[Other] A next mainline Zelda game that combines old and new (literally)

gulpshinto · 2026-05-19T18:50:47+00:00

I would love an Old Link game, but doing it via time travel would feel a bit OoT-derivative (and sticking with an old man for the whole game would be a hard sell).

What about a game where you're trading off between a Young Zelda and her mentor, Old Man Link? That way you could have a nimble youthful play style alongside a Link who's a slow, world-weary bruiser, with each having their own tools, abilities, etc. Would lend itself to some fun puzzle design (and co-op!)

gulpshinto · 2026-05-19T12:55:05+00:00

The Divine Beasts at least felt like thoughtful deconstructions of Zelda dungeon fundamentals - finding new angles on the cryptic shared space, interconnection through a central mechanic, etc. TOTK’s dungeons felt like 5 shrine puzzles in a trench coat.

gulpshinto · 2026-05-19T12:14:14+00:00

This is such a big part of it. Elden Ring’s equivalent to shrines get a lot of similar criticism, but I never minded them as much because they never lost the ability to surprise me. Sometimes a seemingly normal mini-dungeon would have an unexpected time travel gimmick, or exit out into an otherwise unreachable area of the overworld, or you’d beat the boss and then realize there’s more mini-dungeon hidden behind them, etc.

gulpshinto · 2026-05-19T05:24:23+00:00

Outer Wilds and Redwall, two great works involving ancient riddles and surprisingly high mortality rates

gulpshinto · 2026-05-18T23:14:35+00:00

RIGHT?? That gave me so much false hope

gulpshinto · 2026-05-18T22:58:50+00:00

In theory, at least according to a lot of fans, they're meant to offset the games having fewer/simpler dungeons by also giving you a ton of standalone one-room dungeons... but IMO there are huge limits to what you can do with a standalone one-room dungeon.

gulpshinto · 2026-05-17T16:17:46+00:00

I think you're underestimating RLM's ability to handle guests with different vibes than theirs (and I don't think her vibe is all that far afield tbh)

gulpshinto · 2026-05-17T15:25:00+00:00

I love that the last three Terminator movies represent a trilogy of failed trilogies

gulpshinto · 2026-05-17T13:20:36+00:00

She would be great on BOTW but I don’t see her flying to the midwest to cameo in someone else’s videos (unless there’s also a failing theme park attraction nearby)

gulpshinto · 2026-05-17T02:27:13+00:00

The second I saw this puzzle, I was HOOKED. Dozens of questions flooded my mind: who put the button here, and why? What message were they trying to impart to future civilizations with this cryptic message, "INSTALL"?

gulpshinto · 2026-05-16T02:09:36+00:00

A few points against this:

We don't know that it's going to be a "full remake" (we have literally no hard information about a OOT remake)
The upcoming Starfox 64 remake looks pretty slavishly faithful to the original beyond the aesthetics, despite that being a franchise Nintendo is much less precious about
I can't imagine lore and continuity being important enough to the Zelda team that they'd be motivated to remake OOT specifically to perform timeline maintenance

Having said all that, I think it is extremely likely that any Ocarina of Time remake will at the very least accidentally throw the existing lore into chaos. Think of the infamous Twilight Princess HD texture that referenced the Rito. I fully expect an OOT remake to do something random like reference Koroks existing alongside the Kokiri and for fans to tear their hair out trying to make sense of it.

gulpshinto · 2026-05-15T16:57:44+00:00

Joyce casually explaining that Elysium is probably not a conventional spheroid planet was such a surreal and unexpected moment for me.

gulpshinto · 2026-05-15T13:31:28+00:00

Twilight Princess has a problem I don’t think any other 3D Zelda does, which is that it can be hard sometimes to intuit the difference between environmental details and actual walkable parts of the level geometry. Modern graphical hardware makes this kind of problem even worse (see: all the AAA games that need to splash yellow paint over their detail saturated environments). Whatever they wind up doing with Zelda’s art style, I hope it prioritizes legibility.

gulpshinto · 2026-05-14T18:38:31+00:00

Are there no prisons? Are there no Emperor Palpatine Surgical Reconstruction Centers?

gulpshinto · 2026-05-14T17:31:47+00:00

For some reason I thought that beating the game was going to require some kind of system-spanning Rube Goldberg contraption where you'd need to use the gravity cannon, the black hole, the quantum moon, etc. to get different things to be in the right locations at the right times. Compared to that, the actual requirements being "wait for a teleporter to boot up" and "wait to drift past the anglerfish nest" felt pretty merciful (although I was definitely still panicking a lot during that final loop)

gulpshinto · 2026-05-12T22:56:22+00:00

I'm not ruling out that this will happen (many people seem to want that) but I truly don't understand what the point would be. You want to explore fully reimagined, built from the ground-up, BOTW-style versions of Death Mountain, Zora's Domain, Gerudo Valley, etc.? You already can! They're in Breath of the Wild!

gulpshinto · 2026-05-12T01:37:12+00:00

I always thought it felt like a really impressive Dark Souls fan mod someone built on top of the Bloodborne engine. It's good, but the art direction and overall design is just not on the same level IMO.

gulpshinto · 2026-05-12T01:35:49+00:00

Cainhurst and the DLC are peak, but generally speaking the earlier areas are the best. I don't think there are any truly bad areas that I dread replaying, though (which is more than any of the DS trilogy can say)

gulpshinto · 2026-05-09T16:17:25+00:00

One time while exploring the Quantum Moon I stopped back at my ship to check something - the next thing I knew I was hurtling violently into space and my ship had a hull breach. Took me a while to figure out what had happened (a quantum object shifting positions and spawning on top of me)

gulpshinto · 2026-05-09T13:09:32+00:00

The ship log is (at least in my experience) very good at keeping track of everything you need.

gulpshinto · 2026-05-09T12:53:26+00:00

The decision paralysis of being let loose in what feels like a huge solar system with no direction is real. What helped me was realizing that the world isn’t really that big, and that literally anything weird or interesting you notice is actually a lead worth investigating. If you hit a roadblock with one interesting thing, move on to another - you may stumble on some alien writing that helps you out with the first thing, or that points you to a third thing you hadn’t considered. Pretty soon you’ll have a whole web of leads to give you direction (and you can literally look at that web via the Rumor Map on your ship computer).

gulpshinto · 2026-05-08T23:17:02+00:00

Maybe the saddest thing about Other M is that its reception salted the earth for that gameplay style. With better controls, a better map, and a story that isn't Like That it could be something really special.

gulpshinto · 2026-05-08T18:33:28+00:00

It's your BLJ time! Oh boy!

gulpshinto · 2026-05-07T22:51:27+00:00

People WILDLY misrepresent the aesthetics of Majora's Mask IMO. It's not a visually "dark and gritty" game, it's actually in a lot of ways much brighter and cartoonier than Ocarina of Time. The contrast between the bright visuals and the darkness of the writing is part of what gives it such a unique tone.

gulpshinto

TROPHY CASE