Quite a good breakdown by Laura Kate Dale of Nintendo’s handling of recent games featuring playable women characters from franchises usually headed up by men i.e. recent Peach game and upcoming Legend of Zelda game featuring the titular Zelda.
Featuring such Aonuma bangers as:
If we have Princess Zelda as the main character who fights, then what is Link going to do?
The triforce is made up of Princess Zelda, Ganon and Link. Princess Zelda is obviously female; if we made Link a female, we thought that would mess with the balance of the triforce - that’s why we decided not to do it.
We feel like what takes priority is this idea of gameplay. If it turns out that particular gameplay we’re trying to bring to fruition would be best served by having Zelda take that role, then it’s possible that that could be a direction we could take.
i.e. Zelda has featured exclusively MANLY gameplay up to this point btw
Prior to watching the video comment but as a they/them who had played every Zelda game, used to buy and sell retro games in the early 2010s and really knows the hell out of Nintendo and it’s fans, always make link androgynous and pick pronouns at the start. The character was literally designed for the player to project themselves onto hence the super on the nose name. I would add they should make link female for one game before settling on just assigning the pronouns to an androgynous link which barely requires any changes to the standard character model. And in the games link is a child, just give pronoun options, the character is like 8-12, don’t be weird about it gamers.
Yeah the idea of a female link is not that wild and definitely makes a lot of sense. The video brings it up as something the fans were half expecting instead of a princess zelda game because of some promo art that looked like it portrayed a more femme, but still androgynous link. Turns out, nope, nintendo says that’s just our main manly man link smh
Yeah, I remember that from early botw videos and I was kinda hyped to see a female Link