First Zelda Wii Rumors

It's interesting. This fake leak information from 2chan is more than two months old now, but no one noticed or cared about it, then suddenly someone decides to post it at IGN as big news and now it's all over the place, ZeldaUniverse, ZeldaInformer and probably every big Zelda site out there. There's no way around it now. Well, this is, what it says:

• The game will diverge from the established dungeon-field-dungeon gameplay style (confirmed by Aonuma)
• You can select whether you're right or left-handed, and Link will have the same handedness as you
• The basic mechanics and gameplay elements are done, and they're currently working on the story and developing characters. Among them are an innkeeper in the town where Link lives and her young son, who looks up to him
• [The girl] is not the master sword, and as of now there are no plans for Link to get the Master Sword in the game. Her name is Aderu (maybe Adelle), and she's not your typical companion like Ezlo or Midna, in that she's rarely there with you. What you see in the piece of concept/promotional art isn't her real face (this isn't elaborated on)
• Link's main weapon is a sword with different unlockable abilities, which Aderu communicates with you through
• Horseback combat is back, with a more intelligent Epona that is better at avoiding obstacles
• The character models for Link, Epona, and the Gorons have all been modified and touched up, but they're the only ones, suggesting no Zelda or Ganon (or entirely new models for them)
• This Link is the Hero of Time (presumably grown up after MM, but he didn't say)
• There is time travel (again, he didn't delve into it)
• The game does NOT take place in Hyrule

What's funny is, that the guy at IGN claims he found and translated it himself, while he just copied something from GameFAQs boards, which is more than a month old, look here. According to GameFAQs the post on 2chan itself was posted in early November, three weeks before Aonuma actually mentioned the change in the dungeon-field-dungeon formula, which makes the first point the most interesting one. Either this was a very good guess or Aonuma mentioned it somewhere else in Japan before IGN got to hear it.

But overall the whole thing sounds like it was written by some angry fanboy. The Hero of Time part especially, every second Zelda fans on internet boards whines, that he wants the Hero of Time back and wants to know what happened to Navi. But Nintendo never went back there, the Nintendo 64 era is over. And of course the girl can't ever be the Master Sword, it's unacceptable. Aonuma already said, that some of the speculation about the artwork was correct. Since the most common speculation was that the girl is the Mastersword or at least your sword, it doesn't make sense, that "Adelle" is now something entirely else and Link gets some fancy upgradeable sword. Then why doesn't he hold this sword on the artwork?

Also, the comments about the character models don't make any sense. Does he suggest, that they reuse the models from Twilight Princess and just modify them? I doubt that, especially after they wanted to push the graphics, because they were flashed by Monster Hunter Tri. After all they are designing the game from ground up for the Wii. And they talk about little details, where just Zelda fans normally complain about like Epona hitting obstacles or the left-handedness. But they don't talk about the important stuff. Like how exactly does the game course actually change? How do the MotionPlus controls play out? These are the interesting questions, but of course they aren't answered, because the author of this fake doesn't know the answer. It's a fan fiction and not a good one.

They want to give the information more credibility by saying, that leaks on 2ch were right about other games, too. But you have to know, that 2ch is full of fakes. For example there are many fake leaks for the popular mangas in Japan every week and you can only trust certain reliable sources. But we don't have any reliable sources when it comes to Nintendo games and especially Zelda, the probability that this is just some sort of fake is too high at the moment.

So, I'm very skeptical about this and I will dismiss this is a fake until some official information from Nintendo proves it to be right.