Two new interviews with me about Zelda art and preservation!

These were both really fun! I'm pretty shy but it was nice to continue push myself to be more public. Both cover the same subjects, which makes sense because retro Zelda art and archiving would be what to ask me about, but both still feel vastly different and wonderful. They both had some great questions.


First, this is amazing, I'm in a magazine! I was interviewed for Nintendo Force Magazine, a spiritual successor to Nintendo Power. As someone who is deeply in love with books and other publications this feels utterly surreal. You can purchase digital or physical copies here.

Second is an interview for Tokyo Game Life. This is a beautifully produced podcast from the heart of Japan. You can listen to my interview, and find their other episodes, here. I hope you enjoy it, I'm pretty shy about speaking for recordings so I hope I did alright. It was really fun!

2 Years of me being back!

It's officially been 2 years now since I have been back to working on Zelda content! If you were around in the community in the early 2000's, or even 2011ish, you may have caught my other big bursts of work, but disability and website issues built up and took me away from it all. Thank you to everyone that checked in over the years though, one day it finally clicked that I really do want to be back here working on all this with everyone else. It's been really fun being back. I can not believe how wonderful the gaming and preservation community and enthusiasts are. We have found so many cool things together, we have gotten so many more works translated, we have discovered so much lost material. All of you are so amazing and I hope even some of this has brought people even a drop of the joy it has brought me. 

I'm going to try to post more on other social media, not just twitter, and I want to try to start fixing up my actual site at some point, but for now I am just going to keep scanning to try to make sure these things aren't lost forever. We need a library for old Zelda works, there's too much left to be discovered from them, and I can't wait to see what working towards that future holds.

~Melora

I've spent 20 years being told the manga doesn't matter and I'm over it:

I always hear "Why isn't this manga more well known"... "this is such obscure material, that's why no one ever talked about it" etc.

Oh man guys... I really tried and it really shouldn't be.

Cool little fun things like this shouldn't be new to you either. We should have been having so much fun exploring all of this stuff for years now.

So a little backstory here: People who would link to my site on most of the big Zelda forums, back around 2002-2006, wanting to discuss some of the really cool and relevant topics found in the manga or gamebooks, would get their posts deleted and told not to bring it up again. "Zelda manga isn't a real Zelda topic," "Don't link to her site, it's not a real Zelda site and not relevant to Zelda discussion" they said... as they would discuss the Valiant Comics and cartoons. My site and this subject matter was effectively banned from being posted about or linked to on many of the major Zelda sites and Zelda forums. It was serious gatekeeping. When people would recommend my site be nominated for awards, they were told it wasn't allowed. Back in the early days Zelda Wiki wouldn't allow links to it or info from it, saying it wasn't really relevant content and that I hosted material still in print (I did not. In fact I worked hard to get it brought out officially in other languages.  No, really, here is Himekawa talking about it recently) while the site linked to other sites that continued to host other still-in-print works or US comics. It was weird times. I have a lot of webmaster friends that will vouch for how bizzare it was and how accurate this tale is. Anyway. Because of this continued gatekeeping we have absolutely missed out on so much. It was all kind of hushed away, a collective "we don't talk about this seriously in regards to the series," mood settled over much of the community.

I am so tired of pretending it doesn't matter simply because, historically, some people have been so loud and hostile towards anything they don't personally like.

Look, maybe you just don't like the manga. That's fine! Oddly, I'm not a giant manga fan either. I'm an art fan. I've just come to realize, in my 30 year long obsessive quest to find rare Zelda art material, that it's absolutely incredibly interesting in the context of the series. It's actually important. Maybe you would feel this way too if you spent some time on it. But why should you, you ask?

Why should we consider manga relevant to the creative development of the Zelda games? Especially if you don't really like it? 

Because someone likes manga. A lot. Enough that that's what he left art school wanting to do. Let's look at who that is:

Why is how he feels important?

It's not like his love of exploration as a child affected the course of the series or anything either...

I can't imagine why a guy who obviously REALLY likes manga, and grew up in a culture that is surrounded by comics to a vastly greater extent than most of the rest of the world, would check out manga based on his games, especially after he had only made 1-2 Zelda games... Come on! Seriously? I mean, everyone always wonders why Link has hot pink hair in LttP. It's a question that's gotten asked non-stop for decades. Everyone ends up saying Link had pink hair because it needed to share the exact pink with the rabbit, which by the way doesn't even share the same pink, but you know... it could never be because there were 2 years of really good monthly Zelda manga magazines on the shelves where Link had hot pink hair: in 1986-1988, well before LttP was released. So... why isn't that a consideration for you on that topic? Because... manga is just that invalid to you (or those before you) as a creative source of inspiration? Should it be?

Seriously: the burden of proof should be on the people who claim there is no way it could matter. Go to and art school and ask all the people there how they feel about that claim. Or a game dev studio and do the same. If you don't know anyone with extensive knowledge of both, feel free to ask me though and I can get you a shit-ton of responses for you. But I don't really even need to and neither do you because:

Let's look at whom else may have read some Zelda manga and had it create everlasting waves in the Zelda series...

"This guy? If I don't like manga then why would what influences him be important either," a great number of people have apparently muttered.

Well, let's see what he has to say... From this source I uploaded in 2005 

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Eiji Aonuma: In Ocarina of Time, as in most Zelda, we have created a large number of tribes, like the Goron who live in the mountains or the Zoras, people from the water. For the episode "The Wind Waker”, when we chose to situate the action in the middle of the ocean, we immediately felt the need to create a race that can move through the air. During long trips offshore, we needed faster characters capable of transmitting information to Link. It was at that moment that I remembered Watatara clan, you had invented for the adaptation of "Ocarina of Time." In short, I digress a bit about the initials but we are inspired by your work to give birth to Rito Race, creatures that are half-man half-bird that can move very quickly with their wings.

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Nagano (Himekawa): Frankly, we would be so happy if the creative Nintendo could learn from our manga to realize their games! To participate in the development of a Zelda, even indirectly, we would be mad with joy.

Eiji Aonuma: Well I can tell you, you’re already a great help! I've seen guys in my team who for a little help from mental exertion were taking their break by reading manga Akira Himekawa (laughs)! You have a knack for telling wonderful stories to us that is very useful. I, for example, I love your adaptation of the title "Four Swords Adventures". Yet, the content has so much more to do with then the original. In the original, four Link’s have the same expressions and the same reactions. Once they are passed in your hand, one will be impressed by how you came to give so many different personalities to each Link. You really did a good job on this subject, which is undeniable. The pages are yet in black and white but you can easily divide each Link by their given personality.

-----

Well. Huh. ...maybe... hop on this train because it's obviously fun and relevant. Or, at least... Stop gatekeeping? You don't have to enjoy manga or gamebooks but you're preventing people from discussing and discovering the history and context of the series by continuously dismissing it.

-----

 I'll probably start making short posts showing some of the fun ideas that first appeared in the various volumes of Japanese manga, gamebooks, and novels and I'm fucking psyched about it!!

Like as teasers: this amazing point Mak brings up one about the Imprisoning War and the split timelines, this incomplete one of mine about a lot of the firsts in the Ran Maru manga, and this little thing from the LttP manga that reminds me of Fi.

The manga, gamebooks, and novels are clearly a part of the history of Hyrule. If you have hang-ups about why you feel otherwise, question those. To start: all you need to do is look at what traditionally inspires creative minds working in the industry.

Edit: *cough* Miyamoto was probably never creatively influenced by manga *cough*

Why did Link have Hot Pink Hair in A Link to the Past?

The world may never know. ...Unless we look at several years of monthly manga magazine covers from just a 3 years earlier, from early 1986 until late 1988. I don't know though, I've never heard of game developers who also like comics... and certainly not ones about the game they made. It's not like Miyamoto was trying to be a manga artist before he joined Nintendo or anything ...and I really doubt any of them would like one of the best comics ever made for the series. And thus it will forever remain a mystery ♡

Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, in One Pack Comics, by Ran Maru

ゼルダの伝説, わんぱっくコミックス,  乱丸

Find the English translation for the Hyrule Fantasy, the first volume this story starts in, here.

And here are the English translations for Adventure of Link volume 1, volume 2, and volume 3.

There's also some other other magazine art that's kind of fun. The first 2 are a hot pink haired female Link from Shonen Captain (Monthly Magazine) May 18, 1986. 3rd image unknown but it comes from this video. EDIT: I have found, and made, 2400dpi scans of this art of her.

Anyway, just a guess. Maybe we could agree that hot pink is just a great color too. #plink

Edit: There was a giant fanart challenge thanks to @Aeyga_X based on my scans and she was dubbed "Linka" by fans

Edit: Right after I wrote this I found all the pink-haired Link images from this artist. In Shonen Captain and this Wanpakku Guide. The gallery with all 8 starts here. But there is more on it below as well.


Also, I saw this said a lot: "16-bit" is about the processor, it doesn't mean 16 colors. Though, yes! Some of the modes for the SNES topped out at 16 colors per sprite/tile, and LttP is an example of the use of one of those, so I could see how people could get confused. Source 1. Source 2. But, no, it wasn't pink because the bunny was pink and it "needed to be the same color for technical reasons" ...because, even if (?) that were true for some reason, the rabbit's color of pink wasn't even the same as his hair. (Thank you to whomever made this graphic, I couldn't find the source to credit) 

Update: Just to keep all of the Pink Haired Link images in one place, here's a cool feature from a Famitsu issue from 1992

I've had that manga online for ages, on the old main site, (the better scans on archive.org are new,) but so many fans and other sites in the early days would blow off manga (and my scanning work and site) as "not real Zelda content." The ones that would try to post about it or my site would often have their posts deleted. Gatekeeping was an incredibly serious problem in the early days of the community. If you were not one of the popular, male, webmasters you were very often shut down and blocked out. I'm serious, there were full page rants about female run sites and problems with content deemed female-oriented. Like this on what was often said to be the most popular site at the time:

This guy wrote this after he told me to take LGBTQ content off my site and I refused. He then filled his gallery with scans I made (and edited some things into as organic watermarks) and said he scanned them. OmNomBerries, who ran IndieZelda, is still one of my best friends and stuck up for me with this guy at the time. She's a real one. I was friends with the other types of sites that were named and we were usually not allowed to be spoken about or linked to from "big" sites. So that rant needs a bit of self-reflection.

So it's just been overlooked for 35 years when this question would get asked. Which is a huge shame. Wanpakku, Naughty Comics, sometimes translated as One Pack, was a  division of Tokuma Shoten: the publisher Nintendo always officially used back then. And Wanpakku did the Japanese version of Tips and Tactics that Nintendo translated and released officially in the US

Edit 2: Okay, guys, turns out pink haired female Link from 1986 (May 25, 1986 and May 18, 1986) is as official as the Itoh art from Tips and Tactics because she IS in the Japanese version of Tips and Tactics. This kind of changes the way I'm thinking about her, I no longer thing she was just a mistake made by a comic magazine's walkthrough artist like I originally did.

Tips and Tactics was released by Nintendo of America in 1987 and calls itself the "US edition" "Translation of HISSYOU HINTBON Originally published in 1986 by Tokuma Shoten"

Both publishing companies, Wanpakku (the maker of this guide) and Shonen Captain, where she appeared, were owned by the publisher Tokuma Shoten: and Nintendo worked with them a LOT back then.

Here are the 2 manga pages with pink-haired Link and a fairy that were left out, along with some of the Itoh art, of the US edition: 

Edit 3: Slightly different but here's a cute pink-haired Princess Zelda from a Famicom magazine "ファミコン決定版(1986-07-20)"

My Favorite Miyamoto Zelda Quotes

If you don't know me then just let me say I really do spend as much time as I can hiking. So, one day, I was talking about why I love Breath of the Wild and the very early Zelda games and one of my oldest and best Zelda friends, Max, started posting some of the best Miyamoto quotes and I felt like I needed to gush about them a little more.

"Zelda has an epic story and all, but the truth is, to me it’s all about hiking. (laughs)" - Shigeru Miyamoto, 1998... "I think it's clear that Melora, too, is all about hiking xD " -Max

I mean, it's no wonder to me that the guy who created Zelda would speak to my soul like this!

"The spirit, the state of mind of a kid when he enters a cave alone must be realized in the game. Going in, he must feel the cold air around him. He must discover a branch off to one side and decide whether to explore it or not. Sometimes he loses his way." - Miyamoto

 

"When I was a child, I went hiking and found a lake. It was quite a surprise for me to stumble upon it. When I traveled around the country without a map, trying to find my way, stumbling on amazing things as I went, I realized how it felt to go on an adventure like this."

"When I went to the university at Kanazawa, it was a totally strange city for me. I liked walking very much, and whenever I did, something would happen. I would pass through a tunnel and the scene was quite changed when I came out."

 

"I was living in an apartment in Kyoto, and nearby was a building that had a small manhole cover mounted in the wall. I walked by it every day and I noticed it. I wondered, why is a manhole on the wall? Where does it lead?"

 

"I want people to get really into the geography [...], since I think it’s a really natural thing to be able to look around while you’re walking. At first when we were developing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, I even proposed using a first-person perspective.

 

"I wanted to create a game where the player could experience the feeling of exploration as he travels about the world, becoming familiar with the history of the land and the natural world he inhabits."

Here is a video of him talking about all this!