Author: Josh Wittmershaus

It’s no surprise that we here at Zelda Dungeon love our Zelda spin-off games. While there are plenty of games adjacent to our beloved franchise that we can currently enjoy, the opportunity for more games with a Zelda skin on them feels endless. With The Minish Cap celebrating its 20th birthday last year, I have been thinking about the kinds of ways we could see our friendly, little elf-like folks in a new game, and maybe in a new light. Then,…

Earlier this year, we shared our review of a collection of academic works on The Legend of Zelda co-edited by Anthony Cirilla and Vincent E. Rone. The book, The Mythopoeic Narrative in the Legend of Zelda, presents various arguments from an assortment of writers that examine Zelda as both a work of literature and a crucial focus of academic inquiry, giving credence to the game series’ place in the wider academic world. It’s a fascinating collage of essays that show why the Zelda…

When we talk about “best of” lists, the journey from the bottom to the top is always a ride. So, naturally, talking about the best final battles of the Zelda series would make for a crescendo of crescendos in “best of” discussions. However, these lists are always a zero-sum game, and if we’re going to talk about our favorite final battles (Tears of the Kingdom is an example that comes to mind for many), then it naturally means that there…

My first Zelda game, at nine years old, was Ocarina of Time. I was hooked immediately and determined to fall in love with the series. After playing Majora’s Mask (which remains to this day my favorite game of all time) and Link’s Awakening DX, I eagerly anticipated what new Zelda awaited me on the next console, the Nintendo GameCube. This anticipation reached a boiling point with the release of this teaser video from Space World 2000 showing what we might…

Update: Dungeon Runners’ Timeless Marathon is live! The event will take place from February 21st  to 23rd on the Zelda Dungeon Twitch page. You can find the detailed schedule for the marathon here. Original: While only a little under six months old, the Dungeon Runners have hit ground, well, running! Covering marathons and interviewing runners, the team aims to bring a fresh new spin on the Zelda speedrunning community. It brings me great honor and pleasure to announce to you…

Throughout its almost 40-year history, The Legend of Zelda has accumulated countless licensed and unlicensed products, as any beloved franchise would. I’ve spent many hours scrolling through Etsy and BoxLunch, just looking at all the creative trinkets, t-shirts, and other tangible goods I could call my own. In fact, I happen to already own some of the usual and unusual Zelda merchandise you can find online, and it made me wonder what other oddities the community has on display in their…

Video games have seen a slow infiltration into the academic world, yet they are still ever-so-often dismissed as gluttonous, mindless, or even the cause for violent behavior in youth. Fitting video games into ludology (the academic study of games in general) has become increasingly justifiable in recent times, however, as music, stories, and memes from a variety of video games have found their way into popular culture and the modern lexicon, making their impact on the world hard to continue…

It’s well known in the Zelda community that the titular character is, well, a princess, literally. In many games, we meet or acknowledge in some fashion the presence of a King, who is typically Zelda’s father. There is undoubtedly an implied sense of monarchy here as the primary form of government in Hyrule, not just for Hylians, but virtually every other cultural group. Except, on the more local level, we’ve seen a more democratic form of government. The example that…

There are 59 different smoothie recipes you can make in The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, but as you try combinations of ingredients at random, you’ll find yourself creating one concoction more than any other: the “unfortunate smoothie.” Only healing half a heart and a small amount of energy, this beverage is the spiritual pairing to a plate of Dubious Food from Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. While there have already been creative interpretations of Dubious Food,…

Back in 2018, Nintendo 64 ROM hacker Zoinkitty discovered voice commands programmed into The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. These unused lines of code suggested scrapped plans for the game to utilize the Nintendo 64’s Voice Recognition Unit (VRU), a microphone adapter officially utilized for only two games, Hey You, Pikachu! and Densha de Go! 2. As documented by outlets like The Cutting Room Floor and DidYouKnowGaming?, these voice commands would have allowed players to perform an assortment of different actions,…