Another year has passed and it's time to look back once more. 2017 was an important year for the Zelda franchise with the release of Breath of the Wild, a massive milestone for the series and by far the most extensive Zelda game yet. Chances are that many Zelda fans were still playing the game in 2018 and with that a pause for the franchise was to be expected.
Still, 2018 wasn't a year without anything of interest for Zelda fans. Already early this year the Definitive Edition of Hyrule Warriors was announced for the Nintendo Switch, bringing (almost) all the features of the Wii U and 3DS versions together in May, as well as some Breath of the Wild costumes for Link and Zelda. The game is still a nice diversion and certainly was a good source of entertainment for many Zelda fans in 2018, who already own a Nintendo Switch.
Otherwise Zelda fans in the West were mainly served reading material by Dark Horse, who published both Hyrule Encyclopedia and Creating a Champion this year. The first book went over the contents of all the Zelda games prior to Breath of the Wild, while the second book was entirely dedicated to the new Zelda game.
The big highlight in 2018, however, was probably Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Sadly, the Zelda series didn't get to see a new fighter in this installment (yet), but it was treated fairly nicely otherwise. They finally brought Young Link back and overhauled everyone but Toon Link with new designs and interesting moveset changes.
Every Zelda stage returned in Ultimate with enhanced visuals and the series got a new stage (which are rare this time) with the Great Plateau Tower. All Zelda items and Assist Trophies returned as well with the exception of Tingle, who returned as part of the Great Bay stage. The series also got lots of music, including an amazing remix of the Nintendo Switch Presentation Trailer, and many different Spirits from almost all the Zelda games (the exceptions being Zelda II - The Adventure of Link and Four Swords Adventures).
So, overall Super Smash Bros. Ultimate was still an interesting title for Zelda fans or any Nintendo fan for that matter and a major source of entertainment in 2018. While the game wasn't released before December 7th, ever since the game's announcement in April the speculation was a big part of the fun and spawned many posts online, like on this Blog. Speaking of...
2018 on Hyrule Blog
2018 was a dark year for this site, where since May it rested in private mode and couldn't be viewed by anyone except for its author - me. This was necessary to avoid any legal warnings caused by the GDPR. To be honest, this was probably blown out of proportion and it doesn't seem like many blogs got affected by warnings, but Google also wasn't really helpful with the matter and there still is a risk of losing lots of money for something that gets done as a hobby... And it's better to be safe than sorry.
But I'm still sorry that I had to shut down the site like this, because there have been quite a few interested readers, who keep asking about it. But I'm planning to make it public again eventually, so that hopefully one day someone will be reading the posts from 2018, including this one.
Despite all of this, the Blog has been going strong with a twelve post per month pacing. As you can see, every month of this year has exactly 12 posts for 144 posts in total in 2018. What are the odds? During the first months this was really just a coincidence, but then I realized that this was a nice pace, so I kept working towards the dozen posts on purpose. In some rare cases this caused me to create filler postings (like the Smash Bros. Zelda stages series) or withhold posts until a later date, but overall it came all together very naturally. I probably won't be sticking to this pace in 2019, however, because I don't want to artificially restrict myself, in case we're getting new Zelda games.
The biggest topic of this year was without a doubt Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, so many of the posts were about that game, speculating about its potential contents. This includes questions like "Are we getting Skull Kid?", where most of it can be answered with a "no" in hindsight, but it was still fun to think about the possibilities.
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