Sunday, April 1, 2018

Breath of the Wild & Super Mario Odyssey: Zelda x Mario Crossover DLC Concept

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey have quite a lot in common. Both were released in 2017 and both are two of the most successful games on the Nintendo Switch, driving the sales of the system. Both put a much bigger emphasis on exploration than their predecessors and both also let you dress the main character in many different outfits.

There are 107 different pieces of armor in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, where you can change Link's hat, shirt and trousers for different effects and abilities. Meanwhile Mario currently has 46 different hats and 47 different outfits to chose from, mainly for the looks, with more to come in future updates.

So, wouldn't it be a nice idea to have simultaneous updates for both games, where Link receives a Mario outfit and Mario receives Link's clothings? Let both our heroes swap their clothes! This could happen to celebrate the success of both titles.

References to a Link costumes in Super Mario Odyssey even had been discovered by dataminers already, as documented on Cutting Room Floor. These were the descriptions of both items:

Link Hat: A hat from a far-off land.

Link Suit: This outfit from another land comes complete with back accessories (sadly nonremovable).

However, as of version 1.2.0 the references to the Link costume were removed, while all the other references to upcoming outfits, like a Santa or a Zombie Mario, stayed in tact and even more references got added, like an 8-Bit Mario.

So, this might be an idea that Nintendo had, but which got scrapped in the meantime. It also doesn't look like Nintendo has any interest in updating Breath of the Wild ever again, which makes this even less likely.

Still, let's think about how this could have been implemented in Breath of the Wild. For the Xenoblade Chronicles 2 collaboration they had this neat little side quest, where treasure chests were falling from the sky at certain positions. But they probably should do something else to include a Mario outfit.

One thing that comes to mind are the many traveling merchants in the game, where they could bring a classic Zelda character back, who would be perfect for the job: Tarin.


With Tarin it's pretty obvious that he was originally a walking and talking Super Mario reference. He looks quite similar to Mario and he loves to eat mushrooms to a fault, where he got temporarily transformed into a raccoon. He was replaced by Talon in later Zelda games, who still has the resemblance and used Mario's sleeping pose in Ocarina of Time. He also wears a Bowser pendant as part of his outfit and gives you a Mushroom in Oracle of Seasons.

So, either Tarin or Talon would do fine, where the above artwork of Tarin fits the role of a merchant pretty well. He could sell various mushrooms from the game, like the Rushrooms or Stamella Shrooms, in addition to the Plumber armor set.

You would be able to purchase more than one and also dye it, where different colors could turn this into the outfits of different Mario characters. Green dye for Luigi, yellow dye for Wario and purple dye for Waluigi. The white dye could be used for the classic Fire Flower look. So, there would be many options to make this set entertaining.

The set itself could provide the "Climbing Jump Stamina Up" set bonus and maybe even let Link do funny sounds while jumping. It would be nothing out of the ordinary, so like most of the DLC armor pieces this would be just for the looks and the fun of it.

(As with any potential additions to the armor collection in Breath of the Wild this comes with the disclaimer that such an update should also expand the armor inventory by at least one page, so there's enough space to get all armor items in the game. Currently it's capped at 100.)

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