Zachary Small

This is pulling on such strange sources to build this world that could only happen, especially at a company like Nintendo, with a time crunch where they could not throw out the weird ideas.

And I think that's part of what makes it special.

For me, my sort of other picks, you mentioned Four Swords Adventure.

I am probably in the minority.

I really love that game.

In a similar way that I also really like the Minish Cap.

And that these are games that are sort of borrowing the Wind Waker style, but they're developed by other companies, and they just introduce so many interesting ideas that we kind of never see again.

Including, I think Minish Cap is like a deep favorite of mine, of like this alternate villain called Vaati, and

who I think is really compelling in a lot of ways that Ganon and Ganondorf isn't.

My first Zelda...

In my brain, it's like some weird hazy memory of going to a friend's house when I was but a child.

And I think they had both Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask.

And we were so young that like those games are kind of inscrutable when you're like five or six.

And so we were stuck on our own loop of like the first half hour of the game consistently.

So I have a lot of like still like childhood nightmares of like it becoming dark on the fields of Hyrule or the moon crashing while I'm still a Deku scrub that I just burn into my brain.

Yes.

I'm still waiting for some weird academic to do a paper on the transition from polytheism to monotheism in the world of Zelda.

Because there must be something going on there where in recent games, there's a single god.

I don't know.

There's something very fascinating culturally that's going on there.