downfall duo

designs by: jojo56830/linked universe

Chapter 4 - part 2 from my comic Zelda the sacred realm

Time, Link and Sky must escape the monstrous specter... meanwhile someone observes the scene

Thank you always for your support, I hope you like the new update!

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Enjoy girls, Revali with glasses 🐧💖

A quick trip to Lurelin Village

I’m a day late but happy birthday skyward sword!

Just getting this idea out there so that maybe I'll actually finish writing it one day, but -

I've been on a Legend of Zelda kick recently. Currently replaying BOTW. Never played AOC but I've watched gameplay and all the cutscenes so I know what happens. Planning to play that and TOTK again soon. But I've got this idea cooking in my head.

Theres a post that talks about "what if you could find the Divine Beasts in the Depths", and another funny post that was just "what if Teba was the sage of Wind and not Tulin?" And I remembered when BOTW had just come out, and then AOC after, and people were speculating about the characters, like Teba, being the New Champions and getting to bond to the Divine Beasts.

That didn't happen in canon, but. Hear me out. What if even just one of the Divine Beasts bonded with a New Champion... like say, the one who doesn't become a Sage?

Teba, Sidon, Riju, and Yunobo return from their adventure in the past/alternate timeline/whatever, having saved those Champions and that Hyrule from destruction. Their own timeline is still the same, but they continue on as they do in canon.

Except they all meet up shortly after returning home, and one of them (Sidon or Riju maybe) asks "hey did anyone else try going to the Divine Beasts only to get rejected" and while the rest are like "yup wonder what that's about, sad" Teba is like "no wtf are you all talking about I was settling back in with my wife and kid."

But something about it sticks with Teba. He goes home, looks up at Vah Medoh, and thinks, 'it probably won't work but I may as well try just to confirm.'

...Vah Medoh accepts him as its new pilot.

I'm unsure as to whether or not Revali's spirit will still be there for a quick hello - but if he is, he'd be like "whomst?!" And Teba would be like "if you were still alive I'd definitely adopt you because thanks to some time travel shenanigans i know that you desperately needed a parental figure in your life".

Mostly everything else proceeds as is canon up to the start of TOTK - except for the other Divine Beasts continuing to chill at their resting places, because upon hearing about Teba successfully bonding with Medoh, the others want to keep trying.

But, for whatever reason, Hylia decided that you cannot be both a Sage and a Divine Beast pilot, so the Beasts acknowledge them but never quite accept them as their pilots.

Then, TOTK. Then the chasms. Then, the other 3 Divine Beasts taking a plunge into the Depths.

Teba freaks out a little bit, but Medoh is circling Rito Village and is fine, except now there's these random floating islands but also a fuckass blizzard that's making it almost impossible to keep everyone fed, and Teba's just been saddled with Elder status so he's super in charge and Tulin is in a bit of a "I can do anything let me prove it let's go" phase and is trying to convince Teba to use Vah Medoh to fly up and stop the blizzard, but Teba is way too busy trying to keep the village from falling apart to go right now -

Then Link shows up, and Tulin runs off, and Link follows him, and the two go up and find the Stormwind Ark and fight Colgera and as the magical blizzard finally ends, Teba is just like "what the fuck".

Tulin tells him he's become a Sage, and isn't that cool dad?! And Teba is like "you're 12 and you're going to help fight a demon king?!?! Wtf?!"

But then at some point, Tulin (who knows the other Sages from that time he was in AOC, and meeting them a few times with his dad after) one day looks up from his breakfast and says "oh hey Sidon just became the Sage of Water! I saw it through my connection with Link!" And that's when it clicks into place for Teba why the Beasts never quite accepted the other "New Champions" - because they were destined for something else.

But Vah Medoh is still here. And it's pissed that it's fellow Beasts are gone and it also wants to blast Ganondorf in the face.

Unfortunately, Teba can't let it blast the castle when Link and co go to confront the Zelda illusion, because Tulin is there, Link is there, Sidon and Riju and Yunobo are there, and it's not the real demon king yet anyway.

Teba is grumpy about it, about letting Tulin go off and risk his life when he's a child and Teba is an adult, but then a huge dark dragon explodes out from the chasm below the castle and Vah Medoh is all too happy to fire upon it, knowing it's Ganondorf and wanting some sweet revenge of its own.

Teba's just surprised he can see the dark dragon, it's huge but he'd heard tales of only the young, or those chosen by thr goddesses, could see dragons. Maybe it's because of Vah Medoh that he can see this one, and the little light dragon that comes in and - hey is that Link?!

Maybe it ends with Teba going down to the Depths with Link to visit the other Divine Beasts, and suggesting that the locations stay known so that future generations may try to awaken them. They don't really need the Beasts anymore since both Calamity Ganon and Ganondorf have been defeated, but Medoh doesn't want to turn off and is happy just chilling at Rito Village with Teba. The end.

I have like 2.5k of this already written, I just wanted to use this post to write more of the ideas for the fic structure before I go to bed lol. And this idea probably doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense canon-wise, but it doesn't need to because the only reason this exists is because i love Teba and wish he'd gotten more screntime (or at least some spoken dialogue in the cutscenes!) in TOTK.

Someone mentioned that Wild's colour palette matches up with the aro/ace flag extremely well.

Hello!! I'm back for: more whining about TotK Quest Design Philosophy

I can't reblog a really great post I just saw for some reason (tumblrrrr *shakes my fist*), but hmmmm yeah not only do I completely agree, but I think I might expand on why I feel so much annoyance towards TotK's quest design philosophy at some point, because it does extend past the fundamentally broken setup of trying to punch a pseudo-mystery game on top of BotW's bones, where the core objective was always explicit and centered and stapled the entire world together; or the convoluted and inefficient way it tells its story through the Tears, the somehow single linear exploration-driven quest in the entire game.

Basically: I'm talking about the pointless back-and-forths. There were a lot of them, a lot that acted against the open world philosophy, and almost none of them ever recontextualized the environment through neither gameplay abilities nor worldbuilding nor character work.

I'll take two examples: the initial run to Hyrule Castle (before you get your paraglider), and then the billion back-and-forths in the Zora questline.

I think?? the goal of that initial quest to Hyrule Castle is to familiarize you with the landmark, introduce the notion that weapons rot, tell you about the gloom pits, and also tell you that Zelda sightings are a thing? But to force any of these ideas on you before giving you a paraglider is, in my opinion, pretty unnecessary. I think the reason it happens in that order is to prevent Link from simply pummeling down to the gloom pit under Hyrule Castle and fight Ganondorf immediately while still introducing ideas surrounding the location; but genuinely, the Zelda sighting makes the next events even more confusing? Why wouldn't you focus all your priorities in reaching the castle if you just saw her there? Why lose time investigating anything else? Genuinely: what is stopping you from getting your paraglider and immediately getting yourself back there, plunging into the depths to try and get to the literal bottom of this? (beyond player literacy assuming this is where the final boss would be, and so not to immediately spoil yourself --which, in an open world game, you should never be able to spoil yourself by engaging with the mechanics normally, and if you can that's a genuine failure of design)

I think, personally, that you should not have been pointed to go there at all. That anything it brings to the table, you could have learned more organically by investigating yourself, or by exploring in that direction on your own accord --or, maybe you think Zelda is up there in the castle, and then the region objectives become explicitely about helping you reaching that castle (maybe by building up troops to help you in a big assault, or through the Sages granting you abilities to move past level-design oriented hurdles in your way, etc). Either way: no need to actually make you walk the distance and back, because the tediousness doesn't teach you anything you haven't already learned about traversal in the (extremely long, btw, needlessly so I would say) tutorial area.

But to take another example, I'll nitpick at a very specific moment in the Zora Questline, that is honestly full of these back-and-forth paddings that recontextualize absolutely nothing and teach you nothing you didn't already know. The most egregious example, in my opinion, is the moment where you are trying to find the king, and you have to learn by listening in to the zora children who do not let you listening in.

So okay. I think Zelda is great when it does whimsy, and children doing children things guiding you is a staple of the series, and a great one at that. But here? It does not work for me on any level. Any tension that could arise from the situation flattens because nobody seems to care enough about their king disappearing in the middle of a major ecological crisis, except for children who are conveniently dumb enough not to graps the severity of the situation, but not stressed out enough that it could be construed as a way for them to cope about it and make anything feel more serious or pressing. It feels like a completely arbitrary blocker that isn't informed by the state of the world, doesn't do anything interesting gameplay-wise with this idea, doesn't build up the mood, and genuinely feels like busywork for its own sake.

This is especially tragic when the inherent concept of "the zora king has been wounded by what most zoras would believe to be Zelda and is hiding from his own people so the two factions do not go to war over it" has such tension and interest and spark that the game absolutely refuse to explore --instead having you collect carved stones who do not tell you anything new, splatter water in a floating island, thrud through mud who feel more like an inconvenience than a threat or, hey, listen to children playing about their missing king less than a couple of years after being freed from Calamity Ganon's menace. It feels like level designers/system designers having vague technical systems that are hard-coded in the game now, and we need to put them to use even if it's not that interesting, not that fun or not that compelling. It's the sort of attitude that a lot of western RPGs get eviscerated for; but here, for some reason, it's just a case of "gameplay before story", instead of, quite simply, a case of poorly thought-out gameplay.

Not every quest in the game is like this! I think the tone worked much better in the sidequests overall, that are self-contained and disconnected from the extremely messy main storyline, and so can tell a compelling little tale from start to finish without the budget to make you waddle in a puddle of nothing for hours at a time. It's the only place where you actually get character arcs that are allowed to feel anything that isn't a variation on "very determined" or "curious about the zonai/ruins", and where you get to feel life as it tries to blossom back into a new tomorrow for Hyrule.

But if I'm this harsh about the main storyline, it really is because I find it hard to accept that we do not criticize a structure that is at times so half-assed that you can almost taste employees' burnout seeping through the cracks --the lack of thematic ambition and self-reflection and ingeniosity outside of system design and, arguably at times, level design-- simply because it's Hyrule and we're happy to be there.

There's something in the industry that is called the "wow effect", which is their way to say "cool" without saying "cool". It's basically the money shots, but for games: it's what makes you go "ohhhh" when you play. And it's great! The ascension to the top of the Ark was one of them --breathtaking, just an absolute high point of systems working together to weave an epic tale. You plummeting from the skies to the absolute depths of hell is another one; most of the dungeons rely on that factor to keep your attention; the entire Zelda is a dragon storyline is nothing but "wow effect" (and yeah, the moment where you do remove the Master Sword did give me shivers, I'll admit to this willingly) and so is Ganondorf's presence and presentation in the game --he's here to be cool, non-specifically mean, hateable in a non-threatening way and to give us a good sexy time, do not think about it too hard. What bothers me is that TotK's world has basically nothing to offer but "wow effect"; that if you bother to dig at anything it presents you for more than a second, everything crumbles into incoherence --not only in story, but in mood, in themes, in identity. This is a wonderfully fun game with absolutely nothing to say, relying on the cultural osmosis and aura of excellency surrounding Zelda to pass itself off as meatier than it really is. This is what I say when I criticize it as self-referential to a fault; half of the story makes no sense if this is your first Zelda game, and what little of that world there is tends to be deeply unconcerned and uncurious about itself.

And no, Breath of the Wild wasn't like this. Breath of the Wild was deeply curious about itself; the entire game was built off curiosity and discovery, experimentation and challenge (and I say this while fully admitting I had more fun with the loop of TotK, which I found more forgiving overall). The traversal in Tears of the Kingdom is centered around: how do I skip those large expanses of land in the most efficient and fun way possible. How do I automate these fights. How do I find resources to automate both traversal and fights better. It's a game that asks questions (who are the zonais, who is Rauru and what is his deal, what is the Imprisoning War about, where is Zelda), and then kind of doesn't really care about the answers (yeah the zonais are like... guys, they did a cool kingdom, Rauru used to run it, the Imprisoning War is literally whatever all you have to care about is who to feel sad for and who to kill about it and you don't get a choice and certainly cannot feel any ambiguous feelings about any of that, and Zelda is a dragon but we will never expand on how it felt for her to make such a drastic and violent choice and also nobody cares that's a plot point you could *remove* from the game without changing the golden path at all).

I'm so aggravated by the argument "in Zelda, it's gameplay before story" because gameplay is story. That's the literal point of my work as a narrative designer: trying to breach the impossibly large gap between what the game designers want to do, and what the writers are thinking the game will be about (it's never the same game). And in TotK, the game systems are all about automation and fusion. It's about practicality and efficiency. It's also about disconnecting stuff from their original purpose as you optimize yourself out of danger, fear, or curiosity --except for the way you can become even more efficient. And sure, BotW was about this too; but you were rewarded because you had explored the world in the first place, experimented enough, put yourself in danger, went to find out the story of who you used to be and why you should care about Hyrule. I'm not here to argue BotW was a well-written game; I think it was pretty tropey at large to be honest, safe for a couple of moments of brilliance, but it had a coherent design vision that rewarded your curiosity while never getting in the way of the clarity of your objective. There is a convolutedness to TotK that, to me, reveals some extremely deep-seated issues with the direction the series is heading towards; one that, at its core, cares more about looking the part of a Zelda game than having any deeper conversation about what a Zelda game should be.

Don't you see? What's in your reflection?

I love there two sm

Ravio would try to make business with Hyrule to rent his items, bc yeah magic special items are very cool and the people like the cool things

Decided to take my recent musings and do something with them. Turned out far more bombastic than the initial subtle nod I intended... Ahh, standard fare ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[ soppy rambling beneath the cut ]

Been feeling very nostalgic lately for my pre- and early teens; that'd been when I'd first started getting into Zelda content online. Binge-watching theories and top-tens and peoples' thinkpieces on whatever their favourite (or least favourite) game was.

One of my favourite vids to revisit was a Halloween special rabbidluigi did with some other guy, compiling what they thought were the top 25 creepiest things in Zelda. It's from 2012, so it's rough, to say the least, but it also feels like home.

Skyward Sword was the first Zelda game I ever had, but Twilight Princess was the first game I ever played-- Even if it was a bare scrape into the prologue. Fitting that I draw this guy.

Can I have some Realm? he's the cutest and sweetest boy in the world!!

Here's Link/Realm for you! Right now he is relaxing with his device, in the warmth of the sun's rays surrounded by nature

He knows he will soon have to return to Frozen Death Mountain 😂

Thank you for your request! 💖

What if 🥺 what if they're both princes/ess of their respective kingdoms and all these formal council meetings are unbearably boring and Ganon whispers jokes so bad that Zelda can't help it but snicker? And everything is good and happy and somewhere in the future both notice a short little royal guard who gets so flustered by two royals chasing him for some reason.

(Click for better quality! And to see the gold accents hehe)

Give me a 🔁 if you 💟 what you see!

A sneak peak. More to come soon (?)

The Legend of Zelda has been around for 38 years. It includes some of the most acclaimed games of all time.

And yet, the first Zelda from 1986 is still my favourite, and still the one I revisit the most.

Here you'll find a video explaining why. Please enjoy!

With artfight coming up next month, I have quite a few smaller doodles to do to pretty up some profiles for the new season 🔥 I love preparing early, it takes my mind off doing it later!

(Our Artfight is Nebulapaws , in case anyone would like to check it out!)