Are you surprised by that title? It isn’t obvious that there even is one, but Youtuber 2CPhoenix makes a strong case that there is, that’s (mostly) consistent across the game’s signage! Here’s their video on it (9 1/2 minutes):
These kinds of ciphers aren’t to common in games, but they’re not unheard-of either. The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker uses one for the Hylian language, which it even translates for you if you play through the game a second time, and there’s at least one other such language that’s used in Breath of the Wild for Shiekah artifacts. And of course, working out a cipher that’s used in many locations is a major late-game puzzle in Fez.
The “language” of what are possibly the Noki in Sunshine Mario Sunshine is one of those things where, like Bubble Bobble’s Bubble Alphabet, the letters are actually heavily stylized versions of our familiar Latin alphabet, meaning, if you kind of take your brain off the hook slightly and just try to read the glyphs like they were words, you can get a bit of a sense of what they’re saying. Or at least I can. A little.
It’s enough to make one want to take a second look at the fakey-letters in some other Nintendo games, such as the Splatoon and Pokemon series….
MiyaTRT figured it out. Karariko’s Unemployment Rate. In both Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom.
You might disagree with their methodology. Like in BotW he declares that Paya is unemployed even though she is obviously training to become village leader after Impa retires. But it’s still an entertaining video, and probably will tell you some things about Chicken Town’s NPCs that you didn’t know before, like that in BotW one of the townsfolk stamps on one of their neighbors crops at night!
I’m working on something big for you all, but it’ll take some time to get ready. So to free up time for working on that, here’s something I’ve been saving, a Youtube video exploring manga based on Nintendo characters, from the account of S Class Anime. Enjoy!
Revealed by Amber V at Automaton, Nintendo has gone on a spree of filing patents on features of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.
Some of the software they’re trying to add the force of law to protecting include adding momentum of an object to a character standing atop it, figuring out what object the character is standing on, and showing a map of a place the player is fast traveling to during its loading sequence. What is it with companies patenting things that can be done during loading? Namco for a long time had a patent on minigames that could be played during loading periods, which is why for a long while (perhaps to this day) you have had to sit and wait for a game to complete loading before doing anything, instead of at least having fun during that time.
If Nintendo has its way, other companies won’t be allow to present screens like this unless they license the “technology” from them.
My stance, long-held and admittedly strident, is that patents should not be applied to software, ever, full stop. I am sure that some people might disagree with that opinion. They are welcome to, but I am unlikely to change their mind without a damn good argument.
On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.
It’s not easy to find romhacks that measure up to our exacting standards, that strike me in just “that way,” but a conversion of the NES Legend of Zelda, one of the few mainline Zeldas never to have been really remade in any form (unless you count the abandoned Satellaview versions), fits the bill like a duck in well-made dentures.
This screenshot may look nearly exactly like The Legend of Zelda. In fact it is the Legend of Zelda, just converted, nearly exactly, to the SNES.
Link doesn’t wait for the transition to finish to start climbing out of caves.
The question has to be asked: why? I mean, to a degree it is kind of pointless. There’s been nearly exact (although always unofficial) re-implementations of The Original The Legend of Zelda since Zelda Classic (Set Side B). All of Nintendo’s own rereleases, from Virtual Console to Gamecube bonus disks to a stand-alone Game & Watch unit. But recreating it on SNES does have certain uses. First, it fixes a handful of issues with the earlier game, notably it doesn’t have flicker or slowdown. It also uses the L and R buttons to allow for quick inventory cycling without having to go into the subscreen.
The colors are slightly better as well. And the top of the screen display labels the buttons Y and B, instead of B and A.
It speeds up game transitions: it uses the Link to the Past-style iris in and out effects, using the SNES’ display masking feature, instead of the slower curtain closes and opens from the NES version. It allows you to use custom soundtracks via MSU-1 support. Health refills instantly instead of pausing the game for up to 15 seconds while all your hearts load up with red. And the sound is very slightly different: by default the low-health beep is less insistent, there’s an extra sound when you kill an enemy, and the candle sound is a little higher in pitch.
But perhaps the best reason to convert it to the SNES is, SNES emulators are nearly as common as NES emulators. You can play this modestly improves version of LoZ on anything with an SNES emulator, which isn’t something you can say of Zelda Classic.
Yes, I used this hack as an excuse to play completely through the first quest again. And yes, I did it without dying. I still got it.
I’m kind of an outspoken fan of the original LoZ, I still think it’s well worth playing today, although I think you should seek out its manual should you do so. (The opening demo even tells you to look there for details!) You’ll die a lot, it’s true, but there’s little penalty for it except for going back to start or the beginning of a dungeon, and having to go refill your health before you try again. It takes real skill to weave around its fast-moving enemies and projectiles, but it’s doable, and you don’t need speedrun skillz to do it.
It is rather difficult to find it through search. It’s not on romhacking.net. Creator infidelity’s announcement was on Twitter, where he offered only a direct download.
Time Extension has come up here a lot lately, hasn’t it? It’s because they so often do interesting articles! This one’s about the propensity of Japanese games to use medieval European game worlds, the kinds with a generally agrarian society, royalty, knights, and their folklore counterparts elves, dwarves, fairies, gnomes and associated concepts.
They often fudge the exact age they’re trying to depict, with genuine medieval institutions sitting beside Renaissance improvements like taverns and shops. Nearly of them also put in magic in a general D&D kind of way, sometimes institutionalizing it into a Harry Potter-style educational system.
Notably, they usually choose the positive aspects of that setting. The king is usually a benevolent ruler. It’s rare that serfdom and plagues come up. The general populace is usually okay with being bound to the land. The Church, when it exists, is sometimes allowed to be evil, in order to give the player a plot road to fighting God at the end.
Hyrule of the Zelda games is likely the most universally-known of these realms, which I once called Generic Fantasylands. The various kingdoms of the Dragon Quest games also nicely fit the bill. Final Fantasy games were among the first to question those tropes, presenting evil empire kingdoms as early at the second game.
Dragon Quest (All images here from Mobygames)
John Szczepaniak’s article at Time Extension dives into the question by interviewing a number of relevant Japanese and US figures and developers, including former Squaresoft translator Ted Woolsey. I think the most insightful comments are from Hiromasa Iwasaki, programmer of Ys I and II, who notes that this Japanese conception of a fantasy world mostly comes from movies and the early computer RPGs Wizardry and Ultima, that the literature that inspired Gary Gygax to create Dungeons & Dragons (which in turned inspired Wizardry and Ultima), especially Lord of the Rings and Weird Tales, were generally unknown to Japanese popular culture. Developer Rica Matsumura notices, also, that there is a cool factor in Japan to European folklore that doesn’t apply, over there, to Japanese folklore.
Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord
It’s a great read, that says a number of things well that have been bubbling up in the back of my head for a long time, especially that JRPGs recreated both RPG mechanics and fantasy tropes at a remove, that they got their ideas second hand and, in a way similar to how a bunch of gaming tables recreated Dungeons & Dragons in their own image to fill in gaps left in Gary Gygax’s early rulebooks, so too did they make their versions of RPGs to elaborate upon the ideas of Wizardry and Ultima without having seen their bases.
Matthew Green’s Press The Buttons is a gaming culture blog that predates our efforts by many years. They don’t update as obsessively frequently as we do, but the find good things!
They found a couple of commercials promoting Link’s Awakening, which turns 30 years old this year, one from Japan and one from the United States. The Japanese one is light and fun and a joy to behold. The American one, well, has rap lyrics, and is poorly lit, and is mostly a guy singing to game footage. Nothing against rap, but if there was ever a Zelda game that was less befitting the approach that commercial gives it, other than maybe Wind Waker, this one is it.
Here’s the Japanese one, which at least presents characters actually in the game:
On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.
Let’s get back to talking about other Zelda games than the 800-pound, battery-powered, flame-spouting, spike-studded elephant in the room.
I make no apologies for it: I love Zelda II: The Adventure of Link! It’s second only to the original game for me, and I’ve probably played it, in its unaltered form, more than The Legend of Zelda by now. Because you can play enough of TLoZ that it becomes kind of boring, but a game of Zelda II is never a guaranteed win. There’s just enough randomness in it to mess you up once in awhile, even for speedrunners, and while you can do things to account for it, you can never completely negate it. Bots, those blue blobs that jump at you, exist to humble overconfident players. They look like weak enemies, and don’t do much damage once you have some Life levels, but there is always the chance that they’ll ding you. I love that. It has a very high skill ceiling.
How does this NES game screenshot manage to be widescreen? Well….
Zelda II has long been regarded as the black sheep of the series, like how many Nintendo series have second installments that play with the formula. It’s the only Zelda with an experience system, it’s the only one with a separate combat screen, and it’s the only one with a system of extra lives.
It is also the only Nintendo-made Legend of Zelda game, released pre-Breath of the Wild, that has never been remade in any way! Zelda I had BS Zelda, the first Satellaview one; Link to the Past had both a Satellaview update and one for GBA; Link’s Awakening has been remade twice. Ocarina of Time has Master Quest and the 3D version, Majora’s Mask is also in 3D on the 3DS, and Wind Waker, Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword all have HD revisions. That leaves Zelda II.
To further heap laurels upon it, I say it’s the Zelda with the best combat! The newly-teenaged Link has a sense of weight and inertia to him that fits swordfighting well. It works so well that it seems like an obvious thing, but the fact that so few other games do swordfighting so well proves how difficult it is to get right. Breath of the Wild and its sequel have good combat, but silver-level enemies in it are just a bit too much of a damage sponge, and appear too often in the late phases of the game.
Now I’m bending the rules a bit by including this game because it’s not a romhack, it’s a fan remake. But it looks like a romhack. And the game follows Link’s movement from the NES game very closely. If he moves any differently than he did in that outing 36 years ago, I can’t point to how. Any skills you have from playing Zelda II will transfer over exactly, which is good, because they are hard won.
Unlike A2MR, the fan recreation of Metroid II: Return of Samus that Nintendo cruelly quashed, this game has only slightly upgraded graphics, it all looking like it could have been done with the original engine. It’s not, it’s made with Unity, and it pulls out just a couple of effects it’d have been hard, if not impossible, to have done on Famicom-level hardware.
Beyond that, the game’s structure is not greatly changed. The basic map of North Hyrule is similar to the NES game. There are differences, sometimes big ones, but the game still has the same feel, enough so that people who have played a lot of it on the NES will immediately know much where to go and what to do. There’s just a new wrinkle in some places.
ZIIAOL is, I must emphasize, an even harder game than Zelda II. It’s really made for people who are familiar with the original. To pick just a few instances of its higher difficulty: you only start with three units of health and magic instead of four, you must find three Magic and Heart Containers to improve that stat, there are new subquests and places to find, and some areas are slightly randomized. (The game also has its own built-in randomizer, if you really want to mix up your game.)
Yet, of many of the enemies that had tricks to beating them, the tricks still work. I’m thinking especially of its infamous knight enemies, the Ironknuckles, which sent a generation of kids screaming away from the TV. Yet, once you know their trick, to jump and hit them high on the way down, in the helmet, they become fairly simple to beat. The same trick works here, which is a huge relief. (If only it worked in the combat Timer game on the recent Zelda Game & Watch!)
Anyway. It’s free on itch.io, and if you have any interest in the original, or NES games in general, it’s worth it to give it a shot. You’re going to die a lot, but that’s probably going to be true of the original too. But they’re fun deaths.
Why is it called by its initials, “ZIIAOL?” My guess is, it’s probably to help it stay off of Nintendo’s radar. I have used the name from their itch.io post in case it helps them in this goal.
Last week, our minor character Röq (pictured left), a barely disguised excuse to post Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom content on our blog, made a video about something that happened to them in the game. They posted it to Youtube. That video is embedded below:
They made a post containing it. The video itself is ten seconds long. It’s good for a few laughs. I’m going to drop character now, Röq is, after all, just me pretending.
Well, we keep getting comments on that video. It’s weird. So I went in and checked its view count.
The video has over 131,000 views on Youtube. Dear holy frog!
This fish doesn’t have 130,000 views. Poor Marot.
A couple of other posts have 4K and 11K views respectively. I guess there’s just a huge demand for Tears of the Kingdom meme posts right now? The odd one out is the Fish Songs video, about Marot, a Zora who “sings” the same “song” in her dialogue in both Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, that video only has like 20-or-so views. There’s no accounting for musical taste.
Interesting information! If you have a video on Youtube that gets over 100,000 views, even though it has ads, and monetization isn’t available to you, what you receive is exactly bupkis.
There’s such a demand that I mused about going all-in on TotK memes, and… eh, I’m good? I’m not really a meme kind of person? I find all the jokes about Rauru trolling Link in the comments to be kind of tiresome? I’m not mad or upset at all, I’m just kind of numb to it. I’m glad people think its funny, but I feel like playing to this crowd is a dead-end for me. I’m not going to stop making videos, far from it, but there’s as good a chance it’ll be another post about something like Marot (who I adore).
If you’re reading this blog from the URL in the video comments: hello! Welcome to Set Side B! I work very hard to make daily posts about gaming matters. We have extensive archives on many topics. If you read us long enough you will find many strange and interesting things. Thanks for visiting!
Röq is continuing their explorations of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. They’re getting concerned that there aren’t as many triangles in this one as they were hoping for. There are these stone things that look like the number 9 (“Number 9… number 9…”) but they aren’t the same at all. It seems like it’s a bad idea to eat one, especially. (Spoilers?) Not that Röq is considering eating triangles. Although pizza slices might be considered kind of like triangles. Mmm… triangles.
Speaking of spoilers, there are some minor ones in this post, but nothing huge.
At least try to dodge! I feel bad about smacking you around. Even black bokoblin puts up more of a fight!
The Yiga are pretty hapless in this game. I kind of love them? They definitely know how to have a good time, doing donuts in their underground bases in devices with ridiculous designs, and names like Flamecrusher and Doommachine. They aren’t any more effective than in the first game, and in fact may actually be weaker.
It’s pretty creepy that they choreographed Kohga’s tantrum though.
(wave wave) “I see, so the Einstein-Bose condensate is effectively a fifth state of matter, I understand perfectly now!”
Link can say so much with a wave and a shrug. He must have taken mime classes or something.
And now, the musical stylings of Marot the Zora:
“Hm hm-hmm… Hum hm-hmm… yay!”
I don’t know why I fixate on fish lady’s song, but I do. I’m glad it’s the same between games.
The Pants of Doom! Don’t ask why they’re dark though, you, uh, you don’t want to know.Someone tell Sega, Nintendo ripped off their title!
Rauru, our benefactor from the ancient past, has, uh, a questionable sense of humor:
EDIT: For some reason, this video has gotten over 300,000 views on Youtube. Wow.
What purpose does this serve? And this is a bit of a spoiler, but….
Why do we even have to do shrine puzzles this time? In Breath of the Wild there was the sense that the Sheikah monks were training Link up to face the Calamity, but these shrines, that suddenly appeared right on cue, we know that Rauru made them, and that he knows who they’re for. Link’s already a hero. Rauru knows it, Zelda went back in time and told him. “Seals the darkness” my Hylian ass, the shrines exist to give Link the orbs he needs to heal up from Ganondorf’s mummy attacking him at the start of the game, and he’s still the only person who can enter them. If you know already he’s the Chosen One, there’s no reason to make him jump though hoops. Just hand over the round sparkly, he has a realm to save.
Don’t get me started on why Link have to give them to the goddess statues to get healed. What do they get out of it? Why does Link have to serve as middle-elf? This magical economy, it makes no sense.
It’s rather harder to survive the early game, I found, in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom that it was in Breath of the Wild. There are many more enemies, they’re stronger, your weapons are weaker, and there’s a lot more kinds of enemies. I got killed over and over in the early going, while I could engage small groups of Bokoblins pretty easily in BotW. And if you encounter a cluster of Gloom Hands while you still have only four hearts, you’ll probably want to teleport away from there if you can’t immediately climb up out of reach. (What are Gloom Hands? You’ll know them when you see them.)
I wrote up a list of tips for the early game in a MeFi thread, and I realized hey, that’s the kind of content I should be putting here! So here they are. There’s minor early gameplay spoilers here, necessarily.
There is probably little here you couldn’t get from the gaming bigsites, Kotaku and its ilk. But my belief is, if you get this information from someone small, it feels a lot more like a friend is passing along some advice they gained. And after all, the people who have the strategy guides and help articles on those sites probably had the advantage of having completed the game during the press embargo period. I assure you, I had no early access.
Shrines, each giving you a short puzzle to solve for an upgrade orb, are even more important here than in BotW, because the monsters are harder and you need those hearts. There’s a bunch of shrines around the new town in central Hyrule. Unlike the first game where people could dedicate their character all to stamina, I think you’ll find that hearts are more useful in the early game.
If you have full hearts, you will nearly always survive any hit with at least a quarter-heart left, but you have to have full hearts. If you get bodied by an unexpected attack and left with a quarter-heart, immediately eat something that brings you back up to full to regain that protection (not too hard when you only have four hearts), then get away from it.
BotW had an unexplained mechanic where you gained invisible “experience points” as you killed enemies, but they didn’t improve you, they improved the monsters. That’s why the easy, low-health red versions of monsters like Bokoblins and Moblins, and the slightly easier basic Lynels, became rare in BotW after awhile. As you defeated monsters, the world would upgrade foes to blue, black, and eventually silver versions (gold in the Master Mode DLC). I think it’s likely that TotK has a similar process, so by avoiding conflict while you’re weak, you also keep monsters manageable for a while longer.
On the other hand, the Fuse power lets you get stronger weapons a bit earlier. And bomb flowers, as attached to arrows, seem a bit stronger than the bombs from the Bomb Rune in BotW. (Certainly, it’s easier to kill yourself with them.) It’s satisfying to send a bomb flower into the middle of an enemy camp. Bomb Flowers are one of the most useful things you get out of caves (and, eventually, from exploring the Depths).
As I’ve noted, it’s possible to miss the Paraglider quest and make the early game much, much harder. Many shrines in particular expect you to have the Paraglider. To do the quest to get it, you have to head to Hyrule Castle at the beginning and talk to a certain NPC who’s at the end of the path after the gate.
To improve your armor, you have to get the Great Fairies out of their flower buds, which takes more than a cash payment in this game. It seems to be a lot easier to miss important subquests in this game. The quest you need to start upgrading your armor requires that you go to the Lucky Clover offices in north-western Hyrule, near the Rito village, and talk to Penn. (Penn is terrific, BTW.) That’ll start you getting a music group back together (it makes sense in the story), which involves some building with Ultrahand at each step, but just doing the first step opens up the first Great Fairy and lets you upgrade your armor a bit, which can be a huge aid. Note though, in addition to the ingredients, the G.F.s also charge you a bit of money for each upgrade.
Money is rather harder to come by. As in BotW, most of your cash comes from selling gemstones. And as in BotW, a lot of those rupees end up getting spent on meal ingredients and arrows. The problem with selling gems, though, is that you’ll eventually need them to upgrade some of your armor.
Getting your battery improved takes ages it seems! You need 100 crystal charges for each extra bar, not each extra battery. At first, the only way to get those is in chests of 20 in the Depths and bought 10 at a time for Zonaite in that one store in the tutorial sky area. If you want to improve your battery faster, there’s a place to exchange it faster in the Depths beneath Kakariko.
But I’d hold off on exploring the Depths until you’ve built your hearts and stamina up a bit. The rewards you get for exploring the Depths are (other than the Bomb Flowers you find) mostly different from those you get from exploring the overworld and sky. There don’t seem to be any shrines in the deep underground, so you won’t get hearts or stamina that way! Instead you mostly get Zonaite, which you won’t even have a use for at that stage, and some chest contents that have armor and 20x crystal charges. Also you’ll need a lot of brightbloom seeds to explore the Depths to any great degree, which you’ll find mostly in caves in the overworld. Be sure to hold onto that Zonaite though, you’ll be wanting a lot of it eventually….
In the Depths, you’ll find these strange frozen-in-time dark figures, each carrying a weapon. When you examine one, the figure vanishes, leaving the weapon behind. What isn’t obvious at first is these are undecayed weapons. Don’t just use them as-is though, fuse something to them to make them even stronger and more durable.
When you find the Abandoned Central Mine in the Depths, don’t leave it until you find the researchers had the (easy) boss fight. There’s something very important there.
The most useful, relative to both power and frequency with which you find them, item I’ve found to glue to your stuff is Bokoblin horns, especially those from black Bokoblins. I’ve got a ton of those, and they provide a nice strength bonus. Remember you can sort your materials by how much power they’ll give you if you fuse them to weapons, it’s a good way to see what you can use effectively without being in danger of running out of them quickly.
