Tears Of The Kingdom Fans Still Aren’t Over Sidon’s Fiance

Yona is seen standing in Zora' Domain.

Screenshot: Nintendo / Kotaku

You know, I’ve gotta admire the bravery of Nintendo’s social teams to post even one single tweet about Yona, Sidon’s surprise fiance in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. However, I also doubt they were that shocked to see fans, slighted by her taking Link’s boyfriend away from him, rolled in with the good jokes.

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The post itself is innocuous enough. We’re two months removed from Tears of the Kingdom’s launch, so we can post about characters who are “spoilers” without anyone getting justifiably mad. The tweet talks about her concern with the sludge problem in Zora’s Domain during the game’s main quest. It also, of course, mentions that she’s planning a wedding with Sidon, the sexy shark man that fans have been shipping romantically with Link with since Breath of the Wild in 2017.

If you weren’t incredibly online and into the Zelda fandom, you wouldn’t think anything of this. If you’re that person, you would also be pretty confused scrolling down to the comments and seeing the good jokes people are making about the situation. But you could probably suss out that Nintendo just hard launched Sidon’s new bae, and the jealous Link and Sidon shippers are in the comments demanding blood. But even so, it feels like everyone is in on the joke, and knew that this was inevitably the reaction Yona gets from the community. Typically, hopefully, all in good fun.

Honestly, as much as it pains me to admit it, my Sidon/Link ship is mostly a gag at this point because after the ending of Tears of the Kingdom, I’m so, so, so on the Link and Zelda are together now train it’s not even funny. Perhaps one day, the rest of my Sidon/Link ship brethren will can find similar peace, and know that even if Sidon marries Yona, she will not outlive the statue of Link riding Sidon that sits in Zora’s Domain.

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by pbnbigesdi Posted on

Nintendo Is Trying To Patent Some Really Broad Tears Of The Kingdom Mechanics

Zelda is seen standing on a sky island.

Screenshot: Nintendo / Kotaku

Nintendo is registering several new patents from The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom that are extremely broad, to the point where they seem unreasonable for other developers to be beholden to.

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Automaton, a gaming website that focuses on Japanese games like Zelda, has a roundup of the 32 patents Nintendo put forth. Some of them are specific to Link’s latest adventure, including things like Riju’s lightning ability, which lets the player target enemies with a bow and bring down a lighting strike wherever the arrow lands. The weirder ones are related to baseline game design and coding that applies to plenty of other video games on the market. One of the hopeful patents relates to the physics of a character riding on top of a moving vehicle and reacting dynamically to it in a realistic manner.

A character is shown standing on top of a moving vehicle.

The distinction, according to Automaton’s translation of Japanese site Hatena Blog user nayoa2k’s post on the matter, is down to how Tears of the Kingdom codes these interactions. Link and the objects he rides on move together at the same speed, rather than Link being technically stationary on top of a moving object as is common in the physics of other games. The two are functionally the same, but given that plenty of video games displayed characters who can walk around on top of moving vehicles, it’s highly unlikely this kind of approach hasn’t been utilized before.

On top of trying to patent the tech, Nintendo seeks to patent the loading screen that shows up when the player is fast-traveling across Hyrule. This specifically refers to the screen that shows the map transition from the player’s starting point to their destination. Sure, that’s pretty specific and not something every game utilizes, but it’s still such a general concept that it feels almost petty to patent it when it’s hardly an iconic draw of Tears of the Kingdom.

It’s not uncommon for game developers to try to patent mechanics and features. One of the most famous examples is when Bandai Namco had a patent on loading screen mini-games, which finally ended in 2015.

Who knows if these patents actually go anywhere? But when game design concepts are gatekept like this, it only leads to a loss of innovation for other devs. Though these specific patents are small in the grand scheme of things, they can be a slippery slope for things like WB patenting Shadow of Mordor’s Nemesis System, which should be in more games.

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by pbnbigesdi Posted on

Tears Of The Kingdom DLC

Zelda holds the master sword.

Screenshot: Nintendo / Kotaku

In a new interview with Famitsu, Nintendo has revealed there are no plans for any DLC or expansions for Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. As spotted by Eurogamer, Zelda producer Eiji Aonuma told the Japanese publication that he’d “done everything” there was to do in this incarnation of Hyrule.

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TotK is the second time Nintendo had developed a Zelda game set in this space, with this year’s sequel building above and below the original world of BotW. It seems that means it was quite enough for producer Aonuma and director Hidermaro Fujibayashi, however.

In a wide-ranging interview about the game, the pair explain how they deliberately hid that the game would have a vast new underground to explore when promoting it pre-release, and the last-minute efforts that went in to being able to seamlessly travel from the sky islands to the underground realms. And how, yeah, they were expecting the awful treatment of the poor Koroks.

When the interviewer asks about future projects (after failing, as ever, to get a straight answer about the series’ timeline), Aonuma explains that they have no current plans to return to the Breath of the Wild version of Hyrule. “I feel like we’ve done everything we can to create fun in that world,” he tells Famitsu (translated by Google).

Tears of the Kingdom sold over 18 million copies in just its first two months on sale, and there’d likely another billion dollars just waiting to be taken with an expansion to the game. But Nintendo is going to do what Nintendo wants to do, and adding an expansion isn’t one of those things.

Fujibayashi said that he’s already thinking about his “next fun experience,” but it’s likely to be yet another reinvention of the Zelda franchise. And rather impressively, when asked if they feel overwhelmed by expectations for something “even more amazing” next, Aonuma says he and his team welcome it! “[The] development team don’t see this as a hurdle,” he said.

 

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Tears Of The Kingdom Player Beats Game Without Touching Surface

Link is shown falling through the sky toward a sky island.

Image: Nintendo / Kotaku

So much of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is spent jumping between Hyrule’s landscape and the floating islands above it that I can’t fathom somehow beating the game without traversing both the sky regions and Hyrule proper. But that’s exactly what one player miraculously managed to pull off.

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TotK subreddit user Black_Hand_Gotthard shared a post (h/t Polygon) with a screenshot of both the ending cutscene and a map of the game’s sky layer filled out with all of the airborne fast-travel points, proving that they did indeed complete the game without visiting the surface of Hyrule. They responded to questions about how they pulled this off, and it sounds like they used a lot of the Zonai tech that gives you navigation tools like gliders to move through the air or rockets that propel you up higher. But it also sounds like the game’s highly popular makeshift hoverbike came in handy as well.

A screenshot of a Reddit post shows the map of Hyrule's sky islands.

So yeah, in theory, you could get around in Tears of the Kingdom without touching the ground for several hours. However, beating the game does require you to go down to the surface…but not necessarily touching down on Hyrule’s ground.

Spoilers for Tears of the Kingdom follow.

The final boss fight against Ganondorf takes place underneath the floating Hyrule Castle. Reaching this area would usually require something like the paraglider, which you have to go to the surface to get, but Black_Hand_Gotthard says they were able to survive by using fairies, which will revive Link should he lose all his health. Barreling from the sky islands to the core of Hyrule—bypassing the surface entirely—is nothing when you’ve got a little magical person stashed in a bottle in your pocket.

All of this is made possible by Tears of the Kingdom’s open structure, which doesn’t really require you to do anything specific at any time after you pass the prologue. That freedom means you can easily miss things like the paraglider that are ostensibly on the main path because you can simply fuck off and do other things.

Tears of the Kingdom has been out since May, and I’m still fascinated at how people are finding new ways to play it. It’s a shame we’re not getting DLC, because adding new toys and tools would no doubt give the community yet more oft-strange, definitely fascinating new ideas.

Buy The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom: Amazon | Best Buy | GameStop

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by pbnbigesdi Posted on

Tears of the Kingdom Director On Missing Sheikah Tech

Hidemaro Fujibayashi, director of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, finally shed some light on what happened to all the Sheikah technology that was practically ubiquitous in Breath of the Wild but strangely absent in its sequel.

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In Breath of the Wild, players discover relics of the Sheikah tribe’s technology littered across Hyrule in the form of towers, weapons, and mechanical enemies. However, in Tears of the Kingdom, practically every trace of Sheikah Technology has disappeared. Even characters like Purah and Robbie, who led research efforts into the tech in BotW, don’t utter a word about its sudden disappearance in TotK. In an interview with The Telegraph, Fujibayashi revealed that the disappearance of Sheikah technology in TotK basically boils down to the tech being a thing of the past that evaporated once its purpose was complete.

“They disappeared after the Calamity was defeated (sealed),” Fujibayashi told The Telegraph. “All of the people of Hyrule also witnessed this, but there is no one who knows the mechanism or reason why they disappeared, and it is considered a mystery. It is believed that since the Calamity disappeared, they also disappeared as their role had been fulfilled.”

Read More: The Legend Of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom: The Kotaku Review
Buy The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom: Amazon | Best Buy | GameStop

Fujibayashi also went on to explain that Sheikah technology’s sudden disappearance wasn’t an out-of-the-ordinary phenomenon for Hyruleans but an unremarkable occurrence with the many mystifying events that transpire in Hyrule.

“It is, anyway, commonplace for mysterious events and strange phenomena to occur in Hyrule. Thus, people have simply assumed the reason behind the disappearance to likely be related to ancient Sheikah technology and it seems there is no one who has tried to explore the matter further,” Fujibayashi said.

Read More: Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom Players Are Building Tanks, Planes To Commit War Crimes

Fujibayashi’s explanation about Sheikah tech being largely forgotten makes sense considering Hyruleans in Tears of the Kingdom have plenty of new stuff on their minds, as they need to deal with players constructing bomber jets, Korok torture devices, and statues with flame-spewing dicks thanks to Link’s new Fuse ability. See, you’re probably thinking about Link’s flamethrowing dick statue right now.

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by pbnbigesdi Posted on
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