Legends of Hyrule
Adventure through some new views of Wisdom, Power, and Courage!
Summary
Legends of Hyrule is a collection of projects that are centered around the Legend of Zelda franchise featuring game concept pitches, rom hack showcases, soundscape mixes, and more! Two of the biggest projects of the collection, “The Legend of Zelda XS” and “The Legend of Zelda Hero of Kingdoms”, pitch some hypotheticals in regards to the organization of lore or what might be in store for the franchise going into the next console generation. All of the components of this project can be viewed through the Legends of Hyrule YouTube Playlist where Arcmaevotix is home to the original versions and Nehrpsyznet is home to the remade versions.
Process
Legends of Hyrule was a project born out of a desire to create an N64 rom hack for The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time. Eventually this idea morphed into two of the central components of the project that everything else revolves around. These components are “The Legend of Zelda XS” and “The Legend of Zelda Hero of Kingdoms” which serve as a lore experiment and game concept pitch for the franchise respectively. The inspiration for the latter came directly from The Legend of Zelda Collector’s Edition which was one of the two ways to play Ocarina of Time on the Nintendo GameCube. The other way was the Master Quest collection. After researching the development cycle for various Zelda titles and reading through the established lore of the franchise, I published The Legend of Zelda XS as a standalone website that is a part of Xaosphora, a project dedicated to rewriting the lore of various franchises for reasons of experimentation. Then soon thereafter I also started re-designing and developing the assets for what would eventually become The Legend of Zelda Hero of Kingdoms which features an entire trailer sequence, custom letterbox motion graphics, visual modifications, and a custom desert region that was built from an old map project that I had worked on.
Reflection
Upon playing The Legend of Zelda Collector’s Edition game as a kid, I was always curious as to why none of the 2D titles were included except the very first two. Later on I came to realize that this was because the Game Boy Advance received a port of A Link to the Past and had backwards compatibility with any of the other games that might have come out to date at the time. However my interest in creating an Ocarina of Time hack changed when I took a bigger interest in The Legend of Zelda Collector’s Edition game itself and I reserved any ideas I had for an Ocarina of Time hack for The Legend of Zelda XS. This was largely because many of the concepts that I was building for a rom hack were largely story beat changes and little else. Not to mention that the stitching together of the maps of Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask (a pretty massive scope) to run on real hardware was going to be nearly impossible with the limited knowledge and tools that existed back then. So after moving the Ocarina of Time ideas into Zelda XS and publishing that project as a standalone website, I went on ahead and produced a proof of concept demo for a collection of the 2D Zelda titles that were featured in the downfall timeline of the franchise.