It's a great credit to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild's game design that five years on, we are still discovering new things. These various breakthroughs have come in many forms, from glitches to finding secret locations to interesting character interactions, and the latest one came from Reddit user's persistence in hunting down very specific NPCs.
Those who have played Breath of the Wild — which, we assume, is almost all of you reading — will be well aware of the banana-dropping Yiga Clan and their duplicitous shape-shifting interruptions over the course of your journey. But did you know that each wandering Yiga member's disguise is in fact based on another NPC somewhere else in Hyrule?
As flagged by our friends at Eurogamer, in what can only be described as the biggest Where's Wally-style hunt available to the Switch, justlookingfordragon took it upon themselves to find the original named NPC counterpart for each Yiga clone. Anchoring their search to the Yiga at Hebra Trailhead Lodge, the brave explorer was able to see a total of 14 different disguise options by saving or reloading the game (which forced the Yiga to do something of a virtual quick-change into another character).
Having snapped a picture of each disguise, the Redditor then tracked down each of the corresponding NPCs in order to prove their point. We have attached a few examples of their findings below consisting of photos of the NPC and where to find them, but be sure to check out the original Reddit thread to see just how much work went into tracking down all 14 'twins'.
Rik is a Hylian traveler who makes his way between Wetland Stable and Kakariko Village. He worries about pretty much everything, except for getting his identity stolen.
Ronn was a bit harder to track down as the wiki doesn't have a description about him, but I found him near the Forgotten Temple. His horse wanted to be in the picture so badly that I wasn't able to get a better picture of the rider.
Spinch the Hylian Not to be confused with Spinch the Horse. The wiki doesn't have much information about them, but I found "the Spinches" at Lakeside Stable. That guy basically only talks about horses.
With over 200 NPCs spread across Breath of the Wild's expansive map, these finds are pretty impressive. Talk about finding a needle in a haystack! Maybe they can help us find that one Korok we're still missing. Grrr.
What is your most impressive Breath of the Wild discovery? Leave a comment below!
Further reading:
[source reddit.com, via eurogamer.net]
Comments 22
I love it when NPCs in an adventure game or RPG have unique faces and names. Zelda as a whole has always been pretty good about this actually.
The absolute dedication some players have in order to discover stuff like this in BOTW is astounding. I haven't played it myself (I'm prepared to be lambasted) but I love seeing people push the limits of it as much as humanly possible.
Also this is a brilliant screenshot.
Real 'You got games on your phone?' energy.
I remember first happily chatting to a Yiga member to my horror, same with the Lynel at East Gate, completely forgetting Zelda games of the past that had Lynels and assumed they was friendly…
Had to fight a fake Hylian Yiga myself but, then... a Yiga blade swordsman appeared too... like one wasn't enough!
That is so cool, that these aren’t random disguises. Lures you in because if you have spoken to those npcs before you would be inclined to talk to the yiga version. Which is more of a trap to me. Glad the Yiga don’t kill whom they impersonate though.
Moral of the story: you can spot a yigga based on whether or not they're frowning
Fun article, and you should also check out the same guy's YouTube channel (Wolf Link) who did a fantastic video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cjl68Q9HAQs
Plot twist: the npc's they impersonate are actually the Yiga in the first place
Wait, this wasn't common knowledge? The one that looks like Sotoru Iwata was impersonated by a Yiga in my game. Bad timing, too, I /really/ needed arrows!
I remember someone was quoted saying something about a secret room that had to do with the Yiga that no one had found to their knowlege. Could never find any other mention of it from devs or fans, though.
@Fizza Lambast you? No. Highly encourage you to get sucked into an epic open world adventure? Yes.
With Rose-Tinted Nintendo Glasses: BoTW's developers took the extra time to ensure the Yiga Clan disguises use the same exact NPC model as another named NPC in the world, but no old people, children, or non-human races. This was done to improve immersion and add some lore to the Yiga Clan.
Without Rose-Tinted Nintendo Glasses: One way BoTW's developers saved development time was by having the Yiga disguise model randomly render as one of 14 existing human NPCs rather than making brand new models for the Yiga disguises. This was done to save development time/resources.
This is, as always, amazing!! Love that this game keeps having secrets so many years later!
Dude botw2 is going to be played for years!
I feel like this post was trying to expose and cancel some hylians in this game with the "YIGA" text lol
I always liked the encounters with the yiga dudes. Their weapon drops are cool and mighty bananas are very useful. I was kind of disappointed you can't jump down that massive pit where you fight the yiga boss.
@Astral-Grain
Exactly what i was thinking. Not sure why people think this is anything larger than re-used assets. But whatever.
We're congratulating Nintendo for reusing character model?
@Astral-Grain You are aware the npc are generated with an advanced mii editor, right? People have loaded mii presets into the game successfully. If they really wanted to add more npc, they would have done it 🤷🏻♂️
@Devlind You are making my point more clear, so thank you.
The game has an advanced Mii editor, and therefore it would be easy for developers to "create" or "generate" unique NPC models for the Yiga disguises. That would actually be kind of interesting, but that isn't what they did here.
Instead, this work demonstrated they just randomly pull from a list of existing human "traveler" NPCs. I wouldn't consider this lore or anything really notable in the story or setting of the game, and it's mildly interesting at best.
Rose tinted vision is always amusing, especially with Nintendo fans.
@Astral-Grain I mean, if you weren't trying to prove your point so hard, it would be obvious it goes either way. It is really easy to do, there's no modeling needed since the assets are there already. For me, this seems like a rather obvious design choice more than something used to save like what, no more than a couple of hours of work?
That’s an impressive effort by the player.
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