Zachary Small

I have to say just on that, when Tears of the Kingdom came out and I was interviewing Aonuma, you know, Tears of the Kingdom announced Ganondorf's return.

And so I was saying to him, you know, there's a lot of discussion on like, you know, this chance to return to Ganondorf and people always look at Wind Waker as this like surprising turn on the humanity of this character and how he's like,

chief for his people he's angry that the garuda never received sort of the the rains they just didn't have the song of storms i guess um or like the bounty of hyrule and i was like are we gonna see that in tears of the kingdom he's like maybe we should look into this character we've had for a while and uh we didn't quite get that in tears of the kingdom maybe next time um

You know, I'm going to probably go for my final boss the way that I started this conversation, which is to return to the Minish Cap and return to Vaati.

The reason I'm choosing Vaati here, there's so much buildup to that final boss.

You're going through a corrupted Hyrule Castle.

You're hearing these chimes.

He's about to sacrifice Zelda.

And when you get to the character, you're expecting how Vaati's been portrayed in the previous Four Swords games, which is this floating eyeball, which is like, okay, like,

Cool.

But instead you get this like, I think it's like three or four part boss battle, which at that point, you know, Minish Cap was 2004.

You didn't get these like three, four part boss battles.

And the way that they've designed this character, it's almost like a Final Fantasy character.

It feels so outside of the world of Zelda.

You're fighting in this sort of like celestial space of like the Milky Ways behind you.

In a way where I feel like Minish Cap just like sort of opens the possibility of like what this sort of design and atmosphere of Zelda can be in unexpected ways.

That's how it ends in this triumphant final battle.

Zachary, anything you'd care to plug?

Just keep reading New York Times coverage of video games.

Why not?