#beta game

Unused MM3d concept of Termina's ver of Ganondorf

(I just found that Sheik and Impa was also planned to be a fisherman in mm3d, Saria also appeared there. I'll try to draw them too)

Character in Progress: ! Edan !

Wind Waker 2 was first teased in March of 2004 during a Game Developers Conference entitled “The Evolution of a Franchise: The Legend of Zelda. Eiji Aonuma confirmed the sequel in a timeline picture showing “Wind Waker 2” is being set for a 2xxx release. IGN would report on this and mention several times that a 2004 release was possible for the game. Eiji Aonuma would mention during this conference that more information about the Wind Waker 2 would be revealed at the upcoming e3 event.  

E3 2004 would come, and a new trailer would be unveiled; however, it wasn’t a trailer for the Wind Waker 2, instead, it was for a more realistic Zelda game similar to Ocarina of Time.  The trailer seemed to fit the same tone of the Zelda Space World 2000 demo video which featured Link going one on one with Ganondorf in a sword battle. Fan reaction was electric to say the least as Miyamoto came out on stage carrying a replica of the Master Sword and Hylian Shield; however, where was the sea? Where was the King of Red Lions? Where was Toon Link? Well to put it simply, they were gone now.  

During a presentation during GDC, Aonuma would speak about what exactly happened to Wind Waker 2. Here’s an excerpt from that presentation “Let me backtrack a little. As I was busy working on the connectivity project, it wasn’t as though the Wind Waker 2 project that I spoke of earlier came to a halt. Not at all. As some of you know, at E3 2004, we unveiled the game that would become Twilight Princess, the realistic Zelda game, and we announced that it was developed by the team that had been developing Wind Waker 2. Actually, there was a reason that that decision was made at the time. At one point, I had heard that even Wind Waker, which had reached the million mark in sales, had become sluggish in North America, where the market was much healthier than in Japan. I asked NOA why this was. What I was told was that the toon-shading technique was, in fact, giving the impression that this Zelda was for a younger audience and that, for this reason, it alienated the upper teen audience that had represented the typical Zelda player. Having heard that, I began to worry about whether Wind Waker 2, which used a similar presentation, was something that would actually sell. In addition, because we knew how difficult it would be to create an innovative way of playing using existing GameCube hardware, we knew what a challenge it would be to develop something that would do well in the Japanese market, where gamer drift was happening.

That’s when I decided that if we didn’t have an effective and immediate solution, the only thing we could do was to give the healthy North American market the Zelda that they wanted. So, at the end of 2003, I went to Miyamoto and said, “I want to make a realistic Zelda." Miyamoto was skeptical at first. I was so focused on changing the look of the game as being the solution we were looking for without coming up with a breakthrough game idea, and he advised me that “If you really want to make a realistic Zelda, you should start by doing what you couldn’t in the Ocarina of Time. Make it so that Link can attack enemies while riding on his horse using the Wind Waker engine, and make your decision based on how that feels." This is something that went against everything that the staff had been working on and I expected to come as quite a shock to the team. Surprisingly, my entire staff was enthusiastic about this change, and the project on which progress had slowed was given a much-needed jumpstart.

Four months later, development had progressed to a point where Link could swing his sword in battle against enemies while riding on his horse in a realistic looking environment. When it was announced as a surprise trailer at the 2004 E3, it received a standing ovation by the media audience. This was a very exciting moment for us, but we were still very much in the early stages of converting the game into something more realistic. We knew that we had to create a Zelda game that would live up to expectations of fans in North America, and that if we didn’t, it could mean the end of the franchise. But I also trusted the ability of the team, which was able to bring the game so far in just four short months, and Miyamoto and I announced that this Zelda would be released in the fall of 2005.”

So, the project was canceled and was converted into Twilight Princess. Toon Link would continue his adventures on the Nintendo DS hardware and things would be at peace. However, it would be revealed many years later that a group of game developers was working on pitching a version of Wind Waker for the Gameboy Advance. David Soliani, developer of Mario+Rabbids Kingdom Battle, another Nintendo game using first-party characters revealed in a Twitter post back in 2017 revealed that back in 2003 he and a fellow colleague were close to getting a demo version of Wind Waker on Gameboy Advance by their manager. The colleague mentioned was Fabio Pagetti. This is what Soliani had to say about the project "Long time ago, I guess it was the 2003, me and Fabio Pagetti (the artist who made the pixel art below) almost convinced our managing director to let us produce a demo for a GBA version of Wind Waker. No luck that time, but it was running nicely. We were dreamers,"