Friday, February 19, 2021

Skyward Sword Picross?

Skyward Sword logo with a Hylian Shield Picross art next to it

History seems to be repeating itself from five years ago, at least when it comes to the Zelda franchise. The situations in early 2016 and early 2021 are remarkably similar, where we're heading right into the next big anniversary for the series. The next big Zelda title is currently in development and we might see it in full action during this summer, where it's likely that the game won't be released before early 2022.

In the meantime there is a new Hyrule Warriors game to tide us over, which will be supported with DLC until the end of the year. And if that's not enough for you, there also will be the next HD remaster of the 3D Zelda game that is getting ten years old now. The release timings are of course somewhat different between now and five years ago, but the overall picture feels very similar.

However, there is one part of this picture that is still missing... 2016 had another Zelda spin-off in its pipeline, which went hand in hand with the new HD remaster: My Nintendo Picross – The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. It was a free title as a My Nintendo reward and is to this day probably the single best thing that ever came out of this service.

My Nintendo has been changing quite a bit lately, though. You can finally get physical rewards, like in the good old Club Nintendo days, but Nintendo wants you to pay for the shipping and you can only do so via credit cards, which is stupid for countries where the usage of credit cards is rather uncommon. The discounts for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U are gone, while the Gold Points are now primarily used as a cheap discount device in the Nintendo Switch eShop...

You can still get the Twilight Princess Picross for 1000 Platinum Points and I can only recommend you to do so, because it's a fun little puzzle game to pass some time. If you don't have a Nintendo 3DS, then we can only hope that Nintendo finally decides to provide something for the Nintendo Switch on that service. And what better start than My Nintendo Picross – The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword to offer some nice hours of filling up Fi, Ghirahim and Groose pixel arts?

It's even weird how they introduced the "My Nintendo Picross" brand just for the Twilight Princess version, but then completely dropped the idea of doing any other small Picross games like it. Well, of course it's not very profitable to make games completely for free, but in the least this would serve as a nice promotion for The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword HD.

Alternatively, they could do a whole "Zelda Picross" game for the 35th Anniversary that spans the entire series. But something like that probably wouldn't be for free, of course. And the focus that Twilight Princess got with its Picross title was actually very nice, where this could also work really well for Skyward Sword as well. Unintentionally suggestive wordings included.

"Master, there is a 99% chance that you need to fill this hole."

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