Personally, I’m all about Link as a stand in for the player and getting a gender option in forthcoming Zelda titles, but with each Link (outisde of direct sequels like Majora’s Mask) being a different person anyway, a female Link wouldn’t bother me in the least.
And for all the people out there who say, “But they should just make a game where Zelda is the hero!” Yeah, that’d be cool. We could have that, too; those two options aren’t mutually exclusive. It is, in fact, possible to make more than one game with a female protagonist, though I can understand where the current state of gaming would lead you to believe otherwise.
But there’s no reason—when all it would take is some new voice clips, a slightly different character design, and some pronoun changes—not to at the very least give players the option for Link to be female when the character is already intended to be a placeholder for the player. That much is indisputable as far as I’m concerned. “But they’d alienate their core male fanbase”? That defense is founded on so many baseless assumptions it’s hard to know where to start, and all the rest of the arguments I’ve seen I’m pretty sure are just different ways to fill in a false equivalence Mad Libs.
Nintendo’s 2014 E3 press conference showed a strong grasp on what their audience likes to see, and the recent iterations of Smash Bros. did a great job with gender-swappable characters with Bowser Jr., Wii Fit Trainer, Villager, Robin, and even Marth and Lucina in spirit.
I’d love to see them build on that going forward. I just hope they don’t base their choices too much off of Hyrule Warriors‘ sales performance, because no amount of playable female characters could boost my interest in a decade-late Dyansty Warriors spinoff.
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