Link is Staying Male, For Now

There’s been a lot of talk about the “new” Link in the Legend of Zelda Wii U trailer shown at the Nintendo E3 Digital event earlier this week. The character has always looked feminine, but this time around it was enough to seriously question his gender, and people did. This wasn’t helped when Eiji Aonuma was asked why Link looked so different: “No one explicitly said that that was Link.”

Turns out that that was a joke, and that this is another from the long line of Links we’ve come to know and love.

Actually that comment I made jokingly. It’s not that I said that it wasn’t Link. It’s that I never said that it was Link. It’s not really the same thing, but I can understand how it could be taken that way.

 It seems like it has kind of taken off where people are saying ‘oh it’s a female character’ and it just kind of grew. But my intent in saying that was humour. You know, you have to show Link when you create a trailer for a Zelda announcement.

I don’t want people to get hung up on the way Link looks because ultimately Link represents the player in the game

I don’t want to define him so much that it becomes limiting to the players. I want players to focus on other parts of the trailer and not specifically on the character because the character Link represents, again, the player.

It would have been a huge step forward for the series, and one that would have been more than welcome from the girls who have come to love the franchise, but it’s hardly game defining. More questionable should be Nintendo’s choice to make Link so androgynous, something they’ve never shied away from but which has become more obvious as the years have gone by. If it looks female, wouldn’t hurt to be female, why not just make Link a girl?