Cyg
One-Winged Skyward Angel
- Joined
- Sep 28, 2011
- Location
- Antarctica
With the whole slew of pictures and videos of the new areas, mainly the Ancient Cistern, I wondered - Is Nintendo returning to religious/spiritual references, or at least starting to be more accepting and comfortable with them in their Zelda games? Think about it, it's no secret that Nintendo gave spiritual references in past Zelda games. The strongest one of these was in Zelda 1, where practically everything had Christianic references -the cross on the shield, the Bible, the point of Link almost being a sort of Crusader. Nintendo changed some of these in the remakes (please correct me, I'm not sure if it's in the remakes, or straight from the Japanese translation), notably the Bible being renamed into "Book of Magic". OoT also had religious references, mainly Islamic. The Gerudo symbol used to be very similar to the Star and Crescent symbol (I don't know the actual name). I've also heard about the original having a chant in the Fire Temple, with one of the distinguishable words being "Allah" meaning the Islamic god. These too were removed from more recent versions of OoT, the Gerudo symbol being replaced by Onox's symbol and the chant being replaced with MIDI music. This leads us to SS, which seems to have some spiritual references, this time Oriental and South Asian references. The Earth Temple has already been confirmed to be Chinese-inspired and have Chinese lungs (dragons) which are important to Chinese beliefs, but what really struck my eye was the Buddha-like statues in the Ancient Cistern. With this, it seems Nintendo is really quite comfortable with using these symbolisms, as they are placing most of the temple to be based on the Buddha and Shiva statues, especially since it would be very difficult to remove these from later games (the boss is based on the multi-handed shiva and the large statue in the middle where the entire temple revolves around is based on the Buddha). What do you guys think about this topic?
On a side-note, if the Buddha is referred in the game, how do you think it actually got there, in-game story wise?
PS - don't you think the black stuff holding the boss statue together look like Subspace shadow bugs?
Pic comparisons
Buddha:
Shiva:
Subspace Shadow Bugs:
Christ the Redeemer:
On a side-note, if the Buddha is referred in the game, how do you think it actually got there, in-game story wise?
PS - don't you think the black stuff holding the boss statue together look like Subspace shadow bugs?
Pic comparisons
Buddha:
Shiva:
Subspace Shadow Bugs:
Christ the Redeemer:
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