Month: April 2025

In the long tradition of clickbait titles, I lied. You won’t completely fix Just Cause 4 with this one neat trick. It would help a lot, though.

In Just Cause 4, a major mechanic is that you’re leading an “Army of Chaos” in an uprising against this year’s evil dictator. The Army of Chaos seizes territory from the Black Hand mercenaries employed by the dictator to uphold his regime, and in order to seize that territory, they need two things: First, for you to complete a side mission to weaken the territory, and second, for you to accumulate enough Chaos Points (don’t abbreviate that) to recruit additional squads to your army. You get Chaos Points by destroying Chaos Objects, which are red-painted stuff important to the regime like radar and fuel tanks and which are generally very satisfying to explode, so the game encourages you to both run around blowing stuff up and complete side missions. In friendly territory, the Army of Chaos drives around in hummers spraypainted cyan and magenta, while in enemy territory, the Black Hand drive around in tacticool black hummers and shoot at you. So far, so good – it’s basic open world territory control mechanics with a slightly novel method of shifting territory to friendly hands.

The problem is that there’s also a heat system where the Black Hand spawns reinforcements to chase you, and it’s totally unchanged regardless of what territory you’re in. And while you could fix this as easily as disabling Black Hand reinforcements completely in friendly territory, I think it’d be better to make a bit more nuanced change: Heat no longer increases from killing Black Hand in friendly territory, but does still go up from destroying Chaos Objects. So if you blow up fuel tanks and stuff, the Black Hand will show up to shoot at you, but if you’re in friendly territory, then you can kill all the Black Hand who show up and this will not spawn more/harder reinforcement waves. It’s still weird that the Black Hand spawn deep in friendly territory, but Just Cause is a destructive sandbox, so I think some narrative weirdness is fine. What’s mechanically annoying is that you can’t reliably get heat to go back down once it’s spun up except by running away and hiding out for a while, and there’s no obvious place where that’s effective. Making friendly territory into a safe zone where you can kill any of the Black Hand chasing you without spawning any more would fix this.

Also, it’s annoying how Chaos Objects respawn, especially in friendly territory. Respawning them in enemy territory is fine and helps hedge against it being difficult to find Chaos Objects to blow up to get the squads you need. You only need squads for attacking enemy territory, so if Chaos Objects respawn in enemy territory, then that means that there’s always respawning Chaos Objects lying around to destroy if you need them.

Also, also, the main story missions all require you to liberate the territory where they start from, which is a terrible idea. Being able to get some mild-to-moderate but not overwhelming advantages in main story missions by completing side missions first is fine – you’ll have an easier time completing the main story missions if the territory they take place in or near is full of friendly patrols who will help you instead of enemy patrols who will pile on with the enemies spawned by the mission objectives. Likewise, having some side missions be locked until you’ve completed a main mission is fine – this enemy fortress or that enemy city is involved in the main plot somehow, so we can’t liberate it until we’ve finished the relevant mission. But people shouldn’t be forced to interact with your side content. I guess this might be a “game journalists ruin everything” problem again? Like, maybe in order to get game journalists to review the game in the way it was meant to be played, you have to force them to do that, because if it’s possible to only play the main story content while ignoring the side content (the most important part of an open world sandbox, and that’s something the Just Cause series has traditionally been good at) then they’ll do that and review the game based on one of its less important, lower quality aspects.

I’m speculating, though, it’s also possible that the Just Cause 4 devs just didn’t realize this was a bad idea. After all, the Just Cause 2 devs did all the work of making a sandbox full of destructibles to blow up and then forgot to give any reason to do so nor to make them at all easy to locate, so there wasn’t really anything to do except follow the main story and blow up Chaos Objects whenever you happened to bump into them. They put in all the work to do the hard parts of making a fun open world sandbox but then didn’t do the much easier task of making the destructible objects easy to locate and provide some benefit for destroying them, so the game wound up as a mediocre linear third-person shooter instead. Just Cause 4 isn’t that bad, but it’s similar in how it could be a lot better with a few tweaks that would’ve taken less than a month to patch in, maybe even less than a week.

In the Legend of Zelda series, Link, Zelda, and Ganon continuously reincarnate to do battle with one another as chosen ones of the Triforce of Courage, Wisdom, and Power, respectively. I like the idea of an epic saga of heroes and villains battling each other across the ages, but the Legend of Zelda has infamously done a very poor job of actually delivering that due to the timeline snarl caused by making no less than four games that call back directly to Ocarina of Time (Wind Waker, Majora’s Mask, Twilight Princess, and Link to the Past – in the latter case, it’s Ocarina of Time being a prequel rather than the other game being a sequel, but it contributes to the problem in the exact same way). Nintendo doesn’t want their options for storytelling or game mechanics constrained by existing lore, which is wise, although they then tried to cram everything into a single continuity (with multiple timelines) anyway, which was not wise.

But this kind of thing happens a lot. Stories grow organically in a way that eventually becomes contradictory and confused, at which point someone comes along to write a Le Morte d’Arthur or Book of Invasions or something, unifying the stories together into a more satisfying whole that comes from knowing in advance what all the chapters of the story were going to be, instead of making them up one at a time. Unfortunately, copyright law prevents someone from meaningfully doing that. I can say “Wind Waker works just as well as the sequel to any more typical example of a Zelda game, it doesn’t need to be Ocarina of Time specifically and the timeline gets much easier to clean up if we move it,” and I can say “Link to the Past works better as a full replacement for the original Legend of Zelda rather than a prequel, which I’m 70% sure is what the devs originally intended (there’s a couple of reasons to think LttP being a prequel was a very late decision in development), and that means we have to rework the Adventure of Link, but that game was terrible so either culling it from the timeline completely or giving it a bottom-up remake would be a good idea anyway,” and I can say “Tears of the Kingdom’s depiction of early Hyrule as visually distinct and more late stone age/early bronze age compared to the high medieval aesthetic of TotK proper is good and early games in the timeline like Skyward Sword and Ocarina of Time would be better if they followed this aesthetic,” but I can’t actually try to rally support for a version of the Zelda timeline that does any of this. Well, I can try, but the fact that it can never be official, in a legally enforceable way, means the project is doomed to failure.

But I can still wring a blogpost out of one of the aspects of it I’ve been thinking about lately: Giving each of the three reincarnating heroes a different method of reincarnation.

Zelda keeps the original method of reincarnation. The Hyrule royal line periodically produces a female heir with an uncanny similar appearance to the goddess Hylia. As she grows, she intuits things that her previous incarnations knew without having to be taught them. Because she is drawing on many lifetimes of experience, things which Zelda does a lot – like governance and magic – she masters to a level that ordinary humans are incapable of. She’s way past the upper elbow on the time-practicing:improved-skill S-curve, so she’s not ten times as good at these things for having ten times as much practice, but she is better than anyone else alive.

As the chosen of the Triforce of Wisdom, Zelda retains her knowledge and experience from past lives, despite her early upbringing giving her noticeably different (but still clearly similar) personalities. Twilight Princess Zelda still has a fundamental compassion for others and love for her people and country, but she’s a lot more cold and calculating. Ocarina of Time Zelda is much more proactive and adventurous while retaining Twilight Princesses’ mission-focused attitude, while Wind Waker Zelda is adventurous in a fun-loving, free-spirited way. Skyward Sword Zelda is more optimistic and happier. These kinds of changes are to be expected from an individual at different stages of their life, though. Someone who’s been in a certain environment for a long time has their baseline experience and personality changed by that environment, not to the point where everyone subject to the same environment becomes the exact same person, but certainly to the point where someone’s personality can noticeably change based on getting a much better or much worse job. Skyward Sword Zelda and Ocarina Zelda are the same person, but Skyward Zelda lived secure on a floating island surrounded by friends and family who loved her while Ocarina Zelda spent seven years personally trying to hold Hyrule together as off-brand Batman after Ganon’s coup while Link was in time stasis and it kind of crushed the fun out of her.

Ganon is just straight-up immortal. No matter how much damage you inflict on him, he absolutely will not die. The Seven Sages tried their damndest after Ocarina of Time, and it just wouldn’t stick. Ganondorf’s immortality is the most straightforwardly effective way of being preserved across timelines. Lacking Zelda’s regular resets means that Ganondorf is much more prone to a malaise in which he bangs his head against the same problem for a hundred years, but it also allows him to personally pursue goals and micromanage things for decades or centuries without his mental capacities waning, let alone dying. Zelda’s reincarnation into a royal line positions her to simultaneously be a consistent guiding force for Hyrule while also making her responsive to the changing conditions – she has an intuitive understanding of and muscle memory for things she’s practiced in the past, but she does not retain full memories, which means she isn’t tied down by commitments to previous ambitions the way Ganondorf is. Ganondorf gets fixated on a single plan for 100+ years at a time, which means he and his Gerudo subjects can pursue 100+ year plans with much lower risk of the plan being abandoned halfway through compared to most other nations, but it also means that they’re nailed to Ganondorf’s plan until either it succeeds or Ganondorf is willing to admit defeat, and that can lead to a lot of squandered time. Zelda is better at guiding people through changing times, but Ganondorf is better at building political will and physical infrastructure for megaprojects.

Ganondorf’s immortality is also why he’s uniquely capable of mastering the sacred realm/dark realm, and yet the Seven Sages want to imprison him there at the end of Ocarina of Time anyway. It’s not a safe place for people to be, especially long term, which means it will repeatedly destroy Ganondorf’s body in a way that will keep him occupied for a long time, and after efforts to flat-out execute him failed, pushing him through the door and locking it behind him was the next best thing – but eventually, the immortal Ganondorf figures out how to bend it to his will. When Ganondorf returns from the sacred realm, it is with the power to turn into Ganon, an ability which is a terrible curse that slowly kills most people who use it (Link halfway died to it when the half-corrupted Sacred Realm’s magic werewolf’d him in Twilight Princess – although, to be clear, that is 100% a retcon I am proposing to tie that game into a saga of continuous corruption of a single magical otherworld, rather than the canon, where new magical otherworlds with slightly different properties get invented for different games), but Ganon can’t die, so he can do it whenever and it’s only a problem to the extent that his monstrous rampages might do more harm than good to his long term schemes, which is why he tends to resort to Ganon form only after his long term schemes are crumbling anyway.

Link is the inheritor of a legacy. Link is not immortal. Every Link is a different person, and you can give them a different name and design them as different characters (in the actual real games, you can do the first but not the second – under this retcon, you could have a character creator in Zelda games, which would be fun, especially for the vast majority of them that do not give any particular personality to Link, the silent protagonist). Fi, the spirit inside the Master Sword, runs a meritocracy – the bravest hero of the land, whether they are a prodigy Hylian knight or an unnoticed stablehand, is the one capable of drawing the Master Sword. For everyone else, the Master Sword is fixed in place, unmovable, although you can move the thing the Master Sword is in, so if the current Link scabbards it, they can hand it off to someone else to relocate it someplace for the next Link to find. It will be impossible to for anyone but Link to draw the Master Sword from the scabbard, but the scabbard and sword together can be moved around normally. If, however, the last Link stuck it in a pedestal, or left it lying on the battlefield, then it’s stuck there, immovable, unless you chisel out the pedestal/ground and move the entire thing, or a new Link comes around.

And Fi does not bother empowering the bravest in the land just to hold them in reserve. Fi got stuck in the sword as part of the first battle with Ganon in Skyward Sword, and she only wakes up when Ganon is around. In spinoff games like Minish Cap or Four Swords that don’t involve the Master Sword or Ganon, we as the audience know this is Link, but in-universe characters wouldn’t know for sure. The Picori Blade isn’t a divine weapon created by gods to slay evil and wieldable only by the chosen of the Triforce of Courage, it’s just an extraordinarily good sword made by the Minish people, whose tiny size means they have extraordinary attention to detail when making human-size objects, and therefore when they gather their greatest swordsmiths together to combine their efforts into the Picori Blade, the result is something sharper and more durable than would be possible for human smiths. That’s cool, but anyone can pick that up and swing it around. The Four Sword can split someone into four and is tied to shadow doppelgangers and presumably has something to do with the Sage of Shadow, and maybe the seven sages each have some kind of cool sword associated with them, but a maximum of one of those swords (and possibly none of them) is the Master Sword.

Link doesn’t inherit knowledge from previous lives, nor can they pursue ambitions across centuries. What Link inherits is a set of fighting techniques passed down through generations, using sword, bow, bomb, and hookshot. Every Hylian knight learns how to use these things and while Link usually inherits one or two tools from various sages and knights, they often have to assemble at least half of their kit by scavenging dungeons or buying from shops. Link is inheriting the accumulated knowledge as well as the hope and trust of the collective people of Hyrule in a way that could’ve happened to anyone and which, in many eras, actually does happen to lots of other people. In Link to the Past, Link is the last Hylian knight, but there used to be a ton of them. The only thing that sets Link apart is Fi (metaphorically) pointing him out and saying “that’s the best one you’ve got, give it to him.” When Link’s courage and resolve are backed up by a thousand or more years of history, it’s not in the more literal sense of Zelda’s reincarnation or Ganon’s immortality, but in the sense that Link is part of Hyrule, the best of Hyrule, and the Master Sword wouldn’t be out if it weren’t an existential threat, so if Link isn’t enough, Hyrule will end.