The Legend of Zelda series is so steeped in lore at this point that just figuring out which version of Link you’re playing as can be tricky. Heck, I’m still not sure that’s even his real name.
The trivia-themed YouTube series “Did You Know Gaming?” took another stab at Zelda’s rich history recently, and the new video offers up some interesting and often silly bits of information:
My personal favourite is the detail about the ChuChus from Wind Waker being “voiced” by an audio recording of two men arguing that was sped up and played in reverse. But there are also a lot of details here about how specific Zelda titles came to be — often by being salvaged from botched attempts to remake an earlier game for a new system:
- Ocarina of Time, widely regarded as one of the best Zelda games, was “heavily influenced by a failed attempt at remaking Zelda II,” which is generally considered to be one of the worst games in the series.
- Link’s swordplay was inspired by chanbara swordfighting, a type of combat featured in many popular samurai movies.
- The shiny metal knight Link fights in the original trailer for Ocarina of Time was made with the same texture as Metal Mario from Super Mario 64.
- Link’s Awakening, the first Zelda game for the Game Boy, was originally an attempt to remake the SNES classic A Link To The Past for a handheld console. It began as a side-project that the developers toyed with after hours for fun.
- Capcom, the only third-party studio that’s ever made Zelda games, began collaborating with Nintendo after pitching a remake of the original Legend of Zelda for the Game Boy Colour. They ended up working on miniseries collectively known as The Triforce Trilogy.
- The third instalment in The Triforce Trilogy was never finished because of a technical difficulty related to a password system meant to carry across all three games.
- The 2007 DS game The Phantom Hourglass began as an attempt to port the 2004 GameCube game Four Swords Adventures to a handheld console.
- The idea for the latest Zelda game, A Link Between Worlds, came from conversations between Shigeru Miyamoto and Eiji Aonuma in which the two discussed remaking A Link To The Past for the 3DS. Aonuma wanted to make a brand-new game instead. To the delight of many Zelda fans, Miyamoto let him.
- The HD remake of Wind Waker for the Wii U came about because Zelda developers were playing around with a tech demo Nintendo brought to E3 in 2011 to show off “The Zelda HD Experience.”
- Wind Waker was also the first Zelda title to pique the interest of Anouma’s wife to the point where she now plays all of his games.
- The voice of the ChuChu enemies in Wind Waker is actually a distorted audio recording of two men arguing in Japanese. One of them calls out the other for going bald. Burned!
- The nonsensical sentences that fortune teller Fanadi spouts in Twilight Princess are actually just English phrases like “Wait, loading takes a while…” spelled in reverse. Meta.
- Fanadi’s name was derived from taking the first two letters of each of the names of the “golden goddesses” from Zelda lore: Farore, Nayru, and Din.
- The “scrambled, pseudo-speech” that backs up Midna’s spoken dialogue in Twilight Princess is actually just scrambled versions of sentences spoken in plain English.
The takeaway? Fans shouldn’t get upset if Nintendo ever says it’s going to remake a Zelda game and then fail to follow through. Really, I think I’m just gonna take any future announcement about a port or remake as a sign that something even more awesome is on its way.
Comments
19 responses to “14 Things You Might Not Know About The Legend Of Zelda”
Thank you for listing the points for those of us who can’t watch videos (at work) 🙂
THIS! THIS GUY GETS IT!
Funny thing is, we don’t even need the video anymore.
Midna was speaking english? Mind blown!
Yeah, I always thought it was reversed, jumbled up Japanese. Would make sense for a Japanese developer to do so, but they probably thought to the Japanese that English is more “foreign”.
Speaking of 3rd party, Philips made some apparently crappy Zelda games under license for some ill fated cd-i system in the 90’s.
was going to post this. link – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-i_games_from_The_Legend_of_Zelda_series
relevant quote :
Link: The Faces of Evil, Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon and Zelda’s Adventure are three action-adventure games produced by Philips for the CD-i as part of Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda video game series. Not designed for Nintendo platforms, the games owe their existence to negotiations related to Nintendo’s decision not to have Philips create a CD add-on to the Super NES. During these negotiations, Philips secured the rights to use Nintendo characters in their games for the CD-i, and the development of these games was achieved through the hiring of third-party developers.
so unless those 3rd party developers were capcom…
Playing Wind Waker HD atm, and that game is just so damn awesome. I’m not really a big Zelda fan, only played Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask back in N64 days, and I used to be put off by the fact that Link and the NPCs have never been fully voiced (much to the chagrin of true Zelda fan’s i know), but I kinda get it now. I like how each character expresses themselves with that nonsensical jibber jabber. I especially like that attendant at the battleship/squid game, whenever you miss he’s like “Sploosh!”.
SPLOOSH! best part about that game. good call bro.
ahh DKYG 🙂 Keep posting these. If it wasn’t for Kotaku i would have never seen this amazing series. I recommend everyone to go take a look at all the other episodes they are amazing.
agree. more these and less cinema sins!
100% that sins video was rubbish!
Capcom aren’t the only third party devs, the CDI games were certainly not made by nintendo.
they don’t count 😛
CDI games aren’t part of cannon Zelda tho. they are completely disowned and ignored by Nintendo.
I agree, but capcom still aren’t the only…
the only canonical releases 🙂 i agree there are definitely others.
wait, so a failed attempt at making a bad game = a good game
does that mean if i try to make a bad game, when i inevitably fail i’ll be left with a good one?
Does anybody know if Final Fantasy Adventure (aka Seiken Densetsu) played a role in the creation of Link’s Awakening? The two seem incredibly similar in a lot of aspects.