The Legend of Zelda: Forgotten Gates

Just to reiterate for those who may have reached this blog post from the Game Design & Development forum and did not see the progress report post preceding it, Forgotten Gates has just come out of hiatus status into development again after nearly three and a half years. I intend to resume both progress report and game design blog posts on a monthly basis moving forward, although I'm rather running out of mechanical design concepts to mull over. Hence the design posts will probably be mostly about the fictional aspects -- characters, places, etc.

For this particular post, I'm going to talk about a character who may or may not even be in the game at this point. He is one of several characters who were originally slated as main party members, but were replaced by others, mainly because their players disappeared from Triforce MUCK (which is now Zelda RPG) and other players expressed an interest in having their characters be in the game. I'm hanging on to the assets for the old characters just in case I want them to be usable as guest party members on optional/non-story quests or the like, but it's quite possible I'll cut them entirely. Especially this one, for reasons I'll get into at the bottom of this post (it's got nothing to do with disvaluing the character itself, just to put that immediate thought to rest).



Drakler is an assassin from Termina. He came to Hyrule chasing after Eoin, a bumbling Goron who managed to cause a costly accident or two. His attempts to neutralize his target were always foiled by more heroic characters, and eventually he gave up and somewhat grudgingly allied himself with the good guys. He swore allegience to the Gorons and became a bodyguard for Darunia (the "Big Brother" of the Gorons and Sage of Fire, in case you don't recall your Ocarina of Time lore).

In Forgotten Gates, Drakler is a jack-of-all-trades with very average stats across the board. He dual-wields short swords and his element is Water, making him strong against Fire and Spirit but weak against Light and Forest. His regular skill set consists entirely of Water-element magic, or it did when I first wrote them -- since I decided to associate ice with Shadow instead of Water, I'd have to change a few of them one way or another.

Drakler's special ability is Tools, the basic concept of which is essentially exactly the same as the ability of the same name in Final Fantasy 6. Throughout the game, Drakler can acquire special items which unlock new skills in a subset. Some of them are familiar Zelda items like the hookshot and skull hammer, others are new concepts like a drill bit and a mini-cannon.

So, why am I especially inclined to fully drop this character? Because it ocurred to me that with him gone, the Tools special ability would fit very nicely on Link. X) That's kind of his whole thing in most of the Zelda games, after all -- collecting and using an ever-expanding set of cool items. I mentioned in Link's character spotlight post that his current special ability, Spin Slash, is rather tedious to use since you have to spend 1 to 3 turns charging it up before getting its payoff. Tools wouldn't have that problem. There's also the similar issue that when I replaced Drakler with another character (Irina), some of the skills I gave her were copied straight from Drakler. I suppose I could be lazy and let optional legacy characters share some skills with main characters, but I'd rather keep things unique.