Evolution of Link

Recently I started playing the Legend of Zelda: Majoras Mask and started thinking about how the game has evolved throughout the years and how Link in particular has become more human and lifelike with every different iteration. If you start looking at the series from his first appearance as an 8-bit character you can see his face and legs but that is about it. As he grew into the N64 and graphics got better he started to take full form. In the Ocarina of Time and Majoras Mask you really get a sense of who Link is and what he is all about.

This shows Link as he was during the N64 days. You can see that he is very blocky and not entirely fleshed out. As the console generation changed nintendo went into another direction and made him more cartoony which did not fully suit Link, but worked for the game. But as Nintendo was moving from Gamecube to Wii they released a Zelda game that really showed Link to his full potential. The game showed Link as a full person and brought him to life showing his hair and a very detailed look at what Link should look like.

As the games keep evolving and graphics continue to improve Link will continue to look more and more human. We can only assume that a few years down the road and Link will look just like he is there in the room with us as a normal human being.

Majora's Mask

As many of you probably know, I'm a massive fan of Nintendo's Legend of Zelda series. This past Friday, Nintendo released a remastered version of the game for its mobile 3DS platform 15 years after the original was released. I've been playing it pretty much non-stop all week and while I've been going through it I was really interested in how, 15 years ago, the base game was created. For the time, this was a really complex game, not to mention having only been made start-to-finish in a year.

Majora's Mask was Nintendo's second game using 3D graphics and they did use a lot of the character models from Ocarina of Time in order to meet their one year deadline. The remaster has added a host of new features and they're just as impressive as the original game.

When people talk about 3D Graphics and Animation, and the evolution of those, video games are frequently overlooked. I definitely recommend at taking a look at the original game if you haven't before, and if you have--the 3DS version is a new improvement to an old classic.