What also bugs me about the Link's Awakening...

vezouta asked:

What also bugs me about the Link’s Awakening switch graphics is the original game had Bulldog Moblins AND Pig Moblins, the remake removed the bulldog moblins so now we just have Pig Moblins, lame Nintendo.

(In regards to this post.)

I didn’t know about that - that is disappointing!

I was ready to get all huffy about how rising costs of graphical fidelity often mean we lose artistic variety along the way, but after looking into this it seems like a much more interesting problem. Maybe you knew all this, but it was news to me - apparently moblins were originally bulldog-like but after a few games became more pig-like. The original Link’s Awakening is one of the few games on the cusp of the transition and so features both the bulldog moblins and pig moblins.

I’d assumed the remake dropped the bulldog moblins to save costs, but it looks like they still get their own model, it just also looks pig-like. You can see on the Zelda wiki - the formerly-bulldog moblins are the current default page image for the Moblin article, while the pig ones are the page image for Pig Warrior.

So this isn’t about costs or laziness - it’s about artistic direction. When Link’s Awakening was first made, moblins could look like either bulldogs or pigs - but for a long time now, they’ve only looked like pigs. I can understand why Nintendo would decide to update the design to bring it in line with what most people today know moblins to be, but I get why it bugs you and I do find myself wishing they’d taken a different approach.