Okay, youāre gonna love this one: Pitch a Zelda game to me. It can be anything. A fanfiction, a story concept, a list of new mechanics, some combinations of all of those things, anything. Just tell me what you think the next Zelda should be!
First of all, Iāve gotta apologize for taking a handful of days to get to this ask, but in my defense, I wanted to come up with something new - Iāve had plenty of ideas for original stories/games over the years (some bad, some mega bad, some much more fleshed out than others), but prattling off about one of those would have felt like cheating! Ā This new idea isnāt very detailed right now, and it is kind of built off of an older idea of mine (so, yāknow, still kind of cheating), but without further ado:
Does everyone remember the Book of Mudora?
The Book of Mudora is a tome of knowledge; it appears in A Link to the Past, where our chosen hero uses it to translate Hyruleās earliest written language, but it also appears much earlier than that -Ā in the hands of Zeldaās father, Gaepora, in Skyward Sword. Ā It is an ancient book that details Hyruleās history in its totality: its creation and its legends, its prophecies and its folklore, and it does so magically - as time passes in the world outside, as heroes rise and villains are felled over countless ages, that history and knowledge amends itself to the tome as if it had always been there.Ā It is a timeless encyclopedia containing all things that were and all things that will be, forever and after, in all timelines, ceaselessly, assuredly - and so, hereās my pitch:
Our hero, Link, is reunited with the Book of Mudora in yet another of his reincarnations.Ā Perhaps heās already saved the world once over, perhaps he isnāt even a hero this go around, perhaps heās not even a he in the first place - but in any case, this is a Link weāve never met before, and when he finds the Book of Mudora this time, itās different.Ā Because this time - he gets absorbed into its pages, and it is here where our story begins.
From here, the possibilities are near limitless; as a world inside of a book containing all of Hyruleās history from its beginning to its multiple endings, our Link could potentially do or see anything, be anywhere at any time - even inside of a game weāve already seen in the past.Ā He could witness the flooding of Hyrule - the birth of the Great Sea.Ā The Hyrulean Civil War.Ā The fall of the Hero of Time.Ā The creation of Hyrule itself, and what became of its Golden Goddesses whose power resides in the Sacred Triangles.Ā Of course, he wouldnāt actually physically be in any of these places - they would only be recreations of those events in the world of Mudora, and he would be unable to influence actual, written history within its contents.
Ultimately, Link has two simple goals here: to escape the contents of the book and make it back to theĀ āreal worldāā¦and to uncover the reason why he was pulled into the tome in the first place.Ā As it is a world made up of words and paper, perhaps a gameplay mechanic could be manipulating this world in a way that takes advantage of these properties: tearing out pages to close gaps between ravines, discovering new words and writing them in places to affect the environment in adverse and advantageous waysā¦ The big draw of this world within a book is that it could be, effectively, a run-through of the seriesāĀ āgreatest hits,ā revisiting old and familiar faces and places, seeing them from different angles, filling in the missing blanks - but of course, there would be new stuff, too.Ā Stuff like:
Just what or who, exactly, is a Mudora?
But Iāll save that story for another time.
