Since the dawn of civilization, humankind has grappled with many poignant philosophical questions. Mainly the humankind rich enough to not be thinking of starvation instead, but the point stands. Deep, inescapable ponderings such as "What is our purpose in life?", "Why should we go on living?", and "Why do kids love the taste of Cinnamon Toast Crunch?" I don't pretend to have the answers to such questions. Except of course: Because there's cinnamon sugar swirls in every bite. That…is why we should go on living. But there is a far more important question that I'm here to answer today. And that question is…Which Link is the Stinkiest?
'Tis a question that has plagued The Legend of Zelda franchise, since the ancient days when Plato challenged Aristotle to beat his high score at Link's Crossbow Training. Adventuring is smelly work! You think the Hero of Time stopped by CVS to nab a stick of Cool Rush deodorant? No! That dude literally aged seven years without stopping to sleep! Or eat. But this isn't Which Link is the Most Malnourished, so let's stop stalling and settle the stench subject!
The Legend of Zelda
The first game doesn't have much in the way of odorous occurrences, but you can be swallowed by a Like-Like. These counter-intuitively named monstrosities are like short fat worms that digest your shield and spit you up like used chewing gum. But this isn't the only appearance of Like-Likes, and more importantly, getting caught by one isn't guaranteed. If a player was better at the game than you, Kevin, then you might complete your whole adventure with nary a single torturous tummy tour. This makes Like-Likes a Quantum Stink Event, and I'm not qualified to evaluate those until I complete my Master's. Doesn't count!
Plus, this is back when the Like-Likes look-looked like forbidden pancakes rather than an oozing intestine.
Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link
This features the same Link as the first game, and offers a similarly stank-free odyssey. We don’t even see the Like-Likes this time, and none of the enemies, items or bosses are noticeably nose-scrunching. This leaves but a trifling two sources of scent-souring left among our creatively-named sequel. First: The titular princess spends this entire game in an enchanted sleep, and I don’t spend much time with coma patients, but that sure don’t sound like an enchanted shower. Second: You do at one point just straight up pocket a child. For some reason the game doesn’t spend time explaining how dirty or smelly they are, but there’s a reason you can’t find Aroma de Adolescence at your local perfume parlor.
Small human being? Easy transport. More than four bottles? Impossibly heavy load.
Link’s Awakening
Before we bother archiving all the assorted aromas Link approached on this adventure, I'm going to have to spoil the entire plot. For you see, that smorgasbord of smells your nose was remembering? They're imaginary. Yes, that's right, Link's Awakening is the less disappointing spin on Super Mario Bros 2. It was all a dream! And in rules so well-established in the olfactory research community that I surely don't need to go into them: dream smells don't count. So what does the real Link smell like? Well, he's been adrift in the ocean on a plank of wood for Hylia knows how long, and his friend Marin reincarnated as a creature known mostly for pooping and eating sand-covered trash. Could be better.
No I don’t care about how he gets back to land, I care about how much detergent I need to buy before he gets here.
A Link to the Past
This is the game that codified the Zelda formula, this is the triumph of the Super Nintendo, this is the blueprint for an entire sub-genre of video games, this…does not give me much to work with. There's a lengthy litany of love you could lob in the lap of LttP, but as an odorous odyssey it's a bit bog standard. Though speaking of bogs, there's a pile of eyeballs at the bottom of one, and that's gotta be worth a twitch of the nose. But it can't carry the whole game on its own, which is a shame, because Link to the Stink is right there.
So if I’m following the math correctly, this guy could’ve written 13 blog posts last year?
Ocarina of Time
I don’t even have a witty remark here, I’m too busy marveling at the fact this was rated E for Everyone.
This one depends a lot on a key question: Does traveling through time erase your smell? Because child Link dives deep inside of a giant fish infested with parasitic worms. That boy is PEAK STANK. But when he leaps forward, is he magically reformed or just like, chilling in a coma with Rauru? Because if it's the latter, then we have to smell the entirety of puberty too. I mean, Rauru's gotta give him a bath at that point, right? Not like he's got much else to do, now that he's out of protagonists to exposit to. Though bath or no, there is one saving grace for adult Link: In the time period he arrives, the average citizen…
...sets a pretty low bar for stench.
Majora's Mask
One might think the cross-species stink spectrum of these magical masks would showcase surprising new smell-spectives. But consider: One is a plant, and one is a rock. We don't know where on the range of corpse flower to daffodil the Deku lie, but gravel ain't particularly odorous. The real problem comes with the Zora mask. Ya’ ever smelled raw fish? Ya’ ever smelled a bassist? Yeah, I'm not touching that piscatorial performer with a twelve-foot hookshot. And don't get me started on the man who lives inside a toilet.
Pictured: Affordable housing in this economy.
Oracle of Seasons\Ages
A duo of similarly mediocre stench. Ages gets another trip through a fish belly, albeit a cleaner one. But Seasons get a boiling underground lava cave populated by dudes who won't take off their full-body robes. Y'know what they both have? Ricky the Kangaroo. And yes, I know, he's very cute. However: You're sat in the skin flap of a large rat. Really colors the perspective, huh?
Sorry I just ruined Kangaskhan for you.
Wind Waker
Wind Waker begins promisingly pungent, from populating pig pens to packed-in with pirates and being pitched straight into porcine prison. But though the rest of your salt-scented sailing is beset by the occasional rancid rat or reeking ReDead, no single smell stands out as severely sickening. Although it is the game that introduced multiple Tingles, and that's gotta bump up the score.
There are many questions Tingle Tower raises. How’d they build it? Where did the others come from? But the most pressing is: What god would allow this?
Four Swords Adventures
And just like that, we have the last game with multiple Tingles. A strong stench to start, but it highlights a problem with this adventure's aroma: It's all been sniffed before. There isn't an ounce of original odor in this game, and when you're just rehashing ideas from the rest of your games, you're not going to include the gross weird ones. This one's likely surpassed by your real-life multiplayer musk.
Or the musk of waking up in the middle of the night, remembering that there are four Tingles.
Minish Cap
The small can smell, and your treacherous treks through ticks and trash are no doubt proportionately pungent no matter how puny. But let's cut the wee whiffs for now, because we have a more alarming anomaly perched upon our protagonist: Ezlo. Ezlo can speak. Ezlo has a mouth. A mouth means vocal cords. A mouth means spit. But the question is: Does a mouth mean we must make a two-way exit? We never see the inside of our bird-beaked buddy. Is Link…wearing a cloaca?...Minish Cap is saved some points on uncertainty, because no one wants to check.
Cranial anus. Downstairs crown. Bottom noggin. Booty noodle. Stinker thinker...yeah okay I’m done.
Twilight Princess
We could talk about the farm work, or the sumo wrestling, or the girl whose room you fill with insects, but let's just address the elephant in the twilight realm: You spend a third of this entire game as a dog. And I love dogs. I've had many dogs. But people who've had dogs can attest: Eventually, all dogs become smelly dogs. And our dogs were just rolling around in the yard, not a literal, haunted sewer. Gonna take a lot more than a Goron hot spring to wash off that one.
If you were to ask for the three smelliest words in the English language, “Undead Sewer Rat” would be pretty up there.
Phantom Hourglass
Look, I’m gonna level with you all. I haven’t really thought about Phantom Hourglass since I reviewed it on this blog an actual decade ago. And when I reviewed it a decade ago, I repeatedly called it forgettable. I got NOTHING on this one. Um...erm...L-Linebeck? Remember Linebeck guys? The only memorable character in Phantom Hourglass? He probably smells, right? Yeah. Yeah! A scummy con artist type, spends most of his time at sea, I bet he stinks a little. Okay, good enough, let’s move on.
The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass. It was sure a game!
Spirit Tracks
Once again we must consider the olfactory implications of sleeping beauty. Zelda spends most of this game a spectral spectator due to vicious villains ejecting her essence per plans of pressing possession. And I don’t think demonic body snatchers consider giving their hosts a spin cycle like you would a new jacket. More unique to this game is the focus on trains, with you spending much of the game in the engine room of one. A coal-coated hotbox surely chafes on the nostrils. Maybe not as much as our more supernatural smells, but you don’t see anyone keeping a flower garden near the furnace.
*Sniff*...”Cole, did you not rinse this body before giving it to me? Did Byrne skip on the dry cleaning again?”
Skyward Sword
Skyward Sword marks a magnificently malodorous milestone in the Legend of Zelda series: The introduction of crafting materials. No longer limited to the sparse selection of a few bottle-sized bits and bobs, the 2010s crafting craze is here to bog down your bag with bunches of bullshit! From slimes to skulls to dung beetles, though it’s not the largest crafting inventory, it certainly has the aromatic quality. Or lack thereof. No matter how much skydiving you do, you’d be hard pressed to air out a pocketful of hornet larvae.
I gotta wonder, like...why though? This could’ve been a flower, honey itself, heck, the later games make it honeycomb. Nope, can’t be a hero without a fistful of wriggling LARVAE.
Link Between Worlds
Link Between Worlds features the same world as a Link to the Past. This means the same map, the same dark world, the same enemies, the same smells. So to determine how putrid or pleasant its people and places are, we need only to look back to that section. To quote my segment on A Link to the Past:
“the game”
Wow, incredible! So that’s settled, but there are some differences between this venerable video game and its Hyrulean heir. For one, though both display a cornucopia of cyclopean creatures, LBW ditches the boss that’s just 14 eyeballs suspended in swamp-water. You’d think that would give LttP the upper-nose, but LBW also features the return of crafting materials. And though it narrows them down to just three, it introduces what might be the all-time all-star of all aromatic atrocities: Monster Guts. That’s right. You kill a hideous beast, rip out its still-pulsating internal organs, than stuff it into your bag with another fifty of them. Frankly, that smells for itself.
Imagine you look inside someones valuables, like a jewelry box, and find it stuffed with say, the entrails of a pig. You’re suddenly gonna be REAL busy whenever they want to hang out.
Triforce Heroes
The only thing stinky about this one is its single-player mode.
Breath of the Wild
We’ve already established that crafting materials hit the heavenly heights of foulest fragrances, and Breath-
No Really Though, Triforce Heroes
Alright alright, fine. You want me to be honest? Out of the twenty mainline Zelda games, Triforce Heroes is the only one I still haven’t completed. The aforementioned mechanical manslaughter of a single-player campaign was so off-putting I never put it back in my 3DS. Now you might say, “who cares, most of these entries are based on like a single subjective data point, just google some characters and items until you can point out a smelly one”. And ignoring the fact that I totally did that for at least one other entry, I say where’s the INTEGRITY?! This is an Internet Article About Things That Might Smell In a Video Game with standards, thank you very much. And I’m willing to sacrifice the thousands of dollars in ad revenue I definitely would get for pandering on this ad-free blog for the sake of my rank-wrangling reputation.
Pictured: Just about everything I’ve seen from this video game.
Breath of the Wild
We’ve already established that crafting materials hit the heavenly heights of foulest fragrances, and Breath of the Wild may be that mechanic’s putrescent peak. You think monster guts were bad? Try several different kinds of monster guts, and dozens of types of raw meat and fish, and dozens of live bugs, and durians and toenails and teeth and...look, is this even a contest? Can we whiff a wrap-up soon? Because the contents of this boy’s bag are so terrifyingly trashy that I can’t possibly imagine a game as gastronomically god-awful. Though I guess we’re close enough to the end that I’ll launch into a futile finale to find a funk as foul as this one.
The item description literally calls it a pile of smelly, quivering guts. I rest my case. Preferably somewhere far away from Link.
Tears of the Kingdom
Wait a minute, this one is just Breath of the Wild again.
No seriously, did you even realize the last image was from Tears of the Kingdom?
I mean granted, Breath of the Wild with 2.5 times the map and many times the hover-bike, but I don’t smell many differences for our pungent purposes. What changes could it possibly provide that surpass this iconic inventory of grotesquely gross garbage? A higher stank quantity it may be, but I think you’ve truly hit a noxious nadir when both games feature the character Kilton.
I don’t even need to explain this guys backstory. He’s a fart cloud in human form.
Echoes of Wisdom
Technically Link is the deuteragonist-in-distress this go-around, which means we can ignore all of Zelda’s adventurous aromas. It’s just as well though, as despite being able to summon monsters by the bucket there’s nothing new to the nose in their number. And though Link’s magic-kidnapping-crystal doesn’t come equipped with a bath, it looks surprisingly sterile. A frustratingly fresh finale devoid of dubiously dank debris.
“So are you going to let me out to pee?”
“Of course not!”
“So I’m just going to like, fill this thing up with urine? Drown in it?”
“What?! No! God no, you just – you don’t have to pee in the crystal! It’s magic!”
“You thought of that in advance? Is it like, gonna build up and fill a tub when I get out?”
“I liked it better when you didn’t talk.”
Conclusion
And so our odoriferous odyssey comes to a close. But those whose eyes are as acute as their nostrils will spot a particularly prickly point in our premise: There’s still no winner! Both Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom were similarly stinky enough to score full marks on our Stank-o-meter! Yet although these twin titans take the same tier of tear-inducing, the crown champion of cesspools is actually quite clear. Because though I could go enemy by enemy, pitting Blights against Boss Bokoblins and Shrine Monks against Sludge-Likes, it ultimately all comes down to a game of numbers.
In Breath of the Wild, Link wakes up from stasis after 100 years. A pretty long period to pickle, no? But in Tears of the Kingdom (spoilers ahead), we have both Ganondorf, Zelda and Link’s arm at an astounding age of 10,000 years. That puts this Triforce at two-and-one-arm-thirds of peak pee-yew, the shining summit of stench, a ridiculously resplendent ripeness no human nose could comprehend. Let me try and do what the writers clearly did not, and put that number into context: These people have been around almost twice as long as the oldest known writing in human civilization. And in all that time, all those countless centuries of dizzying decay, not once did any so much as spot a singular speck of soap.
The Stinkiest Link...is from Tears of the Kingdom.
…
...yes, that’s the whole conclusion. You’re the one who kept reading after “Quantum Stink Event”, it’s not like you didn’t have the time to waste.
No comments:
Post a Comment