Ever since the Zelda Ocarina of Time remake was unveiled a few days ago, one subject has been up for debate — or rather causing uproar — in threads the world over (all right, mostly on Twitter): Link's face, and those of every other character while we're at it. More geometric, more sharply defined too, with his chiselled cheeks and big eyes, our hero seems to have swapped his usual look for something closer to a wooden doll than a classic video game character. It's an artistic choice that divides opinion, with some going so far as to claim AI has been wheeled out with abandon, the result being deemed too realistic and at times flirting with the uncanny valley. But there's actually a rather unexpected explanation behind this look — one that makes a good deal of sense, in fact.
Takaya Imamura, a former Nintendo artist who worked on the likes of The Zelda Majora's Mask and Star Fox, reckons Link's new design could be tied to Shigeru Miyamoto's love of puppets. Look a little closer and you'll notice that Link's face, and those of the other characters too, has something distinctly fixed and faintly artificial about it, as though the cast had been made by hand before being brought to life. The costumes reinforce that feeling with their very organic textures, their fibres, their wood and their materials, all of which look lifted straight from the set of a Japanese folk tale.
Ningyōgeki, Japanese puppet theatre
Responding to a post on X (formerly Twitter) from the official Japanese The Legend of Zelda account, Imamura explained that he had immediately recognised “Miyamoto's love of puppet shows” shining through in this art direction. It's a particularly interesting observation when you know the background of Zelda's creator, who has always shown an interest in that world. The comparison may seem surprising at first, but it becomes fairly obvious once the two models are placed side by side. Nor has the idea come out of nowhere, since Takaya Imamura knows better than most how Miyamoto can fold that passion into the creation of his characters. When he was working on Star Fox, the game's promotion leaned heavily on actual puppets of Fox, Falco and the rest of the team. Those models have since become rather famous in Nintendo's history.
