14 DAY TRIAL // Eiji Aonuma may have started a bit of a frenzy in us when he said that we should look forward to the next installment in the Zelda franchise and its detailed presentation at this year's E3, but he left us with a cold shoulder after that. Not much has been heard from the title since, and gamers are getting more and more frustrated by the wait.
But rumors have begun to fly around the Internet, and a lot of details on gameplay and concepts of the game appear to have been leaked. Posted on the Japanese message board 2chan, these unconfirmed rumors are made believable to some degree by respecting what Aonuma promised, that being that there would be some structure changes to the new Zelda. So let the rumor count begin.
The first one is that the gameplay line will be changed from that of dungeon-field-dungeon, but while it tells us what it won't be, what it doesn't reveal is what it will be, so this is something we already knew. Moving on, it would seem that Nintendo has already wrapped up both the gameplay and the basic components for the title, and has now moved on to the story and characters, one of which is supposed to be an innkeeper in Link's home village, whose son looks up to Link. He will probably follow us, get himself into trouble, and it will be up to us to save the adventurous, little midget.
The next rumor is about the girl featured in the official art, and if we give it credence, then she is not the Master Sword, which apparently won't even be present in the game. The girl's name could be either Adelle, Adella or Aderu, from which we can speculate that these pieces of information, if true, were leaked by word-of-mouth. As far as Link goes, his sword will have several unlockable abilities and it will also serve as a communication medium between Link and the mysterious girl.
Players will also be able to select whether they're right-handed or not, something that will be reflected in-game. Epona will return and there will be horseback combat, where she'll have learned, this time around, to avoid obstacles on its own. As for the story, that's supposedly still being worked on, as Link may have direct involvement with The Hero of Time, and we'll even be able to time-travel. The rumor rundown ends around here, but these pieces of information shouldn't be swallowed just yet. While most of them fit our expectations, with the rest being very plausible, Nintendo doesn't really have a history in leaked info, so at least some of them, if not all, could turn out to be bogus.