You'll notice that nowhere in my article did I say that story is MORE important than gameplay. Just that they were were equal in terms of importance when it comes to Zelda games.

Thanks for reading. :)

The Legend of Zelda, from a story perspective, has traditionally taken inspiration for its story from two primary sources -- legendary fantasy (think King Arthur) intermixed with classic fairy tales. However, the fairy tale mantra is much stronger than many would give it credit for. Nintendo is very good at hand-waving over anything deemed "too complex" or "too technological" and making the best of whatever they currently have. For example, when it comes to graphical capability, Nintendo is rarely hindered by it and tends to make beautiful artwork out of what they actually have. The term best used to describe this is "abstraction"; they don't worry necessarily about being truly photorealistic or setting-realistic and just present the 10,000-mile high view. Now, in comparison to HD gaming these days there is a definite difference; however, standing alone, it's not bad.

Fairy tale narratives are famous for their abstract principles in setting and characterization. Much like old Western films where good guys wear white and bad guys wear black, it's easy to tell who the good characters are and the bad characters are based upon principles of "beauty." It's easy to see magic tossed in without explaining its origins. Royalty is used as a crux for commoners to aspire to. Zelda uses all of these principles in their narratives. Zelda, at its narrative core, is a story tale with bits of legendary fantasy sprinkled atop of it.

The problem with fairy tales, at least for me, is that there's no depth to it. There's actually some fairly humorous commentary about how vacuous Disney films based upon fairy tales are, where the main character is often witless or, if nothing else, in a rush to make rash decisions to pursue a dream to be loved by some white-knight prince. Fairy tales, at their core, aren't meant to have real principles or real emotion invested into them, and herein lies the connection to Zelda. We've seen Nintendo orchestrate solid characters that we all know and love. However, their story never really has any depth. It's a simple story with just enough detail to entertain for 30-40 hours but never enough to really flesh out a full universe.

Say what you will about the actual plots of Halo, Assassin's Creed, and whatever. You may dislike the plots, and that's fine. But ultimately, you can't deny that they build very interesting worlds.

Actually, I do develop games for a living. :)

I made a Japanese Amazon account a long time ago for another thing I wanted to import, so my details on exactly what you have to do is really fuzzy. It required doing some clever amount of Japanese funniness, such as picking a prefecture and all that. I think.

However, it should be possible, once you have an account, to list a Stateside address as your shipping address. The shipping for me for 2-5 day delivery was $40, which isn't terrible for that expediency.

Yeah. I don't think HoH was originally designed to take such a hit from tons of people downloading big files all at once, and it sounds like the server got auto-shutdown by the admins. Hopefully it'll come back soon.

Actually, just two days.

That's unused concept art that Hyrule Historia provided for OoT.

The Gorons are an interesting bunch. It's curious to see the inclusion of them in SS without the inclusion of other OoT races like the Zora, Kokiri, or Gerudo. While I've heard theories that link the Parella to the Zora and the Kikwi to the Kokiri, I'm not fond of this willy-nilly evolutionary connection, especially since it will ultimately happen AGAIN when traversing to Wind Waker.

The best hunch I can give is that there's lots of time before the Gorons finally settled over in Eldin next to what would become Death Mountain. SS's Eldin is covered in lava here in SS, and I don't think that the Gorons would move in too quickly until the activity in that area died down.

The reason that I suggest that Lanayru province implies human life is because -- if it doesn't imply this, then what else is the huge area even for? Why are they mining the area to begin with? What's the long-term goal? There's obviously got to be something that the Robots' are attempting to achieve (beyond desertification), and if it's all just for the Thunder Dragon... well... that seems... like a huge waste of the entire Lanayru region. So they've got to be doing something for the other races in order to help them along.

The only other indication we get to help support this is the existence of Scrapper. Scrapper's masters were human, so there's likely some sort of interaction between humans and the Robots on the ancient time scale just as there is in the present time scale.

There's a difference between a game having faults and a game being fun; a game can indeed be both things simultaneously.

In the case of Skyward Sword, the game does indeed have faults; there are a few things that are even annoying. But most of these things are nitpicks and aren't the most important aspects of the game and don't get in the way of the bigger picture. It's like having a world-renowned singer being able to hit all of the high notes of a difficult piece, but then in the middle she forgot the words and so she made them up on the spot. That doesn't deny that she's a good singer; it just is an imperfection that makes the performance non-optimal.