at you what she thinks you should be doing. That said, the game doesn’t stop you from doing whatever the hell you want, and the number and depth of dungeons makes exploring and killing stuff by FAR the meat of the game, over the story. There is a suggested dungeon order, but you have some freedom if you’d rather do them a bit out of order, and there is a LOT of fun side stuff you can do and get rewarded for.

Most of that side stuff is an excellent way to highlight the humor in this game. If you beat Malon’s horse race record she mails a literal fucking cow to your house. Your house in Kokiri Forest. You just show up and there is a fucking cow in your house. That is the funniest thing that has ever happened in a game in the history of forever, sorry. You can race the running man, and all of the other sidequests in the game make you think there is a beatable goal you’ll be rewarded for, and the fucker just goes “lol good try but I beat you by one second. :)” You can blow up the Gossip Stones and they turn into rocketships and launch into space. After you beat the game, and have a really poignant moment with Princess Zelda where she sends you back in time, there is a completely out of nowhere dance party featuring the entire cast in celebration. The game does not try to explain this. It just gives you a dance party, and after such a bittersweet finale and such a fun and engaging game, a no-context dance party is exactly what it needs. A line o Gerudo doing the can-can? Thank you, yes please.

There is SO much that this game does not feel any need to justify in-game, that it simply puts in there because it is fun or cool or both, and I appreciate that so much. There are easter eggs out the butt (still haven’t bothered catching the Hylian Loach and I have still NEVER found the sinking lure despite following every guide in existence). Most of the temples imply some sort of greater history that is not even the slightest bit touched on. It has a very cohesive “core” game that has a start-to-finish suggested progression and a matching narrative, and it has absolute mountains of random shit outside of that it in no way pretends to justify. It explains just enough to give it ground to stand on, but no more, leaving you with more questions than answers. That ambiguity drove me nuts as a kid, but now, I think it’s also why I kept coming back. I wanted answers the game wouldn’t give me so I felt compelled to try and find them myself.

Ocarina of Time’s ending is incredible in ways I am just now able to appreciate. First of all, Zelda is like “I’m gonna send you back in time now” and pulls up the Ocarina and instead of playing the Song of Time which everything in the game implies she should, she plays Zelda’s Lullaby and hesitates just enough on the last note as you are sent back in the past - oof, that’s a good moment. The entire game you’re told about how the Kokiri can’t survive outside of the forest and suddenly they’re at Lon Lon Ranch having a dance party. You walk away from the Master Sword and seal it back in the temple, but nonsensically are then able to meet Zelda in her garden as if nothing had happened, meaning she sent you back so far it erased not just the adult timeline but also everything you accomplished as a child too? So many questions, but the fact that it does not even bother to answer them and just leaves you with such an open-ended image of you and Zelda as kids, calling back to that very early moment after the first dungeon in the game, and you can interpret for yourself what exactly that means.

I’m getting rambly (HAHA as if I’m ever not) so I should wrap this up shortly. Ocarina of Time’s ending is why I am so vehemently opposed to the concept of a ~Zelda Timeline~. The ending is nonsensical if you try to apply concrete logic to it. This game proposes ideas and makes me feel a certain way about them and the ending succeeds in providing just enough closure to make me satisfied and just enough open-ness that makes me want to keep coming back to it to experience it again. It’s not an open-and-shut piece of history of a fake world, it’s a really remarkable journey thats ambiguity is what allows it to feel so very magical.

Ooh boy I can’t wait to replay MM again, but that is a game I’ve never stopped playing, so it’ll be anything but fresh. It hits different right after completing OoT, though. The only way to follow up on a story like Ocarina of Time is to be even MORE batshit, ambiguous, and loose with your definition of how time works.

#analyses #ocarina of time #i have a LOT of thoughts it is very long

1 note · View note

hyperfixationweekly · 2 years

Text

This year I’ve put a lot of time into revisiting things either from my childhood or from good parts of my life, things I remember fondly (or otherwise. Looking at you, Homestuck)

I dragged my GameCube out the other day and booted up Ocarina of Time (never had an N64) to see if the hype is still valid. Here’s what I think.

Despite the GameCube controller being one of the BEST controllers ever made, the control scheme used by OoT is definitely outdated. It feels even more dated when you play on the GCN because you have access to a second control stick, instead of the 4 face buttons on the batshit insane N64 controller. Yet, you can’t use the stick to control the camera, since originally those buttons were for items. So 99% of the game is just repeatedly mashing L (Z).

The combat, while revolutionary for the time, is comprised of a lot of waiting. Many of the enemies you will encounter make use of shields or timed attacks, which is engaging at first. However, after the second dungeon it feels like each encounter drags on. Stalfos are challenging enemies, and they can be fun to fight. But most of their encounters are strafing in circles waiting for them to expose a weak point while mashing L (Z).

Some of the puzzles are absurdly simple. Some of the puzzles are needlessly obtuse. Block pushing will never be innovative or fun. Putting bugs in a jar and setting them free over soft soil is never explained to the player and reminds me of the ridiculously cryptic aspects of the original Zelda.

I know there was an HD remake on the 3DS and I played it and loved it. It IS the definitive version, and has so many quality of life improvements. But I think it’s a shame that it’s the only modernized version of Ocarina of Time and it isn’t available in a console format. So if you’re like me and want to play on a tv, you’re looking at the original or the GCN port. And because of that, the original graphics have aged not so great. A lot of games from the 5th gen look pretty ass these days, even if they were worldbeaters when they released. The limitations of the console also made for the barren Hyrule Field we love to hate. Mash the A button and roll your way around, peasant. The text speed is slow and that FUCKING OWL is my actual childhood nemesis.

Though some of these things aren’t quite at masterpiece status these days, the part that matters most is still phenomenal— the story. Ocarina of Time has a wonderfully told coming-of-age story, and the fact that it’s interactive really builds it up. The characters are memorable, the locations are likely burned into your psyche, and the music is incredibly strong. I can look past the outdated stuff if this part of the game is strong, and it is.

So yeah, Ocarina of Time is still good. Sorry for the long post just to tell you all something that has become universal fact.

#legend of zelda #ocarina of time #hyperfixationweekly

0 notes

rottenappleheart · 6 years

Text

mm liveblog part 2

majora’s mask, unfiltered notes for the entire first 3-day cycle until you get the ocarina back and are no longer a slave to the passage of time

DAWN OF

THE FIRST DAY

72 HOURS REMAIN

tatl's thesis - that we should ask the great fairy for help, because the skull kid is no match for the great fairy - is deeply flawed. i have met great fairies. do you know what they don't do? help much.

that said i now like the idea of the skull kid being periodically taken to task by various great fairies

"sit down and tell me what you did this time"

"i made you a sandwich"

"are you sorry"

i know it's meant to be irritating but i love that the guards will stop both deku link and normal link (until they see he's armed, and also looks like he hasn't slept in seven years) from exiting. becasue they are doing their job and keeping the population safe. and that means not letting children wander around alone.

I LOVE CLOCK TOWN OKAY

I TALK TO EVERYONE ABOUT THEIR LIVES AND I READ ALL THE POSTERS FOR THE LOCAL BANDS AND THE GUARD RECRUITMENTS AND I WATCH THAT ODD MASKED PERSON PICK UP THEIR MAIL AND I TRY TO BEFRIEND THE LOCAL STRAY DOGS AND IT IS JUST SO GOOD

the grown deku scrub who promised his wife a moon's tear, i just have to ask: is that a thing that normally happens? does the moon always just... cry onto the surface of the planet? what???

i love their banners and streamers and their happy music and their busy bustling lives and it's so good

what the fuck kind of ink does the banker use that remains indelible even as time itself unwinds

yikes i want to stop and just look at everything but the first sunset is already closing in and i haven't done anything

I FORGOT HOW NERVE-WRACKING THIS GAME IS BEFORE YOU CAN SLOW TIME DOWN

i... just found a lottery shop in clock town. i literally never knew this was here. how have i missed it all these years.

NIGHT OF

THE FIRST DAY

60 HOURS REMAIN

how is time passing so fast aaaaaaa

clocktown is such a nice place, they have a whole section of town set aside for a public park with a playground and gardens and everything ;___;

okay so the great fairies though

remember what i was saying about how this game is actually very heavily voiced for being an ostensibly unvoiced game? everyone sighs, grunts, yells, hmms? and so on. and sometimes you'll catch almost a word.

except for the great fairy, it just sounds like she's squeaking "PLEASE ME" which is. an uncomfortable request. at the best of times.

but especially when i am in the form of a young potted plant.

idk what that was supposed to sound like but the midi-ified file is NOT GREAT, nintendo.

members-only late night milk bar... aw yeah please spike my milkshake, that is a great idea and i love it

(i'm not joking i love spiked milkshakes)

(also i love the milk bar and all the scenes that take place in there, especially on the last night, when you can just have very quiet calm conversations with people doing their best to be calm in the face of their unavoidable deaths)

DAWN OF

THE SECOND DAY

48 HOURS REMAIN

oh no oh no oh no WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO BE DOING IN THE FIRST GO-ROUND

oh right i have literally two tasks

phew

i forgot to go into the stock pot inn on the first day, and i missed seeing kafei at the mailbox, so i am THIRSTY for EVERYONE'S FAVORITE CANONICAL FIANCEES

seriously, another weird but lovely choice on the part of the developers when they were ganking oot character models for this game. "who's a potential spooky villain? how about that one merchant guy? sure! and for an attractive bride-type character, what are our options? hmmm... how about the cuccoo lady with all the allergies? it's perfect"

i love not just anju and kafei but everything involved in their storyline - how kafei's friendship with the curiosity shop manager saved him, how anju's best friend is cremia on the ranch and they talk about their lives and how cremia will save her life (if she can), how you can spend actual in-game hours just sitting with anju's ancient senile grandmother hearing her stories as she thinks she is telling them to her long-dead son, how anju's mom will quietly not like kafei and kafei's mom will love and worry about him on a serious level very unlike her public persona... it's all so very real and human and i love it so

also heck the whole cast of characters staying in the inn

AH THERE SHE IS

THE BRIDE

anju i'm going to fix this ;___;

hello guardsmen if you are concerned about the state of today's youth maybe you should talk to THE BOMBER GANG i'm just saying

people who have played the more recent loz games, is the trend of "horrible underaged gangs of roving thugs" still a thing? or are mm and ww the only two games where they inflicted that on the player?

NIGHT OF

THE SECOND DAY

36 HOURS REMAIN

i'm sweating, i am just trying to find the bomber gang so i can get into the observatory so i can get the moon's tear so i can get the flower launch pad so i can get to the top of the clock tower and not die in a fiery inferno as gravitational forces rip the world apart

is that so much to ask

THERE'S THE LITTLE RUGRAT

COME HERE SO I CAN PUMMEL YOU

i refuse to feel bad about spin-kicking this child in the face because 1) i am technically also a child, in any body they put me in and 2) they are super racist if you talk to them while you are still a deku scrub! VERY RUDE

heck they let fergus over there man the door and he is still in diapers

gonna fill their hideout with encouraging tracts and stuff helping them grow into better people

so, fun fact

i remember many things about this game

but not that there is a skulltula in the waterway leading to the observatory

that was an unpleasant surprise

you probably could have heard me yell from three states away

(also, nothing has attacked you yet in the game (that actually does damage, and is not part of the story) so it's a little wake-up call: hey, don't forget to use Tatl to scout ahead, don't forget that you have a shield

also just

don't

be a moron

anyway

i was about to ask who the dickens put balloons with majora's mask on them all over the place - it's a weird choice, since no one... knows... what's going on? but technically, so far, all of the balloons are being interacted with by the bombers, or in places where the bombers go, and skull kid was, however briefly, a member of the bombers' secret society for justice (AND ALSO RACISM) so actually it makes more sense than i expected

when you first walk into the basement of the observatory and... the music changes... and there's a chicken??? it is what i assume being high is like.

DAWN OF

THE FINAL DAY

24 HOURS REMAIN

plays just as i lunge for the moon's tear

okay i've got this, i can stop fretting, the while last day can just be me looking around at stuff and being sad because i can't help anybody

yet

DON'T WORRY PEOPLE I WILL SAVE YOU

EVENTUALLY

IN A DIFFERENT LIFE

YOU'RE DEFINITELY BONED IN THIS ONE

SORRY ABOUT THAT

BUT I'M A STUMP THAT CHEWS BUBBLE GUM RIGHT NOW AND I DON'T THINK YOU CAN ASK VERY MUCH OF ME

I CAN'T EVEN REACH THE DOORKNOBS OF THIS TOWN SO TBH I WASN'T GOING TO BE MUCH GOOD AGAINST AN INTERSTELLAR BODY CRASHING INTO THE PLANET

a more srs thought: it was an interesting choice of curse skull kid lays on link at the start, making him into a deku scrub, and i think we can unpack some stuff there: he's drawing on his woodland roots (which link shares), he's making link into something small and largely helpless (like skull kid is, without the mask), he's... actually giving link a very similar kind of body to his own?

i don't know what the exact taxonomical differentiation is between deku scrubs and skull kids, but they are both wooden-bodied, whether grown or carved, they both have radiantly glowing eyes unlike most other things in the world, they both clothe themselves in bright layers of leaves... i imagine that if you sandblasted all the drama off a skull kid, you'd find something pretty similar to the lankier deku scrubs.

in that case, what he did is... he really kinda turned link into himself. but his helpless, powerless, abandoned, friendless, pre-mask self. to taunt him with all those awful feelings that skull kid himself experienced.

(mythological distinction for skull kids: they are people who got lost in the woods, and became cursed. if i'm not mistaken.)

(link is literally becoming a skull kid.)

(good times y'all!)

oh gosh the music is so frantic on the third day, and it's such a good bit of development on the design team's side: every day, clock town's music gets a little faster, a little shriller, as their time runs out

if you talk to the guards who block you in on the third day, instead of their usual "hey kiddo it's dangerous outside" they'll start saying "hey, are you alone, where is your family, are you okay, someone is probably worrying about you, please find them and get out of town as soon as you can"

fun fact: one of the things that consistently Wrecks me about this game is how the guards stand at their posts, jaws clenched, holding their fists to their hearts, as they watch their world be destroyed... because they will not abandon their duty.

seriously, every time i die.

and the cow figurines all over town that, if you hadn't noticed before, have bobbleheads, because as the earth starts shaking they do too, and it's another tiny detail that makes it all The Worst.

awkward council meeting eavesdropped on

("nothing is wrong!" is a lot less believable when the ground is literally shaking from the gravitational stresses being exerted by the falling moon, but hey, 2018)

the carpenters shouting back and forth "hey dudes i'm sorry but i'm gonna jet" "are you kidding if i stay i get a promotion"

;_______;

SO MANY RACISTS IN CLOCK TOWN, the merchant's hipster assistant will literally refuse to talk to you if you're "just" a deku scrub

meanwhile the bomb shop guy's grandmother (the one who gets robbed, if you're not paying attention, like i wasn't) is just "oh goodness you are a very small customer, please be careful in our shop of very dangerous things"

NIGHT OF

THE FINAL DAY

12 HOURS REMAIN

eeeeeeeeeeep

finally got into the milk bar (everyone's a member when the world is ending!) and madame aroma, the scary and powerful socialite, starts with a very gentle "are you okay with not fleeing? it looks like we are all going to die here in town. is anyone looking for you?"

if i had all my masks and instruments i would love to invoke that scene right now and be the band on the titanic and give her and the other customers a few minutes of... life, if not joy, and beauty, if not quite comfort.

snuck into the now-abandoned stock pot inn, as well, and... okay, i'm going to say it, i don't know wtf is going on with anju's wedding dress. is her midriff made out of ivy? why is her romantic wedding-day mask (which is a neat concept btw!) a grinning rictus? what are we saying about love in this moment???)

(also, if you have ever made the mistake of helping kafei but forgetting to tell anju to wait for him, or telling anju to wait and then not helping kafei deal with sakon... it's a shitshow, it's bad for you, it darkens your heart forever)

during the last 12 hours the guards will say "i want to help you get out of her asap, run find your folks and i will let you out, please hurry"

nooooooo ;_______;

the postman sobbing because "flee for your life" is not written on the schedule

he wrote himself a letter saying that he is doing a good job and he requests that he himself flee ;__________________; but he can't do it ;__________________________;

oh no here we go

here it comes

the clocktower

the fireworks

the moon

the six hours remaining music

HEART CLUTCH

soft wailing

ngl that sad and weary music is the best part of the entire narrative experience to me

and then skull kid's impotent fury against all that immense power

tatl to skull kid: "what if we... didn't???"

also a good and valid point: friends don't hit friends

JUST LOOK ABOVE YOU

IF IT'S SOMETHING THAT CAN BE STOPPED

JUST TRY AND STOP IT

(his voice is still so horribly thin and shrill, like a child)

but one well-placed gum bubble to the face and we are BACK IN BUSINESS

the BUSINESS

of RUNNING FOR OUR LIVES

from THINGS WE CANNOT FIGHT

i like that the one time zelda appears in the game, it is such a gentle and tender scene, reminding you of the bond she MUST have had with Link, for him to have done so much, and how much trust he puts in her

(... ask me again about the Song of Endings)

("even though it was only a short time, i feel like i've known you forever")

("i believe in my heart that a day will come when i shall meet you again")

(--> all my worst most wretched tp emotions about the wolf and the shrouded lady in the tower)

the song that reminds her of herself and link is the song of time, not anything else... the song about cycles and memory and history and second chances and legends

;_________________;

WELL FUCK I GUESS I'M HAVING PRINCESS ZELDA FEELS IN THE MIDDLE OF THE GAME IN WHICH SHE DOES NOT PLAY A ROLE

i have to play the songs in the right time, i can't just half-ass it by speeding through the buttons, idk why

("the goddess of time is watching over you" --> old old questions about who the goddess of time is, and which sage zelda was, etc)

the PLOT TWIST when you equip the ocarina and it turns into A GOSHDARN BRASS QUINTET STRAPPED TO YOUR BACK i love it

(each little snail yeah knows how to wail yeah)

tatl saying [as midna will, centuries later]: um dude i mean sir WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU, HAVE I MISJUDGED, SUDDENLY I AM WORRIED ABOUT MY MANNERS

and we are... not victorious, but reprieved!!!

i'll do better this time everyone i promise

DAWN OF

THE FIRST DAY

AGAIN...!!!

#yelling about mm #i am very glad i did this tonight #deeply misjudged how long it would take me and how stressful it would be #since you can't save at all during that first cycle #but now i can tool around to my heart's content wasting time and lives so that i can admire the architecture of termina

8 notes · View notes

totk-headcanons · 7 years

Note

MOD VOE!! Favorite Zelda Boss? Favorite incarnation of Link and Zelda?

Really hard to choose an absolute favorite boss so I’ll list a handful.

Ganondorf/Ganon from OoT: At this point I’ve played through this encounter so many times I could do it in my sleep but 8-9 year old me sitting on the couch with the N64 controller clutched firmly in my hands will never forget this fight. The organ leading up to the throne room, the tennis match, the castle crashing down around us as we made our escape and the final fight in the ruins… I truly believe that, in terms of atmosphere, this fight has yet to be topped.

Stalord from Twilight Princess: Giant skeleton monster in an ancient tomb who is defeated by the power of radical wallriding. A lot of the TP bosses could make this list, but Stalord definitely steals the show.

Koloktos from Skyward Sword: Not sure what I can say about this fight that dozens of youtubers haven’t already. It’s one of the few moments where the controls and the gameplay just clicked and everything was wonderful.

From a story perspective, Ghirahim and Demise are probably my favs closely followed by Wind Waker Ganondorf. The reveal of Ghirahim’s true nature and the beginning of the cycle of the Hero, the Goddess and the King of Evil left a huge impact on me and WW has the best Ganondorf in terms of character hands down. If they gave me the choice I may have actually sided with him, seeing as his end goal that time weren’t really all that evil.

Favorite Zelda as mentioned earlier is definitely Skyward Sword. To me this marked the point where Nintendo started giving greater focus to story and character (this is supported by the release of the Hyrule Historia and the official timeline). Sure Tetra had a lot of personality too but I never really saw her as Zelda. SS Zelda was your childhood friend and the love of your life. The sheer look of fury on Link’s face as he rushed to save her from Ghirahim in the final confrontation sent chills down my spine, thanks largely to how well developed the relationship between Link and Zelda was.

Favorite Link is a little harder to pin down. From a character design perspective, I love TP Link. He is, in my opinion, the definitive visual representation of the character. However from a character perspective it gets a little harder. Few of the Links have been given real personality, the chief of these being WW Link. A lot of it is left for the player to fill in. When you look at it closer though, you notice something about all of them. Imagine if you were ten years old and suddenly forced to go off on a grand adventure. During your adventure you encountered a giant spider bigger than your house and were instructed to kill it. Would you stand and fight it? I know I wouldn’t. I’d nope out of there so fast nobody would even have noticed I was there. And yet Link, no matter how young or how matured, never flinches or backs down. What makes Link special as a character is the very thing most commonly associated with him: courage. The fact that he’s able to face head on and overcome all of these obstacles and dangers in his path without hesitation (and without formal training in most cases) is INSANE. Any other game with a character like this would label them as crazy or hot headed. Maybe they’d even die early. But Link doesn’t. He pushes past everything in his way to achieve his goal and the way he goes about it is something special. Sorry if that doesn’t quite answer the “Favorite Link” question, but I guess “All of Them” would be accurate.

[Lonely Voe]

#mod post #mod ask #botw #zelda #legend of zelda

24 notes · View notes

chaos2go · 7 years

Note

Ramble about the Deku Tree and Alden >U

Okay. Finally getting around to finishing this ramble. Sorry it took so long ;w; I had one of those times of “wow I really want to do this //does everything else” orz.

Just as a reminder, the stuff below is following my ‘headcanon’ of junk. So please don’t take it literally XD And I apologize for length. This is way too long haha.

So I’ve pretty much stated in my LoH lore before that I believe the Deku Tree can create life. It’s never really stated what he can do so I just roll with it given it makes explaining stuff a lot easier. And he’s supposed to be a deity of sorts anyway. He is a ‘spirit of nature’ after all so why not organic things? His specialty beyond ‘simple’ plants are forest fairies (aka guardian fairies), koroks, and his newest/most proud creations the kokiri (the intended form of the koroks).

Now even if he is a deity, it had taken him quite a few decades if not centuries to ‘perfect’ every sentient creation. He is proud of them and he enjoys watching them live their lives. They bring about a harmony he loves. They are not savage but rather innocent creatures. They have bouts of anger but they never outright really try to hurt anyone beyond survival needs. These creatures are his children. In all due respect, he wants to protect them beyond just his magic because he understands that his magic isn’t unstoppable. In fact, his magic is mostly that relating to creation of life.

Given legends of the past, the Deku Tree is worried about something bad eventually happening in his forest. This means that his creations will die in bloodshed rather than natural causes (not to say they can’t die to monsters or creatures in the forest in general). Not to mention his control over the Lost Woods is only so much. It has a strange magic of its own and the way to navigate it seems to change from time to time. The only way to protect his children is to create something unlike them.

The legends of the past speak of heroes. This would be something he would believe in but there are other things that stood out too. Robots, machines, and even of swords that have spirits. A lot of his interest went into these ‘mechanical’ aspect but the resources to make a machine let alone an understanding on how to make one was just outright lost. A sword spirit however was more in his field given his magic. It sounded a lot more organic than trying to make a machine. He put many fairies to work to try and find information on creating a sword spirit but not a lot of information was returned. Still it was enough for him to make an attempt and a chance at extra protection for his organic creations.

It took a lot of tries to actually create Alden properly. Creating life was pretty simple in comparison to making a metal statue mostly made of magic live. For a time he gave up and thought about perhaps making a new race to protect the forest. But then what to give them? He didn’t want to create any sort of monsters or have the creature(s) turn into them. And what if they died for some reason? There were so many variables that he wanted a constant. It needed to have a little consistency like he did. Having a protector of the forest meant sacrificing some things that made organic life better in his opinion. Plus it couldn’t die as easily.

A few more tries were given with more success but nothing solid. At times he’d end up with metal lumps, other times a spirit that only survived until the gem collapsed, or just a spirit that died for no reason. Eventually Alden was created using pieces of these spirits (in terms of metal body, not gems) and there is a celebratory moment. However the moment is somewhat shattered when he realizes Alden isn’t anywhere near what he expected. The spirit is outright confused upon creation and doesn’t know what to do. Even though he’s seen others have this problem, the fact Alden doesn’t shatter right away brings some pain. He’s lifeless compared to the organic creations. There is little will beyond asking for instruction on what to do. This really makes the Deku Tree regret his decision. Thankfully the fairies (and a few koroks) step in on the Deku Tree’s silence to make Alden start to ‘live’.

The Deku Tree gives Alden a simple purpose of protecting the forest before instructing him to meet the kokiri he will be protecting. Given Alden is just outright do and ask only simple -if not stupid- questions, he just pops out and gets scared by the reaction he got. Just backlash. He was told not to fight them yet he got rocks and sticks thrown at him. His instinct did want him to fight back. Instead he retreats and asks what he did wrong. The fact Alden couldn’t come up with making a disguise is actually somewhat troubling for the Deku Tree despite there being some promise given how he reacted to the event. There was a little hurt in how he acted which was a good sign of life.

From there the Deku Tree instructs him to make a disguise to fit in amongst the kokiri. The actual disguise takes a lot of work and quite a few attempts before he fits in enough for the kokiri to let him be. He actually had to observe -alongside getting feedback from his partner fairy- and choose. Thing is, even with a disguise to fit in he still lacked basic things others could do. He couldn’t emulate eating, sleeping, he ‘cheated’ at games, etc. He had to learn how to be a child and fitting in became a priority. In all honesty, it was part of his purpose whether or not it was intended.

Alden’s frustrations with fitting in became apparent to most in the forest. It actually became a bit of a joke and he didn’t mind playing to it to fit in. However being laughed at still stung him. Thankfully during his existence thus far the Deku Tree tried to teach him through stories. It was a thing he did every night with Alden when the kokiri were sleeping in order for Alden to learn more about the world he was in, the kokiri, and just how to ‘live’. Stories of heroes and such became Alden’s favorite as he could relate to them more because of what he is. Every once in a while a kokiri came too which meant Alden could observe a bit.

All in all, this was a big effort. More than the Deku Tree wanted to do. He honestly felt awful for creating Alden to be so lifeless at first but was so hopeful with how much he was growing. Even if he was a bully from time to time, he still was trying to live. Still he was a spirit with little soul. Alden wasn’t completely stupid or extremely smart. And he didn’t have a large range of emotions but rather a collection of emulations and reactions he understood for certain situations. He could be angry at the right moments or emulate happy at the right moments. Very little things were genuine unless it involved his purpose, a wrongdoing, or a chance to show off his powers. Really the only plus of anything there too was his speed, magical abilities (at the time due to the Tree’s power), and his skill with the sword. Unlike most others (including most people he’s met), the Deku Tree sees that Alden is mostly a machine of reaction at the proper times. And honestly, that is how I see him too. A very well studied one that goes to extremes. But back to the tree who wishes he could make Alden ‘real’.

The arrival of Link to the forest didn’t help Alden grow at all either. Especially when the Deku Tree could observe how little Alden changed. He was confused by the baby (as were many kokiri) but Link just had an understanding of everything so much easier. For a time, Alden even distanced himself from the kokiri as Link was growing because he couldn’t understand what the heck a baby was or what it was doing. The baby was annoying as far as he was concerned and he didn’t want to break Link either. He was more fragile than a fairy and cried every time he was forced to interact. If anything, he only got more confused on Link growing up. Despite knowing how Link got there and bringing him to the Deku Tree in the first place, Alden never once mentions this to Link. And in fact, he ends up being on of Link’s bullies given he chooses to be with Mido due to Mido’s status as leader.

Upon Ganondorf doing his crap in OoT, he honestly hoped that Alden would have died in that attack in some respect. Alden wasn’t a strong spirit but rather a mostly innocent one that had a hard time understanding how to ‘live’. Destroying him would be a good thing in that respect. At the same time, Alden was a great creation and he didn’t want him to die. Alden was dutiful and did everything in his power despite being bested. Alden chose to defend when he clearly could have easily stayed out of the situation. The lack of a real choice and the obligation to do his purpose is what could have saved the Deku Tree. Ultimately it would help shape Alden further though.

Skipping through Alden blaming Link for the Deku Tree’s death, revealing himself to Link, and outright continuing bullying, we get through the Forest Temple. The sprout emerges from the ground and isn’t exactly the same one as before. However it still carries some regret about Alden. It was partly saddened to see Alden still existed but glad to see he was still trying to do what he was created for. There was a sense of relief that he at least did one thing right with Alden. On the other hand, Alden didn’t consider the new sprout to be the same tree but wanted to listen.

The sprout specifically tells him that the old tree wanted to give him new purpose. Those being 1- Continue to protect the forest to the best of your abilities, 2- Do what you can to help Link, and 3 - Live your own life. The last one having the most emphasis which only confuses Alden. His entire ‘life’ has been fitting in and protecting the forest. So really he puts the second job as his priority. And that only leads to more issues given he is set on his duties and he is a spirit of reaction.

But that about sums it up without jumping to other games or LoH. Sorry it turned into more about the overall arc of his story. But eeeeh lemme just state this. There is a deep regret the Deku Tree carries about Alden. Alden however is a creature of reaction and learned behaviors rather than his own being. Given enough time, he would assimilate into another culture. Fitting in is his ‘life’ and little things do confuse him. Why a certain way of dressing? Why are some actions more preferred than others? He has many questions but refuses to ask them and instead just tries things in hopes of positive reactions when able. Otherwise he will observe unless he feels brave. As I said, Alden isn’t smart or dumb. He reacts. His entire character is about proper reaction rather than being him. His entire emotional range goes from extremely angry to extremely happy or extremely sad in a matter of seconds. There is very little inbetween so it can be as if he is hyperactive. The only time he tends to sound mature is when he feels there is nothing to react to and can state what he wants. It is confounding to him to be outside of the forest until he realizes that children can get away with certain things. He uses his childlike nature to Link’s advantage when the adult Link cannot do things. Fi has her smarts, Ghira has his emotions, Alden has a mix in terms of just reacting in the proper way at the proper time (which can be messed up!). So more or less he understands to an extent when to be happy, sad, etc.

To quickly jump to another games since I rambled about the rest, Alden’s second purpose becomes a major focus for the MM game. Especially since he becomes even weaker. Alden’s focus is broken to a point and he has a loss of powers. At times he is a hindrance to Link. At the same time, it also allowed him to speak his mind more freely. If anything he sounds a tad more intelligent than before if not emotional. He thinks about things and realizes why people might enjoy it. He’s seen a lot more in life than he ever would have in the forest. Being lost in these thoughts become is downfall however. There are joys/fears/etc. he’ll never understand and it kinda scares him a little. And it scares him even more that he won’t be able to protect Link from it. In the end he fulfillshis third purpose before he is ultimately destroyed. He spends time with Linkdespite time travel and enjoys things he hasn’t before. And as an upgraded sword, he can continue to protect Link. But that’s for that version.

Come LoH, the Deku Tree gets to meet Alden once again. There isgreat disappointment in knowing that Alden was left behind by Link but also ahappiness in seeing that he’s trying so hard to help someone else. Alden has chosen to continue his job and his reactions give more ‘life’. He seesKalla has rubbed off on him and he’s actually happy to hear Alden reject himwhen he states that he should stay. Still Alden is a lost cause as he seesgiven he is so strung to his purpose that living will never really happen. He’s still attaching himself to a forest dweller despite wanting to be outside of the forest. And the only reason Alden states he wants to stay outside is to protect the forest. Sothere will always be a loss for this magical life he created rather thanbiological. Little does the Deku Tree understand though that if Alden was to stay, he’d try to leave. Alden does want to protect the forest but understanding others to some degree might help. He in no way wants to be like them (he believes himself a kokiri after all) but it means a possible means to an end if he has to fight them.

#tiffy stfu #long post #alden #ramble #oc ramble

2 notes · View notes

chaos2go · 7 years

Text

So finally rambling about Dryst in BotW where I’ve decided he would ‘originate’ from. Land-of-Hyrule will always be where he really belonged and there are quite a few things he’ll be missing in translation but oh well. I can’t really place Alden in this game (okay, I could in some respect given timeline is figured out 100% even then... well, I want Alden to be with the koroks >C XD Just imagine. Alden in his sword spirit form with a korok leaf on his face so he ‘fits in’, trying to do the korok stuff, picked up the Mr. Hero thing, etc.). and Zahir fits in just fine with OoT (though with her, a BotW counterpart could work better given the stables). Either way, this game opened up the chance for a lot of my characters that didn’t really fit anywhere but where LoZ characters but especially Dryst. Aliza, you can have a house out there in the scary Hyrule too!

But there are SPOILERS below. Don’t read any further if you don’t want any! Though I’ll be honest, they’re nothing major given I haven’t been everywhere or done divine beasts (only watched) XD. Plus there are some ‘speculation’ things in there given there isn’t solid information on some junk. So excuse shoddy headcanon crap where appropriate.

Now if you’re reading this, I’m sorry if it gets a little long. I want to touch on his background changes and what exactly he’d do in the game as I imagine he would have some interaction with Link given he is a sheikah and the sheikah had a connection to him. In no way would he be over 100. If anything, he’s still around the same age which makes him a young whipper snapper! Also I don’t know if ‘magic magic’ actually exists but I’m just going to ignore that for now. It looks like it’s only items and special people so we’ll find out? Yiga clan teleportation looks like it’s to do with the talismans/wards/omamori(???)... But yeah XD Here we go. Sorry if this is boring!

Dryst would be born in Kakariko about 75 years after the calamity returned and Link was sent to the shrine. Much like LoH, he was kind of a spoiled kid who didn’t want to end up being a 'menial worker’ like his parents. Plus don’t forget the landing in trouble. He wanted to be someone important and do something important. Though the game doesn’t show it exactly beyond a few moments one memory scene, he wanted to be someone who helped guard the royal family. At the very least, he wanted to do something outside of the village that wasn’t research given there is no royal family at this point. Fighting the calamity and guardians to ‘thin them out’ really was his big idea as who knew when and if the hero would return.

Needless to say his parents weren’t keen on him trying to learn to fight and tried to redirect his ideas to research instead. It only directed him to learn about legends beyond what he was taught about the calamity, shiekah slate, etc. while trying to read books about combat. Despite many punishments, he still tried to sneak out and learn to fight. His parents barred others from teaching him which only hindered him further than his already lackluster skill. This drove him to just want to leave his hometown and try to find someone who could help him or to learn on his own. It wasn’t a big deal as some sheikah did this anyway though most opted to stay and wait for the hero’s return. Dryst was more dead set on fighting.

After one particular fight with his parents, his rage had just gone through the roof. His parents were trying to convince him that only the hero could fight the calamity and if he really wanted to help, he could still change his focus to researching. Dryst elected to take this as a chance to just leave the town entirely as he was done. He never informed his parents of this choice but rather went to Impa who he saw as the main problem for why the sheikah were so passive. Upon meeting her, he stated how this whole sitting and waiting didn’t help anyone. There had to be some action given there were still things bad in Hyrule given the calamity and the Yiga clan. Monsters were a problem, rebuilding was a problem, and all his people did was take care of themselves now. His frustrations towards the village poured out, especially against his parents. Impa could see his troubles and only informed him that she wished him well in his journeys across Hyrule. It wasn’t the first time a youth had felt that way and she actually encouraged him to leave. Dryst didn’t see her words as trying to help however. He told her that he had no intentions of returning. Then he left.

Hyrule itself was just too much for him. He did his best to survive and barely scraped by for the longest time. If anything, he had to learn how to fight a bit better against monsters just to survive. The original plan of making it to another race’s home just fell flat as he was constantly lost and struggling. Thankfully he ran across a woman who helped him out. That of course being Aliza much like in LoH. This would be very similar to LoH as Dryst would be quiet and open up about many of his problems after initially being berated by her. She’d offer him a home but still scold him and mother him when necessary as he would have been only about 17 (far too young to be out on his own according to her). Aliza overall doesn’t see why he has such an interest in actually fighting the monsters and the calamity. But she doesn’t wish to stop him as she sees he feels the need to do it and prove himself. If anything, much like in LoH she wants him to do what he can and find his place which obviously wasn’t with his people.

Over the years, Dryst’s skill doesn’t really improve beyond tiny things but he’s become good at other things. He’s made it to some of the places in Hyrule he’s planned on going and has found out a lot of legends. Despite his navigation still sucking, he has learned a few tricks to getting around that has helped him immensely (aka teleportation given we don’t know how it works >C so the wards or magic). Being known as a braggart and helping people out with menial tasks too has put him in a rather good position.

So from here on out, imagine Dryst as he is in the group save magic, save siding with demons (as there isn’t really an evil side to go with unless he went Yiga which he would probably wouldn’t even try given they can’t give him anything he wants), and save having Alden. He’s just a guy trying to do good deeds and show off. He would slowly be learning what he really needed to do with his life.

If I were to do a story however, he would run into this hero. Given how everyone plays the game differently, I don’t know how or when I would plan on them running into one another. Dryst would know very well the towers showing up would be a sign of his return. It would make him question whether or not he should return to his village. Unlike in the group, he would try to go there (his shame being the only real reason he hasn’t this time). Aliza would encourage trying. I imagine that it would more or less be him meeting Link right after Link had spoken with Impa. So the poor hero would have to deal with more “Wait, is that what I think it is? the sheikah slate?!” crap.

Given what the game says about Link, I imagine Dryst would just tag along and try to show off his knowledge. Link wouldn’t have much to say and honestly he’d probably test Dryst’s limits. Dryst would be useful in his knowledge however on some items that may have been forgotten (just not memories). He’d also have some input on other races (still being racist towards gerudo but not nearly as bad). Still there would come the time where he’d get left behind whether it would be warp, a shrine, or just an area he wasn’t allowed. I’d imagine somehow he’d be able to make it through the Lost Woods (if only because EVERYONE DESERVES TO SEE KOROKS... gonna just say I think they probably choose who to appear to but eh, w/e) and get a bit of story there thus finally learning that Link doesn’t remember everything and feeling kinda crappy that he assumed Link did. Overall just bro-ventures though. Dryst often getting a shorted on the adventure due to being left behind and just not being as skilled.

However I’d love to add some characters in to help build friendships besides Aliza. I am wondering about some LoH concepts (like a zora OC I couldn’t figure out an occupation for) to be adapted and then perhaps I can turn around and use them in the group too. IDK XD There’s just like... a lot I want to talk about but this ramble is kinda long. I’m just happy there is something beyond LoH he could fit in to.

I’m giving up on this ramble as of now because it’s late XD And I should be in bed. I could hit on specifics if anyone cars.

#ramble #dryst #botw spoilers #tify stfu

1 note · View note