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Character spotlight: Ruto



Say hello to the princess of the Zora and Sage of Water! Ruto is best remembered for her bossy demeanor and usefulness as a switch weight and plot coupon throughout the Jabu-Jabu's Belly dungeon, and of course the subsequent uncomfortable joke at Link's expense of her deciding that she's his fiance. The character of Ruto has been passed to several players over the life of Triforce MUCK/Zelda RPG, some of whom I wasn't around for, so I can't speak to her entire history on there. My own experience was that she'd finally given up on Link and become a bit less flighty and more responsible, although she still had her eccentricities. I mainly interacted with her as a Zora character of my own named Adrian, who will probably be an NPC (and likely an adversary) in Forgotten Gates -- perhaps I'll do a spotlight of him in the future.

In Forgotten Gates, Ruto is comparatively jack-of-all-stats as the Six Sages go -- naturally they all have to have at least pretty good magic capability, and Ruto is no exception. Her element is of course Water, making her strong against Fire and Spirit, but weak against Light and Forest. She uses a trident which should look familiar to those who've played Breath of the Wild. ;) I was actually planning to make her a spear-wielder even before that came out, so that was a fortunate coincidence for me. On a side note, the process of creating the attack sprites for Ruto caused me to decide on a general change to the way spear attack sprites are drawn. Before they involved an awkward slight upward angle of holding; if I recall correctly, I made them that way back when I thought I'd be using RM2K3's weapon attack animations system, which involves smaller sprites. Now that I'm using battle animations for everything, I have more space in which to show the full length of a spear jabbing straight outward, which looks much more sensible. And in the case of the trident, trying to draw the symmetrical prongs on either side when the weapon was at a funky angle was a nightmare. X) I'll have to alter a few existing sprites to match this new style, but it shouldn't be terribly hard.