My Experience with Zelda Part 5

Previous Entries:

My Experience with Zelda Part 1

My Experience with Zelda Part 2

My Experience with Zelda Part 3

My Experience with Zelda Part 4


For Christmas 2017, Anne got me a Breath of the Wild blanket, featuring an image of Link shooting an ancient arrow. It was warm and soft and I soon started using it whenever I was on the couch and cold. She started calling it my "magic blanket," since whenever I laid down with it on me I fell asleep fairly quickly. 

The third entry of the Dark Horse Zelda books came out in June of 2018 - the Zelda Encyclopedia. I pre-ordered it clear back in December, but it took 6 months to finally become available. The colors and release order of these books coincidentally match the boxes of the Extended Editions of the Lord of the Rings movie sets. 



Over the summer of 2018 Anne, Aurora, Logan and I played through Four Swords Adventures using the 3 GBA SPs we have between us and the modified backlit GBA hooked up to the Wii emulating a Gamecube. This marks the game where Anne has now completed the same number of Zelda games as Avery. Logan, on the other hand, has finished them all (at least in one form or another). She finished Twilight Princess HD next and then Tri-Force Heroes. This only leaves Skyward Sword and Breath of the Wild for her to finish. 

In the fall of 2018 I finally figured out how to get Custom Firmware on my 3DS thanks to the fine people of /r/3dshacks, which allowed me to do a couple of things I've wanted for a while. First, I finally have a copy of Minish Cap on my 3DS, and second, I have digital versions of all my favorite games so I don't have to carry around a case with gamecards. So what that means is that I have all Zelda games except 5 on my 3DS (WW, FSA, TP, SS, and BotW). 

But beyond that, it has opened up a whole new avenue for some of the spin-off games that I either never could play before or had to jump through a whole bunch of hoops and/or pay a lot of money to play. It wasn't too long until I also had BS-TLoZ Map 1, BS-TLoZ Map 2, and BS-TLoZ: AST installed onto my system. I followed them up with the 4 Tingle games (which admittedly, I only did for the completionist in me): Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland, Tingle's Balloon Fight, Too Much Tingle Pack, and Tingle's Balloon Trip of Love. I also got the 3DS version of Hyrule Warriors and a Twilight Princess themed Picross game, and a GBA port of the Zelda Game & Watch game. Which is to say that with the exception of Link's Crossbow Training and the actual Zelda wristwatch, I had all of the (official) Zelda spin-off games on my 3DS. 

3DS CFW also allowed me an experience that I didn't think I would ever have. By installing the Japanese version of the original Legend of Zelda, I was able to finally yell into a microphone to kill a Pol's Voice. The original Famicom's controller 2 had a microphone instead of Start/Select buttons, and a few games integrated this feature. The manual for TLoZ mentioned that they were afraid of sound, and most people assumed it referred to the Recorder (flute), similar to how Digdogger is weakened. But since the US version of the NES didn't have a microphone, the programmers altered the monster with the weakness of being killed by arrows without updating the manual.

Around this same time, the Nintendo Switch Online launched, and came with a feature to play old NES games. I made a Japanese account so I could also download the Famicom equivalent, and was able to play Japanese versions of both Zelda 1 and 2. The only real difference in Zelda 1 was a few sound effects (the FDS had an additional sound channel available) and more accurate hints from the old man (i.e., no Engrish transrations). But Zelda 2 had several interesting changes - a few in the graphics/sound area but mostly in the leveling up system. Later I learned how to emulate the FDS on my 3DS including the startup BIOS and having to switch to the B side of a disk (and sitting through the loading wait time). 

Just after Christmas, I happened to spot Creating a Champion, the fourth Zelda book from Dark Horse, while perusing the store. I wasn't really planning on getting it, but I had some Christmas money to spend and so I got it and now have all four volumes displayed on some nicer bookshelves in our living room. 

After playing a few of the Tingle games, I decided I might as well play all of the spin-off and non-canon games, even the unholy trilogy that we normally do not speak of (*shudders*). This involved downloading two different emulators for the PC. One emulator (MESS) could play two of the games and had controller support, but wouldn't play the cut scenes, so I had a YouTube video of them pulled up and would watch them at the proper time. It supported Save States, so I could get through some of the frustrating parts without having to start whole levels over. The other emulator (TinyCDi) could play the other game using a keyboard but wouldn't do Save States and would crash every time Zelda died. But I got through them finally. 

The next big news for the Zelda world was the announcement of another spin-off game called Cadence of Hyrule. In a similar vein to Hyrule Warriors, this was a game was a coat of Zelda paint on another style of game. In this case, it was Crypt of the Necrodancer, which I had never heard of before. I got excited for it and pre-purchased it (as well as the original CotN game) but it turns out that we were supposed to be in Vegas on a family vacation when it was to be released. So I couldn't really play it upon release and it took a little while to get back into it. 

In the process of finishing the latest spin-off game (CoH), I came across another one that I hadn't played - Navi Trackers. It was a process to get it working. Because it was only released in Japan (and Korea, strangely), I could either try getting a Japanese GameCube and disc, or hard-modding my American GameCube (and still buy the disc). But I found option #3: getting Custom Firmware on my Wii U. So after doing all the work to get it working, I got everything set up and ready to play only to find out that there isn't the "hardware handshake" protocol between the Wii U and the GBA when emulating the Gamecube. So that meant option #4: getting it working on the CFW Wii (which worked, thankfully). I played a few levels with each of my family, but only in pairs (meaning, never with 3 or 4 people). Having to teach them how it works because they can't understand Japanese was kinda neat, too. 

In September of 2019, the second Link's Awakening remake was released for the Switch. It's not officially called Link's Awakening HD, but most people on the internet refer to it that way to distinguish it from the original b/w Link's Awakening and the GBC remake (DX). I was very glad to get to play one of my favorite games in glorious, gorgeous HD with the harder difficulty. And the new dungeon maker mode of play is . . . okay. I think the game should have been more like $40 instead of full price, but apparently I'm a sucker for anything Zelda. Avery and I both got a copy from GameStop on the midnight release (along with a poster). 

After seeing a copy of it at a used game store, it occurred to me that the manual inside of the plastic case for my copy of Four Sword Adventures has been missing its cover ever since I bought it. I had never seen the cover until that day and it bummed me out. Fortunately I devised a solution - use a hi-res scan PDF of the manual and the color copier at work to reproduce it. It took a few tries to get the exact dimensions and to get the front and back sides to match up exactly on a 2-sided print, but I eventually succeeded and restored the manual to its former glory. Along those same lines, I occasionally see the Gamecube Collector's disc, which has LoZ, AoL, OoT, and MM on one disk along with previews of other games. I'm tempted to get it but unwilling to pay the high price at the moment. Perhaps when the house is paid off . . . 

Then after some months of looking at one, I finally bit the bullet and purchased a 30-year-old digital watch just to play the Legend of Zelda Game Watch. I put more details in the Spin-off post, but while I'm glad to own a piece of Zelda history, the experience of playing it isn't anything to write home about. But I at least persevered through it so I could honestly claim that I have finished it. 

Anne reached the point where she only had Skyward Sword and Breath of the Wild to finish, and I decided that she should do Skyward first. I also took it as an opportunity to finally get around to playing it through a second time. While it wasn't quite as bad as I had been touting all these years, there were still many frustrations and problems that bothered me. I wrote more about this experience in its own post. Logan also decided that he wanted to complete all of the spin-off games as well, so he slogged through the CD-i games on our computer and did the rest on his 3DS. I think the only one he didn't finish is Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland. 

While I obviously have all of the games, I'm not usually one for merch. I need it to provide me with lore, backstory, or some other kind of content. After buying the four Dark Horse books, I decided to try the Mangas. I let Anne know of my plans and so I started getting them for birthdays/Christmases starting in 2019. The first ones were Twilight Princess vol.1-3 and then the version of LttP that was in Nintendo Power along with LttP/MM. I've slowly amassed all of the Legendary Editions of the Himekawa books, and am now only needing to finish the Twilight Princess books. As I'm very much an, "In for a penny, in for a pound," kind of collector, I looked into all of the older mangas/books as well. Using online resources, I found a fairly good list of publications, including various comics, mangas, guidebooks, sheet music, and novels based on the games. For now, I managed to find digital scans of almost everything, which will be enough for now. Perhaps in the future I might hunt down these elusive pieces of Zelda history. 

I did a few of projects on the computer to kill some time. The first was to complete my Musical Journey Through Hyrule edit. It was something that I started while anticipating Breath of the Wild but I got distracted once it (and the Switch) came out. The second was to make desktop wallpaper of the various Zelda game logos. It was easy enough to do the various spin-offs as well, so I did. Once I finished that, I got the idea to use Photoshop to make a somewhat realistic version of the LoZ title screen, using real textures. I had so much fun that I decided to do it for all of the main games. 

Another way I flexed my Photoshop skills was to make a Zelda poster. I had previously made one for Avengers: Infinity War that had the various MCU movie posters based off of one my brother saw online. The problem with the one he saw was that the movies were out of order and some of them were the international release posters. I recreated it in Photoshop with the correct posters and added things like the Netflix shows. After Endgame came out I made an updated one with the newer movies and took out some of the TV stuff. But I had the idea to also make a Zelda one. The problem was that unlike movie posters, the game boxes were sometimes vertically oriented (NES, and Gamecube on), sometimes horizontal (SNES, N64), and sometimes square-ish (handhelds). My solution was to make them all squarish and just expand the picture as needed. It turned out pretty well and I spent weeks going over minutia to eliminate mistakes that would only be a couple of pixels in size. We got a few misprints and were informed that they wouldn't refund anything, unfortunately, but we had enough to cover the orders from ourselves and friends/family. Later I made one for the spin-off games, but never got it printed since I'm probably the only one who would appreciate such a thing. 

During the Spring 2020 when everything went tits up because of the 'rona, we spent some of the time doing home improvement projects and I decided to make myself a lamp like one I've seen people make on Reddit. Using a piece of oak and some very precise calculations, I got the wood frame all done, then finished it with some plexiglass and rice paper, some LED light strips, and some leftover fabric to make a lamp that can change colors and is dimmable. 

While I enjoyed the 3DS version of Majora's Mask for the updated graphics and portability, there were quite a few changes they made that I wasn't too keen on, such as the Zora swimming nerf and the boss battles. Thankfully, a group of people who know how to patch such things made a patch available for those of us who have custom firmware. It fixes many of the problems that crept into the remake and makes it more like the original N64 version. 

Over the summer, the big thing I was looking forward to was the release of Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity. Truth be told, I wasn't the biggest fan of the first game, but this one looked more like Breath of the Wild so I was a little more excited. Avery picked up our copies on release day (along with a keychain). However, it happened to release right when I was in the middle of a few games so I put it off and didn't play it for a few weeks. However, I found myself rather enjoying the game, as Aonuma-san had given Koei Tecmo some direction and insight to making it feel more Zelda-like. This article articulates a lot of what I thought and felt about it. 

To complement my lamp I made, Brady found a Triforce tree topper on clearance at GameStop and sent it my way. Anne also finished Breath of the Wild just after Christmas 2020, making 19 out of 19 Zelda games completed for her. She practiced her profanity skills and learned some patience along the way, but for now she can claim to have at least completed all of the games (for now). Convincing her to do the spin-offs or 100% them . . . that's a different story.