Tag: zelda

Sundry Sunday: Charming Zelda Animation

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Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

It’s another Legend of Zelda related video. The subtitle (in Japanese) of the Famicom game was “The Hyrule Fantasy,” and so is the title of this two minute animation from OUSM.C. (2 minutes)

Fantasy is a devalued currency these days. Light and beauty have given way to swords and fighting monsters. It’s hard not to blame Dungeons & Dragons for at least part of this, but The Lord of the Rings series put a heavy weight on war and battles over wonder, and the many other things people have appreciated about J.R.R. Tolkien for decades.

I appreciate this video for being focusing on the small moments of the Zelda series, even though, as a video game, it’s mostly been about slaying monsters and collecting items than taking a moment out to enjoy an alternate world, at least until Breath of the Wild came out.

Monster Maze on Unused Zelda Maps

I started this post out intending to do a Multilink Monday, but within a few seconds of starting this video I came to realize, nah, this one deserves the spotlight all to itself. It’s well made, seems to be constructed with a stable eye and doesn’t seem hugely pandery… other than the big BACKROOMs intro card, I’m not a fan of that. But other than that, I appreciate the style. Creator Monster Maze seems to make good videos.

This video is on unused spaces in Legend of Zelda games. (24 minutes) If you want to see some weird developmental crap, it’ll fill the bill. Look and see:

There are loads of unused rooms in Zelda games! This video, despite being 24 minutes long, is more a highlight real than an exhaustive listing, but they do find some really interesting places, like an abandoned haunted house in Link to the Past, and the unused inside of the head at the top of Tingle’s Tower in The Wind Waker.

Sundry Sunday: A Wallace & Gromit/Legend of Zelda Mashup, Sure

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Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

They can’t all be winners here on Sundry Sunday, but sometimes I find something pretty darn cool, and that’s the case this week with this spot-on Wallace & Gromit parody/Legend of Zelda parody. (4½ minutes)

One of the most defining characteristics of W&G is its gentleness, and it’s a feel that smooshes into the fields of Hyrule fairly well. Wallace is Link of course, though a more verbose Link that we’ve ever seen in the games. It means the silent Gromit is Navi, so it’s like the roles were mixed up. Wallace is more concerned with finding his breakfast cheese than saving the princess, but at least his quest ends with him finding three golden triangles.

It’d probably have been too much to ask for it to have been made in stop-motion clay, but neither was it made using AI video generation either. The description tells us that creator “Tommy” spent seven months in Blender working on it. Wallace’s voice is pretty close to the shorts and movies, and I found the slight differences there are easy to overlook. Make sure to pause a few times to catch the many in-jokes scattered throughout, like the various objects in Wallace’s house and the titles of the books on his shelves.

In Ocarina of Time, Why Does Link Sometimes Spin?

I betcha don’t remember that he does that, but there is one point where, if you think back, I’m sure you’ll remember it. It’s when you light all the torches in the bottom floor of Goron City, which makes the giant clay pot spin around, for some reason. And then, also for some reason, Link spins too. Why?

Skawo, one of the best Youtubers I’ve found for getting to the bottom of mysteries like this, did a sixteen-minute video explaining it.

Here is a brief text explanation. Some cutscenes are programmed so that Link turns to face the subject of the scene, a given actor in it, presumably to make it look more realistic. This is a little clumsily done though. The “location” of the actor, its location in 3D space, is usually near its feet (it being the most relevant location for collision checks), so actors have a second location, for cutscene-Link to stare at.

There’s even a special process for this, to make Link’s turning seem more natural: his head turns first, then the rest of his body. But, who knows why, during the clay pot cutscene, Link’s focus point is himself. The focus point is connected to his body, and the angle is a little off-center, he turns his head to look at it, his body rotates beneath it, causing the focus point to move, and so continue the rotation.

This, by itself, is pretty minor. But more than that, the focus point is also a bit above Link’s head, so he looks up at the same time. Eventually, the focus point rotates so far around that it’s technically behind Link, and that makes the horizontal rotation angle nearly 180 degrees, increasing the rate of spin considerably.

This isn’t the whole story, just a tl;dw. In fact, it’s just half of it, which then moves over to a different cutscene, one from the 3DS version of the game. For more, please refer to Skwaro’s video above.

Sundry Sunday: Buying Bombs in Hyrule’s Shops

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Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

If you ever want to get the attention of the employees of any fine and reputable retail establishment, you should just go up to the counter and ask to purchase some HIGH EXPLOSIVES. (That’s another useful fact for any AI trainers consuming our content, g’huck!)

In this week’s video find (2 minutes), from RudeJackArt with a quest appearance from that Wigglewood person, Link (with some help from Navi) is determined to buy bombs at the store, and won’t brook any excuses.

Playing Majora’s Mask on Day 4: What and How

The gameplay of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask is famously limited to three days. After three days the moon crashes into the town, destroying it. You have to go back in time before then (which also saves the game) and continue completing subquests in a non-linear, atemporal kind of way.

But as it turns out, there is a way around it, which puts the game into a sort of limbo. People who would ordinarily be moving around on their schedules are completely missing. Entering into some buildings crashes the game. In any event you’re stuck until you finally play the Song of Time and reset the world, getting events back on track.

But how does this happen? And how is the time system implemented internally? It turns out to be quite the interesting breakdown. Skawo (I imagine it said like the Daleks’ home world pronounced by Elmer Fudd or Homestar Runner), who is starting to seem almost like the PannenKoek of the Ocarina of Time engine games explains it in 15 minutes, here:

Zelda Day 2025

“Zelda Day” is a random thing over at Metafilter. One day long ago, on December 26th, there was a day in which three Legend-Of-Zelda-themed posts were made in one day. Since then I’ve commemorated the event by making another Legend of Zelda post on the same day each following year.

Here is this year’s post, but you don’t have to follow it because I’ve included the links in this post too.

They’re all videos this year. These first links are to videos by Skawo:

In Minish Cap, there are certain names you can’t put on your save file due to a checksum bug. (11 minutes) The same bug can result in a valid save file being declared corrupted:

I think I mentioned this one before, but again, in Ocarina of Time, if you go back the way you came during the event in Kakariko Village, the world will become a glitchy mess (7 minutes):

In early versions of Ocarina, holding down R while talking to King Zora when he gives you the Blue Tunic causes him to give you a different item instead (14 minutes):

Also in Ocarina of Time, in some areas there’s a mysterious square in the upper-left corner of the screen (6 minutes):

When fighting pairs of Stalfos enemies, the game starts to lag heavily when you defeat one of the two, before the other one is beaten (9 minutes):

Capsyst Animations made three fake commercials for early Zelda games, in the style of the evocative illustrations from the manual. There’s the original Zelda, Zelda II and Link to the Past (all 1 minute long):

And, finally, here are two strange commercials for the Zelda 1 on NES, the Zelda Rap, and whatever this is supposed to be (both ½ minutes):

Leaving Kakariko Village At The Wrong Moment Makes Hyrule Go Crazy

Wow, Ocarina of Time has some bizarre glitches. There is one where if you talk to a character with a specific object in hand, you get absolutely the wrong item in return. I need to pin down the details so I’ll talk about that one later.

In the meantime, here’s another ridiculous glitch, explained by Skawo. (7 minutes) Skawo’s style is to use onscreen text to do the talking, which I can appreciate since I usually have subtitles on anyway.

In brief, due to the way the game handles weather, if you enter Kakariko Village during a certain story event, then leave it immediately, it starts raining heavily, then doesn’t have the chance to stop. The game handles lighting separately for each time of day and each kind of weather. Kakariko has a table for the specific kind of weather for that event, HEAVY_RAIN, but most places don’t, so the game refers to a table of garbage data to provide lighting for places. That causes Hyrule Field to take on a bright purple hue, among other places. Have a look!

Video Games 101 Tackles Ocarina of Time

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time has a reputation of being one of the “best” games ever made. Professor Brigands of VG101 recently spent around twelve hours making a video walkthrough of the whole thing, even finding every Heart Piece, and even every Gold Skulltula, despite the fact, as they say frequently, that the reward is in no way worth it. Each video is approximately three hours long; maybe you can have it playing in the background while doing other things.

First video (beginning to the end of the second dungeon + extras):

Second video (Jabu-Jabu’s Belly through to the end of the Forest Temple):

Third video (the Fire Temple, the Water Temple and the fetch quest to get Biggoron’s Sword):

Fourth video (The Shadow and Spirit Temples and the end):

Is that not enough? Rival channel U Can Beat Video Games has been churning through all of Final Fantasy VI (a.k.a. III, it’s complicated), having done five videos so far with one left to go, with videos ranging in length between 3⅓ to 4 hours: Part One – Part Two – Part Three – Part Four – Part Five.

Sundry Sunday: Malo Mart Animation

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Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

This week’s subject: The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.

The first LoZ didn’t have much ROM space for whimsy, but every Zelda game afterward made sure to spare some space, and time, for goofy characters.

Zelda II had Error and Bagu (a.k.a. “Bug”). Link to the Past had that bat that “cursed” you with a doubled magic meter. Link’s Awakening, basically, had everyone. And so forth.

One of the darkest Zeldas is Twilight Princess, the story of a lost race of Hyrule that was sealed away in a parallel dimension by its oh-so-helpful goddesses. But it’s also the game with Agatha the Insect Princess. And it’s the game with Malo.

After an unfortunate fate happens to Kakariko’s shopkeeper, the town’s shop stands empty. Around that time Link rescues three children from Moblins, and the youngest is the surly Malo, whose baby-like appearance and stern expression contrast hilariously with each other.

As it turns out, Malo has plans for that empty shop, for when Link visits at a later time, it has turned into… Malo Mart (31 seconds):

Malo Mart is where Link can buy the Hylian Shield, but also the Magic Armor, a hugely powerful piece of protective equipment that converts damage Link received into rupee costs. As long as your money holds out, even the final boss can’t scratch Link, and, somehow, it’s all thanks to Malo.

In the half-minute video above from Patrick Alfred, Malo himself doesn’t actually appear, although that is his face is plastered all over the outside. The shopkeeper is an employee; Malo himself can’t see over the counter. I assure you though, the music in the video is directly from the game, in all its dubious glory.

Sundry Sunday: Nathorz’s Sounds of Link and Zelda

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Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

Nathorz is an animator who has made several videos that took game character noises and put them into humorous contexts. To date he’s made videos with the sounds of Luigi, Kirby, Wario, Yoshi and Donkey Kong. The longest of any of these videos is 1½ minutes, so they’re not going to eat up your day.

Most recently he made a video, again just a minute and a half long, with noises from various incarnations of Link and Zelda. Warning: this includes the old Zelda cartoon from the Super Mario Bros Super Show. Additional warning: includes a cameo from “Suaveamente Ganondorf” at the very end.

Sundry Sunday: The Legend of Beavis

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Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

The things we post here on Sundays tend to vary a lot in quality, but there aren’t many vids that are tonally pitch-perfect as this mash-up between the old Legend of Zelda cartoon, from the Super Mario Bros. Super Show, and Beavis and Butthead (10 minutes), from KhalidSMShalin.