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The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap is celebrating its 20-year anniversary today, January 10, 2025. Below, we look back at how the team came up with a playful sense of scale as its central hook.
The Legend of Zelda series is filled with dynamics that stretch and alter the world of Hyrule. Whether it be going back in time or into a realm of darkness, these add a new element of exploration that you wouldn’t see in a peaceful Hyrule. The goal with many of these design choices was to inspire wonder–to give players a reason to explore familiar areas they’ve seen several times before. The Minish Cap’s shrinking feature is one of the best examples of The Legend of Zelda designers achieving that goal.
Recent games like Tinykin, It Takes Two, and Grounded have explored what it’s like to explore the world while tiny, but few have created the dichotomy that The Minish Cap had with its shrinking feature. It encouraged fascination with the mundane–anything and everything could be hiding Link’s next discovery.
“When we started thinking about what that gimmick could be for Minish Cap, first, we knew it couldn’t be that far-removed or out-there from the world of Zelda,” said The Minish Cap director Hidemaro Fujibayashi in a 2004 interview in Nintendo Dream magazine. “I started thinking, what feature[s] of these game worlds could we possibly expand on, what dimension could we explore? “Front and Reverse, Past and Future, Light and Darkness… we’d done all these before, but could some other pairing remain? I racked my brain until I realized–ah hah, if we make Link small, that would be like entering a whole ‘nother world within his own.”
The Minish Cap’s hallmark shrinking feature led to an overworld that was absolutely packed with puzzles to solve. Its clever use throughout the game make it one of the best examples of The Legend of Zelda designers inspiring wonder, and it’s an aspect of the game that still stands out 20 years later.
While individual dungeons and the overworld are packed with fascinating content to explore, the mere idea that an entire village could be hidden inside a tree or rock inspires a Breath of the Wild-like sense of wonder that was somehow accomplished with 2004 technology.
In Capcom’s The Legend of Zelda adventure, the world of Hyrule has tiny beings called the Minish packed into stumps, under rocks, and in dozens of other places across the kingdom. These Minish are everywhere, even under the snoozing nose of a shoemaker. Link and the rest of Hyrule have never heard of these creatures, making further discovery of how they live a wonderful story thread to pull on.
The Minish Cap lets you yank on that thread early on in your adventure, shortly after peril comes to Hyrule. Soon after the villain of the entry, Vaati, unleashes a horde of monsters across Hyrule, Link travels to The Minish Woods to find the Minish, retrieve four elemental stones, restore the sword of legend, and restore Hyrule and a Zelda, the latter of whom has been turned to stone.
Much of this is standard Zelda flare, although the leadup to discovering the Minish for the first time establishes the larger-than-life level design that will fill the rest of the game.
Link’s new sidekick, Ezlo, shrinks him down using a portal found in The Minish Woods, eventually leading him through logs, over drifting pondweed, and around life-size sticks and acorns to find the miniature race of people who would kick off the rest of his adventure.
Looking back, this moment doesn’t seem incredibly impressive on its own, but its ingenuity is found in how it sets up the rest of the game. Navigating the small platforming section and keeping an eye out for areas that can only be explored while small is what, as Zelda producer Eiji Aonuma said, turns the entire overworld into something just as challenging as the series’ trademark dungeons.
“Dungeons have a certain limited format to them, right? Find keys, advance further, defeat the boss,” Aonuma said. “In contrast, the outside world, the field map, can offer more multifaceted gameplay.”
Kinstone fragments scattered across the overworld feel like standard collectibles at first, but they amount to more by unlocking other areas of the map. Find two of the same type, fuse them, and the classic Zelda discovery jingle will play–meaning a new path opens up, a chest is revealed, or something similar happens.
Many of these Kinstones are found within puzzles that require you to shrink down and climb a bookcase, run across bakery shelves, or even dodge gigantic raindrops: simple acts that give you an entirely new angle through which to view Hyrule.
“Collecting the fragments opens up areas far from your current location,” Aonuma said. “In a sense, this makes the overworld map itself act like one big dungeon.”
This sense of wonder came from Capcom’s goal to shift away from their design approach on Oracle of Ages, Oracle of Seasons, and Four Swords. While they ended up building off of the Gnat Hat–an item that shrunk Link down in Four Swords–they wanted to replicate Nintendo’s approach to Zelda by focusing on worldbuilding. In doing so, they just happened to create an amazing world that came from posing a simple question: What’s hidden beneath and within all the familiar workings of Lake Hylia and Lon Lon Ranch?
“We wanted to make a ‘mainline’ traditional 2D Zelda game. Traversing overworld maps, exploring dungeons. The essence of Zelda,” Fujibayashi said. “I see it as following in the steps of the Famicom Zelda and A Link to the Past, but a more powered-up version for today’s hardware.”
Exploring cracks in rocks and tiny holes in the side of cottages in 2004 is the equivalent of scaling the side of the mountain in Breath of the Wild in 2017. The biggest contrast is the technology, as Capcom worked within the parameters of Game Boy Advance hardware in order to instill a magic that could be felt through a 2.9-inch screen. That tiny, mystical world hidden amongst fantastic combat and puzzles makes The Minish Cap one of the most memorable Zelda games today,
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Kurt Indovina
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