The Influence of Japanese Archaeology on the Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild | Hacker News Reader

The Influence of Japanese Archaeology on the Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

jgeekstudies.org

255 pointszdw50 comments

The absolutely best thing about being in Japan is realizing that games so often are recreating Japan ... and you don't realize it until you're there. You hike and exit the path at a small shrine and feel like you're in Zelda. You go through a tunnel and come out in a different (snowy, in my case) environment, and feel like you went through a Mario pipe. You drive on expressways in Tokyo with office buildings nearly right up to the road, with pillars between lanes and (in one spot) a highway going through a building and suddenly racing games don't seem so far fetched.

It's a trip, in the best of ways.

Absolutely had this experience touring the shrines around Kyoto— the combination of changing biomes, pedestrian-only spaces, tight sightlines against a distant vista, or turning a corner in a wood to suddenly see an area of interest followed by more woods, there were moments there that felt extremely gamey.

I’ve got 24 hours left here. Hiroshima now. Tokyo as fast as a speeding bullet. What’s your do-not-miss in Tokyo?

You can't do Tokyo in 24 hours, you are going to miss many of the "do-not-miss" anyways. So you will have to make choices.

First thing to realize is that Tokyo is not really a single city but a prefecture, it is like a bunch of smaller cities (wards) stuck together, and there are 23 of them. They all more or less independent and they have their own center, and they also have some kind of theme. All that to say that there is no "downtown Tokyo", and choosing what to do in Tokyo is essentially about the districts you will choose to visit.

Which one depends on your interests. Shinjuku which is a major business center at day and a shady (but still safe!) place at night, Shibuya for fashion and youth, Roppongi for foreigners and its nightlife, Asakusa for its temple, Yoyogi's park, Akihabara "Otaku" mekka, Odaiba's futuristic vibe, Ikebukuro's shopping centers and arcades, Ginza's luxury, etc... Tokyo-Edo museum is indeed awesome if you are interesting in the history of the city, and it certainly a "do-not-miss", but on a 24-hours stay, you have to make choices.

If I had to pick one to add to any list, maybe Shibuya crossing. It is one of the most famous sights of Tokyo and a symbol of the busy city it is. It is also right out of the station on the Yamanote line, so close to other notable places. Just north is Harajuku, Yoyogi, and Shinjuku, all worthwhile.

> Odaiba's futuristic vibe

Even 20 years ago it felt like the pasts vision of the future and the malls already felt pretty has-been.

But I agree on going to the scramble. Maybe walk from there to Harajuku and drop by Tower Records on the way.

Far from an expert, but two favorites from last time I was there:

- Uneo Park and the Tokyo National Museum. - Tokyo Metropolitan Edo-Tokyo Museum (and I've heard great things about the open-air take on this museum in the suburbs ... which could be a better option since the former I just saw is being renovated).

And on the other side of the country, don't miss Kyoto. Just came back from there, and I'm not sure I've ever fallen in love with a city faster.

But above all, I adore just walking around any city, aimlessly, and exploring whatever I stumble upon. Turn into a temple, walk through a random neighborhood grocery store, delight in the ordinary-for-here that's not-so-ordinary for elsewhere.

If you're visiting Shinjuku, nearby there's a narrow street called Omoide Yokocho. Just take in the vibe and choose a yakitori spot to grab a bite and drink your poison of choice (tea/beer/sake). I would recommend going at night/dinner time.

Speaking of Shinjuku and videogames, if you've ever played any yakuza/like a dragon game, you owe it to yourself to go to Kabukicho and its big red gate.

In any case, whatever you choose to visit in Tokyo, it will be really nice, and a lot of it will still be waiting when you eventually come back.

Cheers!

As other said, gonna depend on what you like.

Meiji jingu + walking around harajuku/omotesando gives you a great contrast and is very doable in half a day. Not original, but very "tokyo vibe".

Walking around Jimbocho, with lots of old books shops around

If you can pass the evening, I would recommend eating out in ebisu yokocho

Check the industry in Kawasaki or maybe Minato Mirai (same direction). Also Enoshima makes a nice day trip from Tokyo (don't miss Shonan Monorail and Enoden on your way there). :)

i think if you have 24h left in Japan, coming from Hiroshima, those would be tough to squeeze since none are that close to Tokyo's central area

The Yakuza/Like a Dragon series doesn't even try to hide this. They lift entire locations straight from the country. Kamurocho is Kabukicho without the trademark infringement. Sotenbori and Ijincho both have their real life counterparts in Japan as well.

In various Yakuza communities, one of the more enduring posts are those of people taking pictures of the real life locations and comparing them against the in-game counterparts.

Basically, RGG studios are doing their best to make the single most Japanese game they can.

Last time we were in Japan, we were walking around in Hakone and thinking the same thing. Then we stumbled upon a (literal) video game treasure chest. Inside there was a journal, stamps, and stickers to contribute your stories to.

https://i.imgur.com/VIPkCZr.png

Wish I took better pics, but here it was in the middle of nowhere. Japan is awesome.

It was trippy playing an Initial D arcade game and driving down the same highway in real life before in Gunma-ken to Shimonita.

The 2nd Gen of Pokémon also did that, basically having references to rl Japan:

https://youtu.be/Qil4OpfOufU?si=dLQEFJVESfMdW1BX

BotW will go down as one of the greatest games of all time and there are so many lesons in that. You will find plenty of people who say it's too easy. And it is easy. But that's one lesson: players generally don't want "hard". A lot of people just want to chill out in video games.

What makes BotW is so memorable is how it makes you feell. And a big part of that is the world. Even just standing in a grassy plain with the wind blowing the long grasses has a better sense of being alone (while still being wondrous) that I can think of pretty much any game.

I'm not a Japanophile by any stretch. Kinda the opposite, actually. Dig beneath the surface and there are a lot of problematic things in Japan and Japanese culture.

Anyway, I have no issue with what inspiration the designers used or what they were mimicking. That's kind of irrelevant because you can do that well or badly. I don't think the world is so great because of Japanese archeology or even in spite of it.

It is interesting to see their inspiration but for anyone in the gaming space, just remember that what makes a lasting game is the emotional connection.

I thought that this video essay was a pretty eye opening take on what I had been struggling to articulate about BOTW: https://youtu.be/RNCCKABmHO8?si=fFX6z_ZnCSBDNpio

Basically, BOTW is "poetry" because it is heavily vibes based, at a time when a lot of games are "story" based. My most memorable moments of BOTW are exactly what you described, standing on plateau watching the sunset, walking towards hyrule castle in the rain, finally ready to face Ganon and the zelda theme starts to play, etc, etc. Not specific story reveals but the moment to moment feelings that originate organically from the world and the unscripted interactions and events occurring within it.

My 2 cents: TOTK perfected the exploration part of BoTW and completely failed on the story part.

So many times during TOTK I was thinking to myself "Are you still talking?" and the main quests are extremely clunky. I think its in Lanayru Region main quest where you are just acting like a walkie talkie walking back and forth between two people.

But then you have the quest for the tears and memories. You end up in a temple with an old stone map, that you can take a picture of, and then match the roughly outlined map with your own to figure out where to go and explore next. That is so much more fun than following a red dot and an arrow on a map like every other game!

Exploring the depth was also a lot of fun, although I felt it was too big to explore completely. But I've read that many things in BoTW and ToTK is not meant to be 100%ed, which is also a design attitude that goes against hardcore players.

I don't really get the quiet moments people seem to comment on the most, but I do have some memorable adventuring moments - like the first time I paraglided across the chasm in the upper left of the map, I turned the camera around to see how far I dropped and there was a GIANT DRAGON (Dinraal) right behind me. I'd seen Farosh in the distance without knowing what it was, but that jump scare was the first one I'd seen close up and didn't yet know they don't attack you.

I remember being brought to tears standing on a hillside in TOTK looking at a double rainbow across the valley as rain came down while the sun was shining. Despite its dated graphics, it somehow manages to feel more immersive than even the most impressive current gen titles out there.

The feeling I got when entering each of the unique towns in BOTW are memories I will cherish until I die. They nailed the art direction, music, and soundfx so damn well in that game it's an artistic masterpiece in my opinion.

BOTW (and most Switch-era Nintendo titles with high marks) will go down as some of the most overrated games of all time. You'd think Nintendo fans have never played an open world game prior to BOTW with how they crow about it.

Not sure where all the rating hate is coming from, but Nintendo always gets high marks from the amount of polish in the gameplay and design. The biggest thing BOTW accomplished was taking the "you can go anywhere, basically" approach from the original NES Zelda and translated that to an open world game far better than any game previously. Most open world games gate players hard with obvious gated entry to areas. BOTW integrated natural progression in a much more thematic way.

The destructable/interactable environment was also a big innovation that only a few other games had attempted at the time. You can argue the shrines were repetitive or the fighting too easy but that is complaining that the game isn't what you want it to be and not looking at it for what it is and who it is for.

Your impression of BOTW doesn't line up at all with how it has been received by both fans and critics.

One of the things I love about BOTW is that the world is very intentional and uses altitude as a significant and important feature.

Compare this to so many other open world games where "content" is strewn about everywhere and your choices as a player are meaningless because you'll find the same bland crap whichever way you run.

I don't care, I don't need my opinions to match the majority. The bias of critics is obvious and has been analyzed to death, and the bias of fans is equally obvious. Very few people who aren't already Nintendo fans would bother to spend money on a Switch.

Speak for youself.

I didn't grow up playing Nintendo games. I didn't even know anybody growing up with a Nintendo. I think the first (and only, prior to the Switch) Nintendo experience was buying a Gameboy Advance to play Mario Kart (briefly).

I bought a Switch solely to play Breath of the Wild.

I regret nothing.

You seem to rail against "majority think". I've encountered this many times. There are a lot of people who take the contrarian view basically because it's the contrarian view. That's actually worse than the alleged "majority think" because these people think their contrarianism is somehow virtuous.

There was really no reason for you to reply to my comment. It added nothing. All you really said was "I don't like BotW" and "I don't like Nintendo". Ok, that's fine. But you couched it in language like "overrated", like that's some objective standard. It's just your opinion.

You may want to examine why you're so hostile and quick to present your opinion as fact. For your sake.

IDK, I thought BOTW's implementation of an open world was far better than, for example, Skyrim's

The game designers did a truly fantasic job with botw. Think how much time is invested in creating game assets these days and often the designs merely replicate cliches which have been seen a million times. Doing some reseach and drawing inspiration from ancient cultures adds a whole new dimension to the game.

A great design job indeed. Both, BOTW and TOTK have a beautiful environment. I really wish Nintendo would create a mod without monsters, perhaps something focused more on nature, places and artifacts. My kids love to explore Hyrule but are afraid of monsters and fights :)

I only just recently been into BOTW (well technically last christmas but only played a few days in january) and went back to it last month. You can totally play and explore for a long time while avoiding most fights. Just keep some wood and silex to sleep during the night and avoid the random bats and skeleton creatures.

Sure, or you can stay in villages (that's what my kids do) or in other "safe zones" (marked in unofficial maps). Still, I think it would be nice to have some kind of a peaceful mod.

I had similar feelings about Far Cry 5. My son would have loved exploring, driving, flying, fishing, spotting wildlife… but at his age the violence made it useless. A mode that removed all the guns and bad guys would have been awesome.

I used to play a modded copy of GTA 5 with my son that removed all the violence and you would teleport into cars instead of stealing them. My son would have me ride the street car with him, drive in the sewers, drive to the farm and look for tractors. It's a really great city simulator with mods.

It's Zelda tradition :) I used to love "Zelda" when I was a kid, and I would always run around the sunny home island in Wind Waker on the Gamecube. When I went to play "Zelda" at my cousin's house, it was Majora's Mask on the N64, and I remember it scaring the absolute shit out of me!

Wear Majora's Mask and most monsters will just ignore you.

The art style in Zelda Switch games is certainly interesting but the game world is mostly just empty space dotted with the same couple dozen assets that have been reskinned and recycled.

The "grade inflation" that Nintendo fans bestow upon every title the company creates is frustrating, and there's a lot of toxic positivity that drowns out true criticisms. The Zelda Switch titles are nowhere close to 10/10 games.

>"grade inflation"/"toxic positivity"

This is probably true of me (for BOTW/TOTK) from the position of a hard-core gamer or game critic, and itt stems from where I am in life. I am not looking for a super innovative/blem free game. I am looking for something that I can play with my kid and just have a fun time.

I have played a lot of games over the years. I have 250+ hours in every single fallout title (except 76), have completed all Halo storylines, hundreds of hours into each of the HL games, and have completed most of MGS. Most recently I put 80+ hours into Starfield, and another 60+ into Helldivers 2. If you're a hardcore gamer, those are all baby numbers (especially since I played fallout 2 in 1999), but to a non-gamer those numbers probably seem obscene.

All that to say, the 300 hours I have combined between BOTW + TOTK were a truly magical time hanging out with my daughter. I can't explain it more than that.

10 out of 10 games. Zero flaws.

Do you dislike sandbox games in general? BOTW’s map felt really designed to have unique, memorable areas and playtested to be “fair” to me, especially the noob area.

> The "grade inflation" that Nintendo fans bestow upon every title the company creates is frustrating, and there's a lot of toxic positivity that drowns out true criticisms. The Zelda Switch titles are nowhere close to 10/10 games.

BOTW is in my top 5 sandbox adventures for sure. TOTK had some good mechanics, but I think reusing the map was a mistake.

What's the "true criticism"? You've made a couple posts on this page about it that seem to just be "it's overrated" and "they re-use some assets a lot" and "other open-world games exist."

Neither of those are particularly compelling. Did they invent the game style? No. But this is the closest anyone's came to perfecting it. Exploration is encouraged and facilitated, without overloading you with "here are fifty map points of interest all at once." There are harder/deadlier enemies and areas, but you can usually get out easily enough and won't get stuck if you wander there before you're leveled up enough. The mechanics and responsiveness of interaction are super crisp. The inventory is quite well balanced and pretty thorough and allows a good number of different play styles (TOTK especially, obviously).

Not really interested in getting into a Reddit-style back and forth about a game I played and didn't finish like 6 years ago.

::starts online conversation::

::refuses to participate in online conversation::

> Another characteristic feature of Okamoto’s work is the large, stylised eye, incarnated by his “alien named PAIRA” of 1956, which inspired the eye on the Sheikah slate, the player’s tool for altering the environment and interacting with gameplay elements (Fig. 5).

Little nitpick: it's not exactly right to say the design on the Sheikah slate was inspired by this artwork, the eye symbol has long been established as Sheikah, first appearing in 1998 in Ocarina of Time. Though it didn't always have the bright blue color, the shape is basically unchanged.

The eye goes further back than that; the top comment on https://www.reddit.com/r/zeldaconspiracies/comments/c5e8h1/a... has a link to the Link to the Past illustration of Agahnim and the similar eye symbol on his robes. The poster makes the case that they’re not connected lore-wise (I mean, it’s on r/zeldaconspiracies so I imagine there’s a healthy dose of reading a little too much into everything), but in my opinion at least the similarity is strong enough to make a case for an inspiration drawn from the same source that far back.

I wonder if the Paira alien sculpture inspired Starro from DC Comics (who first appeared in 1960). It certainly inspired a race known as the Pairans who appear in the kaiju film Warning from Space.

I'm not sure that I believe in the author's conclusion that these Japanese cultural inspirations represent a pivot for the Zelda series towards more focus on Japanese cultural heritage in line with the "Cool Japan" policy. Nintendo's works have always been rooted in Japanese culture with Western elements mixed in for universal appeal. Both the Mario and Zelda franchises draw heavily from that titan of the East Asian canon, Journey to the West -- with Bowser being modelled on the Ox King and Ganon being based on the pig demon Zhu Bajie. Some of Mario's transformations are based on Japanese folklore about trickster animals -- the tanuki suit, the use of the leaf, and so forth. The Jōmon artifact inspiration really serves to add that next level of mystery in a manner that would be instantly evocative of "ancient precursors" to a Japanese audience.

This is a well-written article, but the title feels overly complicated. It’s just a roundabout way of saying that BotW includes references to Japanese heritage or cultural symbols.

And honestly, which Japanese fantasy game doesn’t? The Dogū, for instance, has been used so much that I barely even notice it as a reference anymore!

I know virtually nothing about gaming culture. But eons ago was interested in Japanese pottery. My understanding then was the start of Japanese culture in 300 ad with importation of styles and language from Korea. I have no memory of the Jomon period. But now that long stable period snd uniquely Japanese culture from the Jomon period seems a vital strand of Japanese culture. Do the article is interesting to bring that to life in a gaming context.

> I have no memory of the Jomon period.

You're not the only one with no memory of 300bc. My memory fails me too.

Also I went to a local Viking fair and it was like walking around Hyrule.

> Dogū from Tajirikabukuri, Ebisuda, Miyagi Prefecture (1,000–400 BCE)

If you think that looks similar in Breath of the Wild, wait until you start looking at Digimon.

https://wikimon.net/Shakkoumon

Which goes to a larger point: this influence isn’t specific to Breath of the Wild, or Legend of Zelda, or even video games. Manga and anime are filled to the brim with these references and inspirations. And not just legends or ancient places, but everyday locations.

https://japantour.xyz/2022/06/22/27-real-life-anime-location...

Hello! I am one of the editors of the Journal of Geek Studies, where the article posted by the OP is from. There is actually another article in our site that discuss the Dogū presence in multiple japanese media, that I recomend the read! https://jgeekstudies.org/2018/05/19/dogu-from-prehistoric-fi... Cheers!

This is why nintendo endures.

2013: The Death Of Nintendo Has Been Greatly Under-Exaggerated

https://techcrunch.com/2013/09/04/nintendont/

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