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Breath of the Wild Zelda

If you're writing a story, and someone something isn't particularly interesting, you don't spend much time focusing on trying to explain it because it'll just further emphasize how uninteresting it is. If you go into a building and there's a plain wall, you're not gonna spend two pages attempting to illustrate that wall. Not all characters NEED to have complex internal struggles, because sometimes their purpose is just to be a lens through which we examine the world, and wasting all this time talking about a struggle Zelda had really did nothing for BotW apart from emphasize how much I didn't like her. That didn't really humanize her, and her "development" did absolutely nothing, and was introduced for no reason other than to be there.
 

The Dashing Darknut

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it would pull her out of the stereotypical damsel in distress princess role that she's been occupying for almost forty years.
Spirit Tracks? She helped Link and was not a damsel in distress. Her body was taken and used as the device for the villain, but she helped Link as a ghost, was with him for most of the game, and was imo really charming and cute in that game. Plus you also control her in the Tower of Spirits
 

Bowsette Plus-Ultra

wah
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Spirit Tracks? She helped Link and was not a damsel in distress. Her body was taken and used as the device for the villain, but she helped Link as a ghost, was with him for most of the game, and was imo really charming and cute in that game. Plus you also control her in the Tower of Spirits

She's still ultimately a damsel in distress. Her participation comes with the huge caveat that she still somehow be kidnapped and thrown in a closet.

What I want is a Zelda who just isn't a damsel in distress. It's been forty years. Can they really not come up with something else?
 
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Uwu_Oocoo2

Joy is in video games and colored pencils
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I get that people wish Zelda could be playable for botw / botw2. That way, she could be an actual main character with a big role in the story, and not just that random person in the title. But I don't think that making her a playable character would really fix the issue, assuming there's actually an issue because it depends on each person you talk to and their storytelling preferences.
In botw basically all of the cutscenes focus on Zelda. Even if they aren't the best, they still convey the basic premise of her struggles and how she learns to overcome them. You learn more from the game about her than Link, despite him being the "main character". She's what is at stake, your only link to the past, the thing you're trying to save. But honestly, Link doesn't seem very invested in it. Now in AoC (yes its a spinoff, but the Zelda team worked in directed collaboration and was a big guiding force in the story anywaaay) Zelda was playable. And once again, all of the story bits focused on her. The entire game was her story, with Link simply being one of the background characters there to deliver the final blow. And chances are if they were to make her a main companion in botw 2 they would do the exact same thing. This can be attributed to a hyper-focus on Zelda or poor characterization of Link, but the issue is still the same. It's not a question of whether Zelda should be playable, it's a question of whether Link should be overshadowed and/or completely replaced by Zelda. They managed to work out a good balance in ST, but to try something similar in botw given her overbearing focus in the story would be precarious at best. And if they were to make her just a side note, an example being if you could unlock her when you beat the game, people would once again start complaining that she's just a trophy and not an actual character. Can it be done? Yes. But there's no way Ninty could do it without making people annoyed about either her or Link's characterization. It's much safer for them to not touch the concept with a ten foot pole.
 

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