Trivia / The Legend of Zelda

Works with their own Trivia pages:

• The Legend of Zelda
• Zelda II: The Adventure of Link
• A Link to the Past
• Link's Awakening
• Ocarina of Time
• Majora's Mask
• Oracle Games
• The Wind Waker
• Four Swords
• Four Swords Adventures
• The Minish Cap
• Twilight Princess
• Phantom Hourglass
• Spirit Tracks
• Skyward Sword
• A Link Between Worlds
• Tri Force Heroes
• Breath of the Wild
• Tears of the Kingdom
• The Legend of Zelda animated series

---

Trivia for the franchise in general:

• Link's name and appearance:
  • It was revealed in an interview Miyamoto gave to a French website that Link's appearance was, like Mario before him, influenced by the NES's graphical limitations. Miyamoto wanted Link to be easily recognizable, and able to visibly use his sword and shield. The weapons were thus made big and easily visible, and Link was given his trademark pointy hat and long ears so that he could easily be distinguished from his equipment despite the sprite's small size. The pointy hat and long ears, in turn, reminded Miyamoto and his team of elves, most notably Disney's Peter Pan, hence the decision to color Link's outfit green and make his design more elf-like.
  • From the same interview, it was also revealed that Link's name came from an early idea for the series: the Triforce was meant to be a bunch of electronic chips that the hero would collect by traveling between the future and the past. The hero was named "Link" to symbolize the fact that he was the Link between the time periods. Even though the series ended up taking on a totally different approach, the name "Link" stuck ever since.
  • His name's also doubly appropriate in a Bilingual Bonus sense: "Links" is German for "left". In most games that don't have motion controls, he's left-handed, plus there's also the "Four Swords" games where he splits into multiple Links.

Tropes for the franchise in general:

• Adaptation Sequence: Video games —> The Legend of Zelda cartoon —> Comic
• Cash-Cow Franchise: One of Nintendo's Big Three, along with Super Mario Bros. and Pokémon.
• Cross-Dressing Voices: Link is voiced by a woman whenever he's under 12 years old. In Ocarina of Time, it was Fujiko Takimoto. This continued until The Wind Waker, when she was replaced by Sachi Matsumoto, whose lines were reused in most subsequent games. Sachi passed on the baton to Yūki Kodaira in Spirit Tracks, who is slightly more pleasant to listen to most time, but her (slightly too high-pitched) voice can get annoying when Link takes a lot of damage in a short-time span. In a Real Life case of Meaningful Name, Yūki is Japanese for "Courage", the attribute most commonly associated with Link. In A Link Between Worlds and the Link's Awakening remake, he's voiced by Mitsuki Saiga, despite appearing a bit older in the artwork. Adult Link is always voiced by males. Of course, "voiced" is a bit of a stretch, since Link doesn't actually talk beyond a few grunts and "Come on!"
• Dummied Out: A portion of the fan base loves to document unused assets found in the games. As it stands, all games to date have some confirmed unused content, from the first game to the most recent.
• Flip-Flop of God: Demise describes the future Ganon as the incarnation of his hatred, but other sources like Hyrule Historia and Hyrule Warriors describe him as the reincarnation of Demise himself.
• Killer App: It's practically guaranteed that a home console Zelda release will coincide with a massive spike in Nintendo console sales, with two entries in the series even serving as cross-gen launch titles.
• Market-Based Title: Originally, The Legend of Zelda had the tagline The Hyrule Fantasy in Japan. In Western releases, it only showed up within the "Tips & Tactics" guide and the back of the Zelda II: The Adventure of Link box ("The Hyrule fantasy continues..."), but it was otherwise dropped for future releases.
• No Export for You:
  • Several Zelda manga have yet to be released outside of Japan.
  • Tetra's Trackers from the Japanese version of Four Swords Adventures.
  • The Satellaview games for the Super Famicom: the first being a remake of Zelda 1 (with different dungeon layouts), and the second being a Timed Mission in the A Link to the Past engine, where your hero (not Link, who is currently stuck on Koholint Island) must collect the eight stone tablets to seal Ganon again, after his seal weakened.
  • The three Tingle Spin-Off games: the first one, Freshly-Picked Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland, was released only in Japan and Europe; the US version was cancelled under popular demand from an online NoA poll. It has greed as a game mechanic. The latter two, only released in Japan, are a Balloon Fight clone, and Ripened Tingle's Balloon Trip of Love, a sequel to the first game but with Dating Sim elements, of all things.
• Promoted Fanboy: Eiji Aonuma, the series' current producer and de facto figurehead, credits The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past as sparking his interest in game design as a whole. After presenting his own Marvelous: Another Treasure Island to Shigeru Miyamoto, he decided to hand directorial duties of the series to Aonuma, though he wouldn't be head director until Majora's Mask.
• What Could Have Been: Has its own page HERE.

The live-action movie:

• International Coproduction: The film is being co-produced by the Japanese Nintendo and the American Sony Pictures.^note The studio is owned by the Japanese Sony, but Sony Pictures/Columbia Pictures was founded in the US and continues to primarily operate in the country.
• Saved from Development Hell: According to Shigeru Miyamoto in the initial press release, a Zelda movie had been in the works since 2013. While there have been attempts to make the film a reality, it wasn't until Sony Pictures picked up the rights in 2023 that it would become a reality.
• Self-Adaptation: Much like The Super Mario Bros. Movie prior, Nintendo is directly involved with the film's production, with the press release confirming that Shigeru Miyamoto will be a producer for the film alongside Avi Arad.
• What Could Have Been: This isn't the first time a Legend of Zelda adaptation had been attempted.
  • Imagi Studios, prior to their closing, showed a short pitch to Nintendo to produce an animated film based on Zelda in 2007. Obviously, the pitch did not succeed.
  • Nintendo and Netflix were in early talks for a Legend of Zelda TV series in 2015, but the project was abandoned when this information was leaked by a Netflix employee before anything was finalized.

---