Sometimes the greatest secrets in games aren’t those hidden in a place where most players would never think to look, locked behind a complex button input, or buried deep within a game’s code. Sometimes, they are in plain sight. I would probably never have figured out that the poses of the monks in Breath of the Wild‘s Trial of the Sword reference the sages in Ocarina of Time on my own, despite the fact that they are all openly displayed.
The last place I expected to make another discovery like this was The Wind Waker, a game I have been playing for almost 17 years. It’s the game that keeps on giving.
Before Link places the three Goddess Pearls into the hands of the statues on the Triangle Islands, causing them to explode and expose the true Goddess Statues, the outer shells of these sculptures resemble creatures from another Nintendo game, Pikmin.
The Pikmin franchise was still quite new at the time of The Wind Waker’s December 2002 Japanese release, with the original game having launched just a year before in October 2001. The first Pikmin game had only three different species of the critters, based on the primary colors: red, yellow, and blue. This was a natural fit for The Legend of Zelda’s Din, Nayru, and Farore, who were also an iconic trio.
The statue shells each have a pole sticking out of their head, resembling the stem and leaf on the heads of Pikmin. Each one also shares the unique facial features of each Pikmin species, as you can see below.
This isn’t the only time that these two fantastic Nintendo worlds have collided, either, as the Puffstool enemies in The Minish Cap are taken right out of the original Pikmin. It makes sense, considering that both games share themes of tiny creatures.
This has not only made me love The Wind Waker even more, but I am also now more desperate than ever for a new Pikmin experience. Let’s hope that Pikmin 4 is finally announced at this year’s E3 presentation.
