Nintendo fans love it to get personal with familiar company characters, obsess over mario’s nipples, how big is luigi’s dongand what if Kirby went to swallow a hot man. (Disclosure: that last one is actually my fault.)
Before the release of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdomalthough, a TikToker dared to ask a question that wasn’t on the hot topic list: Which version of Link, among the dozens of titles in the long-running series, would smell the worst? In a complete video, @bigtighthescienceguy rank each iconic hero as they see fit, ultimately declaring Link in skyward sword the least musty (the game has toilets). ocarina of time Link, however, did not shower for seven years, despite running into a large fish and getting hit by rotting bodies.
Tears director Hidemaro Fujibayashi and producer Eiji Aonuma disagree. To them, two Links stand out as particularly stinky. Aonuma points to breath of the wild‘s version of the character, who wears a barbarian-style outfit with a bone cap and fur. “That could be a bit stinky,” she says, noting her “wild animal scent scent.”
Fujibayashi, who says that “throughout many decades” he has given interviews in which he has never been asked to consider which hero needs deodorant the most, cast his vote for twilight princess. Although Link spends much of his time digging in the dirt and running through dungeons like a wolf, Fujibayashi is thinking of a specific moment. “There are some scenes in twilight princess where Link engages in sumo wrestling with the Goran tribe,” he says. “I imagine he’s pretty stinky in that situation.”
Smell testing multiple Links is just the beginning. In a wide-ranging interview with WIRED, the duo, via translators, also explained their worst Ultrahand creations, how getting lost in caves helped them create one of Tears‘ new skills and how they approached one of the biggest games of the year. But not before Aonuma shared one final thought: “Actually, Ganon might just suck the most, if I think about it.”
WIRED: You have said that it was a deliberate choice to make Tears of the Kingdom a sequel to breath of the wild. Why was this world, specifically, so important to return to?
Eiji Aonuma: I was probably the first to mention it. This was something that occurred to me while we were still working on breath of the wild, especially in the DLC. I really felt like this world that we had created still had a lot of potential for a new game that we could dig into. So this is something that I suggested to Mr. Fujibayashi. Little did he know that at the same time, he already had some ideas in his head about ways he could accomplish that.
Hidemaro Fujibayashi: I was thinking about the environment breath of the wild without adding anything new. In some of the dungeons of breath of the wild, you see these perpetually spinning cogwheels. So we took four of those and attached them to a stone slate, and [made] a makeshift car As an extension of that, someone took rectangular slates and put four of them together in a cylinder. And then you throw a remote bomb and a ball in there and it detonates and you have a makeshift cannon. Putting those two ideas together, you have a DIY tank that Link can now assemble.
