Topic: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Nononono, the Hero's Shade is Ocarina of Time/Majora's Mask Link. The Hero's SPIRIT refers to the spirit of Hylia's chosen hero who is reincarnated each cycle along with Demise's hatred and Hylia.

@BlatantlyHeroic None of the Links look the same and it has nothing to due with the different artstyles. And what does the actions of the Link from OoT/MM have to do with anything? That represents characteristics of ONE Link not all of them. The same goes for love interest because he doesn't shack up with Zelda in every lifetime. Links do share a few traits but looks, personality, and love interest aren't any of them.

Link starts out with Zelda, and at the end of the decline timeline, once Ganon is killed once and for all which finally breaks the cycle, Link and Zelda/Hylia can finally be together again.

The actions of Link in OoT/MM have to do with everything, as it is him doing these actions, not the player, thus further solidifying that he is his own character. He's even part of legends in WW, and like I said with the whole TP thing, has his own dialogue as the Hero's Shade. That pretty much screams "CHARACTER" to me.

And yes, each Link has the same basic features. Pointy ears, Pointy hat, side burn things, same voice, you get the drift. I'd also like to say that each Samus and Mario don't look exactly like the last iteration, same with any character, and that's because they're always being improved design wise, not to mention Link has a different body in each game due to living a mortal life but also being a spirit chosen by a Goddess to forever protect her and fight Demise.

It might be counterintuitive but that's not actually a problem at all. The real problem is making sure the sample is random. Assuming it IS random, you can get a confidence interval of about 99% on a population of 100 million with a sample size of less than 1000. If you don't have any training in statistics, what this means is that if you sample people randomly, the trend you have after asking 1000 people will be almost identical to the trend you'd get by asking everyone in that 100 million.
I'm afraid this is one of those subjects where human intuition leads to reliable mistakes!

It's funny how people only seem willing to defend that Link has meaningful characterization when they're arguing that he should never be female.

That's because you're looking at it from your own biased point of view. You've already decided that he should be female, and don't really care what anyone else says about it. Link does have poor characterization, but that doesn't mean that none exists. The key word there is POOR. It's just the same as Mario or any other lead Nintendo character. He is his own distinct character and does in fact have characterization, it could just be a lot better than it is. It doesn't make sense to make Link female, when we could just as easily have Zelda as the next lead in a Zelda game. You see what I'm saying? Why change a set and established character, when you could just make a new/use an existing character that would fit the role better? Sheik is the way to go if you want a strong female protagonist, and would add a lot of game mechanics that normally wouldn't make sense with Link. If you're going to change something about the character it NEEDS to help out the gameplay and story itself. A female Link would still just be a one man/woman army. But Zelda/Sheik? That would add a lot of gameplay value that would make the change WORTH IT, other than helping out political views and what-not.

Lol, no it isn't. Very nice liberal trick of defining conservatism as equivalent to closed-mindedness though. Closed mindedness can just as equally occur on people who are promoting change as they can be closed to the idea that the change will end up being negative (and often are)
I'm not saying I necessarily disagree on the argument. While I will definitely resist this kind of political correctness in other areas of media, Zelda is one of the areas where it would have almost zero creative impact on Nintendo.
The only potential problem I can see is whether they'd then have to change Zelda to a prince. It's not always clear whether it's supposed to be a romantic relationship between them.

In before everyone starts arguing over whether Sheik is male or female, when we have official sources saying what it actually is.

I thought it was obvious she was Zelda in disguise? Didn't OoT make that obvious?

IT'S NOT REAL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! IT DOESN'T MATTER IF HE'S MALE OR FEMALE!!!!!!! HE'S MALE!!!!! HANDLE IT!!!! IT DOESN'T MATTER!!!! I DON'T LOSE SLEEP PLAYING METROID!!!!

Yes, but some people believe that Zelda changed her gender to be male while disguised as Sheik (to make it more convincing, I suppose).

??? Um ok then

You seem very passionate about this, but I'm going to have to drop out here because I think you're confusing me for someone else. I haven't argued that Link should be female. I hadn't even commented on it until now.

And I think he should rename male for a couple of reasons. 1) the lore does specify that the hero is a boy, and 2) the character's look and design is very iconic. However, I would love to see a playable female character. Hyrule Warriors got me really wanting to play as Impa in a main series Zelda game. Not for the whole game, just sections of it.

Can't deny how good this looks though. That was a rejected design for Hyrule Warriors, but not for Link. It was his sister or daughter (can't remember what the translation was) named Linkel.

Lol what? Who believes this?

If I recall correctly, we had this discussion earlier in this thread several months ago where I pulled multiple sources saying that Sheik is female, all the way back to 2001 when Melee came out. And I was still shot down by a couple people.

I am open to change. I just don't think that giving Link the option of being female is a good change. There's the difference.

That's literally the same thing. That's the same as saying "I'm not close-minded in general, I'm just close-minded about this"

It's still being close-minded.

I think the issue here is that people have different definitions are closed mindedness. It appears that it comes down to two.

1) Not being open to change without even considering the topic at hand.

2) After considering the topic impartially, not being open to change.

In other words, #1 is bad. #2 is acceptable.

No it's not. If that's the case you would be close-minded about everything you disagree with.

''I want the option to play as an elephant in the next Zelda game, if you don't want this, you're close-minded.''

I'm glad logic and reasoning don't work that way...

EDIT: If @brewsky is right and that's the case, I think we should define the word ''close-minded'' before going on, because it isn't as if I didn't think this through.

Erm, what? How could a pigeon become the hero of time?
And yes, they're narrative driven. But that wasn't my point. They're not character and dialog driven like something like Final Fantasy. That's where a character's personality really has an impact on the game. In most Zelda games, his personality wouldn't actually have much of an impact unless they changed the formula. Part of me would want them to try that. Another part of me thinks developers should be very cautious about changing a formula that has worked so well for so long.