Sundry Sunday: Zelda Animation Roundup

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

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom has been out for a week now and the internet is still abuzz about it. (Can’t you hear it? The incessant buzzing?)

Recently I had the opportunity to do a roundup of a number of Zelda fan animation videos. A few of these may have been shown here before. (We’ve been at it for over a year, it’s possible!) I’m sure some haven’t.

Racing for Rupees (4 minutes) was made with Source Filmmaker and Sony Vegas, and is a standout. With 24 million views it’s hardly obscure, but it’s eight years old as of this writing:

Shield Bash (2 minutes) is a lot newer. What are either of these two doing stealing items off the wall of a library?

I’m sure I’ve linked Something About Zelda: Breath of the Wild Animated Speedrun (5 1/2 minutes) before, but it’s a highlight of the Something About series for how many of the seemingly random elements, this time, have actual antecedents in BotW speedrunning. But not the “Excuuuuuuuse me Princess” part. That’s from the old Zelda TV cartoon.

Terminal Montage’s How To Get To Goron City (1 1/2 minutes) is also BotW related, and is also hardly obscure at 14 million views.

Pringus McDingus’ Breath of the Lovers (3 minutes) is not really much related to the games, but is still funny and cute.

Chasing Rupees (2 1/2 minutes) has only a third of a million views, but was made in stop motion, and rather well animated for that.

Let’s finish for now with Anger Management (5 1/2), starring everyone’s favorite put-upon money-grubbing shopkeeper, Beedle:

There’s tons of Zelda animations on Youtube, so you can bet we’ll be returning to this well eventually….

Tears of the Wild, Breath of the Kingdom

Like most of the game-playing internet, I picked up Tears of the Kingdom and played a bit of it. It’s good! The opening tutorial seems to be slightly harder than Breath of the Wild’s (that cold water is instantly deadly to fall into now). That there’s a bunch of secret stuff to find even before you get out of the tutorial is awesome. I found a “Bottomless Cave” area that actually gave me a couple of real enemies to fight.

I’ll probably be obsessing over this game for a while, so I figured I’d make a special recurring feature for the blog about it, complete with its own pixel art character. May I introduce Röq, an inhabitant of Set Side B’s unnamed alien home planet who’s fixated on triangles, since they’re vaguely triangle-shaped themself. (They work out in order to sharpen their corners.) Please don’t mention they look like a Hershey’s Kiss, they’re very sensitive about that.

I know it looks like I’m trying to make an ostentatious point with pronoun use in this paragraph, but the fact is, no one on the Set Side B planet seems to have a gender! Except maybe The Gripe Monster, that one’s definitely male.

Here’s a few screenshots and videos from my first morning of play:

Just so you know who she is. BTW, how is she still a princess when her pop iced it a century ago? Coronate her already, she should be Queen Zelda, she’s not a My Little Pony or owned by Disney!

BTW, I bring this up only because strangely I’ve never heard anyone comment on it… why the hell is Zelda not an old woman?! Link was in stasis for a hundred years but Zelda was alive and fighting a psychic battle against a giant misty slime pig all that time. Impa became a prune! Zelda must moisturize.

Link, like many heroes that have the misfortune to be played by me, spent the first few minutes of his life tearing around the starting cave like a dog with too much energy.
Legwear? It’s obviously just a miniskirt.
This should be a moment of terror! If it weren’t for the music and the camera angle and Link’s carefree angle it’d be obvious he was about to be turned into a twink smear with pointy ears sticking out. He lands in a pond, but water hurts to fall onto!
Gargantuan lily pads should breed terrible frogs.
Oh hello birdie how’d you get up here? Do you want some seed, I think I–OOF

Stay tuned for our dubious hero’s continued badventures.

History of Hyrule, Legend of Zelda art in print

Source: Art and Artifacts – Upload credit: Melora of historyofhyrule.com

This is a collection, made by Melora, of various Japanese publications related to The Legend of Zelda and its sequels, including manuals, hint books, strategy guide and manga. There’s a lot to go through! Some of it is translated, a lot isn’t. But it’s all nice to leaf through. There’s four heads to this particular Gleeok: a home page, a blog, a Twitter feed, a Flickr image archive with tons of images, and a substantial amalgamation on the Internet Archive. If you’re as familiar with Zelda games as I am, you might not even particularly need the strategy guides translated!

I still remember the first substantial thing I read about Zelda, long ago, a review in, of all places, Games Magazine. I must have been about 13 at the time. It seemed like an awesome thing to my games-addled brain, but at that moment I didn’t even have an NES. When I first played it, it was amazing. I spent months uncovering every item and secret (finding Level 7 in the second quest was a major roadblock).

So, when I think of The Legend of Zelda, I think of challenging game play, exploring a huge world, finding deviously hidden secrets, and overcoming a formidable challenge purely by my own efforts. All of these side various comics are a bit lost of me, as it is not often that I get into the lore of the series (The Wind Waker was a major exception), but I understand that a lot of other people do, and I think that’s terrific.

I have not had that the kind of experience I got from The Legend of Zelda from many other things since the era of the NES, but two places I did get it from were Breath of the Wild, of course, and Fez. I hear Tunic‘s pretty good, I probably should look into that soon….

Some more images, from various materials related to the first game. All are from this Flickr album, and were uploaded (and many of them, scanned) by Melora of History of Hyrule:

Publication Source: Million Publishing Guide – Contributor Source: Zelda Dungeon

Publication Source: 3 Game Guide
Contributor Source: Donated by Mases of Zelda Dungeon
Originally found in the comic magazine Monthly Shonen Captain May 18, 1986, discovered thanks to twitter.com/kazzykazycom
Found by kazzykazcom on Twitter, unknown origin
Source: From the The Legend of Zelda: The Mirage Castle by Akio Higuchi and Yuko Tanaka, 1986