The Legend of Zelda is one of the most famous video game franchises in the world. Despite the misunderstandings generated by the title and the fact that the main character is called Link, its characters are well known and loved by the general public. This doesn’t mean that the saga doesn’t have a good handful of quite peculiar characters. That’s what we’re going to talk about today. Of the strangest characters, when not directly insane, that populate Hyrule and all the worlds we have visited by the hand of Link and Zelda. Because although it may not seem so, this is a world full of peculiar characters.
Salvatore
Few things are funnier than a man who is unnecessarily serious. A boring man, who doesn’t make sense to be there, but somehow, doesn’t clash at all with everything he does. And that’s Salvatore’s role in The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker and The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass: to be strangely hilarious in his utter lack of enthusiasm for his work.
Salvatore, a man with a blank stare and minimal mustaches, is in charge of the Sink the Fleet and Cannon Game mini-games who always greets us with a bored and disinterested gesture. But when he has to explain the games to us, he impersonates other characters in the game, pirate captains or damsels in distress, all with wooden cutouts with a hole in which to fit his face. He shouts. He voices. He changes his accent and the way he speaks. But not his enthusiasm. Salvatore always comes across as bored and completely disinterested in what’s going on happening. On the other hand, that’s exactly why we like him. He never stops being funny even though, in reality, we know he’s still looking for another idea to take on.
Skull Kid
The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask is a game that many of us still remember today with a mixture of reverence and dread. Its setting was strange, it was full of mystery and its main antagonist during most of the game, Skull Kid, made everything even stranger. Child-sized, colorfully dressed and very mischievous, influenced by Majora’s Mask, he seeks to bring down the Moon in order to destroy Thermina. But the strangest thing of all is that Skull Kid is not the only skull kid in the franchise, because they are a whole species.
Usually found in the Lost Forest, a labyrinthine forest where the pedestal of time where the master sword is hidden, it is said that adults who die in the forest become skeletons and children become skull kids. Kind to children and hostile to adults, something that is represented in how they are friendly with Link as a child and attack him as an adult, are one of the great mysteries of the Zelda saga. A recurring species, with importance in the lore, but the more we know about them, the more mysterious and distant they seem to us.
The ghost hunter
Although it is always said that the darkest game is Majora’s Mask, it is undeniable that Ocarina of Time also has some disturbing aspects. Ultimately, after Ganondorf gains the power of the Triforce, no one in the village of Hyrule Castle can live there anymore, except for one person: the ghost hunter. A mysterious character who makes a living selling ghosts and loves to create trouble.
But who is this character? The game never makes it clear. But everything seems to point to the fact that he is probably the gentleman who remains standing exactly where the ghost hunter is sitting seven years later. He is a knight who encourages you to break vases and who wears clothes with the triforce symbol, just like the ghost hunter. If both are located in the same place, wouldn’t it make sense that the impudent and mischievous soldier would become the impudent and mischievous ghost once Ganondorf takes over the place?
Tingle
Finally, we have to talk about the strangest character of the franchise. The man who has starred in two of his own games. Who has appeared in almost all the installments. Who’s very appearance has caused countless nightmares, who’s obsession with forest fairies is disturbing, and who, despite working as a cartographer, seems more qualified as a lowly inventor than a geographer. We speak, of course, of Tingle.
This 35-year-old Hylian made his first appearance in Majora’s Mask and since then has not stopped appearing in one way or another. Believing himself to be the true reincarnation of a fairy, as Zelda is the reincarnation of the legendary hero, he’s always comic relief, sometimes in the form of an ally, sometimes in the form of a minor antagonist, as well as the originator of the phrase “kurulin…PA!”. Essentially, a romanization of the Japanese phrase “kuruinpa”, the sound the Japanese make to say that someone is cuckoo. Something that already tells us everything about what we should think about the strangest man in all of Hyrule.
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