Rynling R&D

Nintendo recently released The Minish Cap on the GBA virtual console included with its Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack subscription service. This service costs $50 a year, and you have to pay the annual fee all at once. As a reminder: It is always morally correct to pirate Nintendo games.

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In the end, The Minish Cap is still a great 8/10 game that’s very much worth playing, but it’s on an entirely different level than A Link Between Worlds, which perfected the top-down 2D Zelda formula while also featuring excellent writing and interesting design work. Given its limitations, I think The Minish Cap will probably appeal most strongly to 16-bit retro game fans, as well as its actual target demographic of ten-year-old kids.

"I don't want to see grown-ass adults I respect getting their panties in a wad over asinine clickbait online discourse," I say sincerely and with good intentions as I attempt to explain to myself why professional boundaries are important on social media.

Meanwhile, Satan smiles as he presses the button to launch the latest Nintendo Direct, in which it is revealed that the sequel to Breath of the Wild has cast an Anglo-American man as the voice actor for Ganondorf.

Hyrule Apocrypha
• https://zeldaficzine.carrd.co/
• https://twitter.com/zeldaficzine
• https://zeldaficzine.tumblr.com/

Hyrule Apocrypha is a fic-centric zine focusing on these lost tales of Hyrule. From forgotten mythology to unexplored history, this zine intends to expand on canon lore and fill in the blanks with interpretations of how certain events may have come to pass. Writers and artists will collaborate in the storytelling process, culminating in an anthology that looks, reads, and feels like a real history book in the Zelda universe.

I was thinking about sitting out this zine in order to focus on original work, but the New Zelda Content™ released yesterday got me all fired up. Also, the zine's social media seems very organized and professional, and the mods are good people. Contributor applications haven't opened yet, but here are my pitches...

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Wind Waker's WEIRD Octorok Secret?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxho3zXUEpI

I wanted to do a Zelda-themed botanical photo study, and I found this video while searching for "Octorok pot." There's nothing particularly interesting here if you haven't played The Wind Waker, but I think this strange little secret is neat. For the record, I don't actually care enough about Legend of Zelda lore to keep up with YouTube videos, but Zeltik is always entertaining.

Can We Talk About Pokémon Legends: Arceus' Shockingly Dark Tone For A Second
https://kotaku.com/pokemon-legends-arceus-alpha-pokemon-tone-nintendo-swit-1848478468

Another lady, meanwhile, says she’s heard that there’s no seasoning quite like starvation, and while she says it with a chuckle, I don’t think she’s 100% joking. Certainly not when your private quarters happen to have a sign near your bed to the effect of, “life is hardship but you have to suck it up.” And sure enough, there’s a different old lady who, upon meeting, immediately scolds you and says that the town won’t be feeding any freeloading strangers like you. Lady, I just fell out of the rift in the sky and I have no idea what’s going on but Christ, OK.

I've been reading a bunch of interesting essays about this game, but I still don't think it's for me, at least not right now. I might come back to it in March or April, when I'll hopefully have more time to spend with video games that don't immediately deliver the sort of narrative-driven experience I'm craving at the moment.

how is botw so pretty? the mute desaturated colours make me able to play for long periods without my eyes dying. also it looks very sentimental and emotional for some reason. i like complimenting that game.

https://twitter.com/hanabelink/status/1487775328210911235

You know what? That's fair.

Things I like about Generation IV:

- The graphics and monster designs are very cute.

- The music is distinctive and catchy.

- This generation introduces Budew and Pachirisu, two absolute baby-faced murder machines.

- The Sinnoh Champion Cynthia, who offers one of the only legitimately difficult matches in the series.

- Although Ruby and Sapphire take steps in this direction, Diamond and Pearl are the first pair of games to lean into the specificity of their setting. Because the games are set in Hokkaido, you get things like coal processing plants and museums, shiny new wind turbines next to abandoned coal-burning power plants, wildflower fields and a robust system of berry crossbreeding, and nods to the co-existence of newer Yamato belief systems with older Ainu mythologies. I think this is the first generation where you really get a sense of the games’ setting and worldbuilding, and it’s lovely.

- Flint and Volkner are husbands.

- Did I mention how much I love Cynthia.

I’ve spent the past two months replaying Pokémon games. What I enjoy about these games is that:

(a) They are very stupid,
(b) they are very cute, and
(c) they are absurdly fun to play.

I’m currently playing Pokémon Moon, which is about teenage lesbians in Hawai’i, and Pokémon Shield, which is about British football hooligans.

The metastories of these games are actually quite interesting. Pokémon Sun and Moon is about how the activities of scientists intent on “preserving natural heritage” without consulting native Hawai’ians are fucking up the environment, while Pokémon Sword and Shield offers a critical commentary on the extreme corporatization of sport. Sword and Shield also tackles issues of race and class from a British perspective and takes a nuanced approach that doesn’t designate heroes and villains or offer clear solutions.

I sort of want to write about this, but I know the response is going to be “why are you overanalyzing these cute and stupid games.” Which is fair.

So apparently Shigeru Miyamoto is in Hollywood making an animated Super Mario movie, and they just announced who they cast as the voice actors.

I'm not sure that it's possible to sexualize Jack Black, but I guess... I'm up for the challenge?

What I actually think is that, if I'm going to write stories about Bowser and Luigi, I might want to go ahead and do it now. I've got one already drafted called "Striking the Set" about Luigi cleaning up Bowser's castle and being told he's appreciated. I think that one might be good to post so as to test the waters.

I also think, if I can write quickly enough, that I want to post another Legend of Zelda horror story for Halloween. It will be called "Flowerblight Ganon," and it will be about Magda in Breath of the Wild. The tagline will be something cheesy like, "In the world of flowers, beauty takes many forms... as does malice!" Anyway, dead bodies used as fertilizer is one of my favorite tropes, so this should be fun.

By the way, I decided to write my first Halloween story for this year in two versions: The original version, which is Legend of Zelda fanfic, and a version with the serial numbers filed off, which I submitted to a few magazines. I did this just to see what would happen, and lo and behold. The generic version was accepted for publication.

Still, my Super Mario stories continue to get a handful of kudos every day, while my Legend of Zelda stories get almost none. Idk, maybe it's time to step away from Zelda and get back into Bowser and Pokémon. I bet I could do it.

You can play Skyward Sword HD without motion controls, which is good. Unfortunately, the controls still aren’t great.

Specifically, in order to free-rotate the camera with the right joystick, you have to hold one of the shoulder buttons on the left Joy-Con. This means that you have to apply constant pressure to a relatively out-of-the-way button in order to navigate the world. The Joy-Cons aren’t large or unwieldy, but this still hurts my hand after about fifteen minutes.

Also, since the “target” button is the other left shoulder button, maneuvering can be difficult, especially if the camera is set to an awkward angle during an enemy encounter. To give an example, you have to go through a small cave early in the game that has slime monsters on the ground below eye level and bat monsters in the air above eye level. Unfortunately, you can’t adjust the camera to look at either of these enemies while you’re targeting them, so you just have to swing your sword wildly and hope that your strikes hit.

The reason you can’t use the right joystick to control the camera is because this is the button that controls your sword. In other words, you can’t just hit “B” to swing your sword; you have to make a slashing motion with the right joystick. This is not precise, and I generally have to go through a few attempts in which Link just sort of raises his sword in the appropriate direction before he actually swings it.

This is extremely frustrating, especially because Link isn’t wielding his sword in any way differently than he is in, say, Ocarina of Time or Breath of the Wild. There’s no reason that the variety of sword slashes can’t be assigned to the same intuitive control scheme as the rest of the Zelda series. Like, it doesn’t have to be this difficult or complicated.

If I remember correctly, there isn’t actually that much combat in the game, so I also don’t understand why “controlling the sword” is the default setting for the right joystick instead of “controlling the camera.”

Also, the text scrolls very slowly, and there’s no way to speed it up either in the “Settings” menu or by pressing a button to make all of it appear at once. And there’s a lot of text! The game doesn’t have many cutscenes, but every conversation sort of feels like a cutscene.

I want to love Skyward Sword so badly, but it’s not fun to play, especially for the first ten hours or so. Hopefully I’ll get used to the controls and start enjoying myself once I get past the slow start.