Sunday, December 18, 2016

Blocks of Choice

While replaying the Minish Cap on the Wii U Virtual Console, an odd detail about both the Minish Cap and Oracle of Ages came back to mind. With the exception of Four Swords, all Zelda games directed by Hidemaro Fujibayashi present the player with various choices during sidequests that affect the gameworld and its characters permanently in various ways. This includes the animal buddies or the son of Bipin and Blossom in the Oracle games, the Oracle housings in the Minish Cap, as well as Peatrice's affections and Cawlin's letter in Skyward Sword.

If you want to experience the different results with all of these interesting choices, you have to replay the games. But there's also another choice found in two of these games that can only be labeled as "minor". There are blocks that can be moved in either direction that will stay in their new position for the rest of the game. One is the barrier rock found at the beginning of Oracle of Ages:


You can move to the left or the right. And it will stay in that position indefinitely. Moving it to the left is preferable, because it never gets in the way there. But with the nature of having various savegames in the Oracle saga to experience it all, you might want to have at least one savegame, where the rock is moved to the right. For the sake of completion, basically.

This same behavior has been copied in the Minish Cap by the statue of Minister Potho that can be found inside the Funday School:


Again, you can move this to either side and it will stay there for the rest of the game. Now, if you're replaying the game to have different Oracles inside the houses, you might also want to consider to change things with the statue, just so that your different savegames cover all possibilities. It's a minor thing, really, but that's what makes it so noteworthy. It's odd, how such an unimportant choice can leave a mark on your savegame.

Also, I think, the same applies to the one throne in Dark Hyrule Castle, where you fight the first Darknut. You can also pull the throne either to the left or the right and it will stay there.

Well, Hidemaro Fujibayashi will be back to directing Zelda with Breath of the Wild... Let's see, what weird choices we will have to make then.

2 comments:

Eduardo Jencarelli said...

Regarding the Oracle girls on Minish Cap, that's an indirect joke to the Oracle games in that the third girl doesn't get her own place to live. That's because Nintendo and Capcom cancelled the third Oracle game which was part of the trilogy. That game would focus on another element besides nature or time, and would employ Dimitri as the default animal partner.

I can only imagine Breath of the Wild employing such major changes which would force you to replay it several times. And if the game is as long as I'm predicting, that will be a long playthrough. And I thought Skyward Sword was extremely long, counting all the obtainables for 100%.

TourianTourist said...

@Eduardo Jencarelli:
Uhm, you could have just checked the article that I've linked above about the Oracle houses. :-D I've basically said the same thing there many years ago, it even got cited by ZeldaWiki!