The Hyrule Warriors Legends panel last night at WonderCon was a blast! I had originally imagined that most of the panel would be news that had already been revealed, but boy was I wrong! They had lots of development insight on Linkle and Tetra’s character development, a character reveal (Marin), and also detailed a side story involving Linkle and Tingle that was eventually cut from the game. There were also interesting nuggets in the Q&A section that followed.
I would like to retell the story that involved Linkle/Tingle because it was simply so hilarious–however, I did not acquire a full recording of the panel, so I’m retelling this roughly from memory. It is possible that this article may be updated in the future to more accurately reflect what was told:
Linkle receives some news that Link is in trouble, and follows leads which bring her to a castle. As it turns out, Ghirahim (from Skyward Sword) is using a sinister dance to bring Link under his control, and it seems that Linkle isn’t the only one that had received this news, as both Cia and Lana had known about this too. Cia and Lana are already in the castle, and are both doing magical dances to counter Ghirahim’s spell to control Link. When Linkle finally arrives in the room, she sees this strange scenario of all these characters dancing, and decides to join in too to help the cause. Not long after that, they start hearing eerie laughter as they realize that they weren’t dancing for Link, but rather it was Tingle all along playing a joke on them. Shortly afterward, Linkle wakes up realizing it was all one big nightmare.
In the Q&A section of the panel, I asked the developers if they had ever thought it would be fun to develop highly unusual characters for the game, citing the Kikwi Elder from Skyward Sword as an example. They had responded that saying the Kikwi Elder in particular was never considered, but among the staff that developed the game, they largely agreed that Groose was a name that came up time and again, as a character that would be fun for the world of Hyrule Warriors. They also added as an extra note that Tingle almost didn’t make it into the game, because Aonuma wasn’t too hot about the idea.
Pretty exciting huh? I’d have to say, if Groose makes it into Hyrule Warriors, I’ll be over the moon! What do YOU think?