My Odyssey Into The Bizarre World of Tingle’s Rosy Rupeeland

I’ve had the fortune to grow up playing Zelda games. My first, Ocarina of Time, when I was 12 years old on the Nintendo 64 I had just gotten for Christmas; The Oracle games on the bus, going to and from school in junior high; the original NES classics when I was a bit older, had saved some money from my first job and bought a used NES from the pawn shop; as an adult, with a career and a fiancée who had just started as a writer for Zelda Dungeon, when Breath of the Wild finally made its long awaited debut on the newly unveiled Nintendo Switch. I’ve had the pleasure of playing every Zelda game in the main series, side games like the Wand of Gamelon and Link’s Crossbow Training, and games that featured Zelda characters, like Soul Calibur II or Nintendo Land. If it was Zelda, I played it.

However… there was always one subsection of Zelda games that eluded me.

Until recently.

After many years, I finally got my hands on one of the Zelda games I had left on my bucket list. I played Freshly Picked Tingle’s Rosy Rupeeland. This is my story.

 

Picking up the Game

I’d long known about Tingle’s Rosy Rupeeland and its status as kind of a wacky spinoff that was never released in North America, but I’d never felt a particular drive to actually pick up a copy until recently – don’t ask me why, at age 31, I decided that now was the time that I needed some Tingle in my life, but there I was. It was like Inception: I couldn’t stop thinking about it. But how did I go about grabbing a copy, I thought to myself?

Turns out that was actually pretty easy if you were willing to pay about 100 bucks (Canadian dollars, a currency even worse than rupees) to Amazon, but just like Tingle, I am cheap and greedy with my money, so I turned to other options to find a cheaper copy. After putting some feelers out in my local Facebook video game buy and sell group, a member (who has since become a friend!) stepped forward and offered to sell me his copy. To my surprise, he was not only familiar with Zelda Dungeon, but some of my own and my colleagues work at this site. He gave me what you’d call in sports “the hometown discount” and all that was left was to meet up and pay the man.

Now this should have probably been a sign of what I was in for, but this seller unfortunately worked a total opposite schedule of me, and also didn’t accept etranfer’s or PayPal as a method of payment, which is too bad because I never carry cash. We agreed to meet up at a Tim Horton’s parking lot at about 11pm to do the swap – Tingle’s Rosy Rupeeland for the cash. The girl working the drive-thru definitely thought a drug deal was going down. Needing a solution to my ‘never carry cash’ problem, I waited until my fiancée had fallen asleep and took some cash from her wallet (don’t look at me like that, I asked first!) and set off. One late night exchange in a coffee shop parking lot later, and the game was mine!

After booting it up on my 3DS and sinking roughly 30 hours into the game, I was left with a few observations…

 

I Can See Why Nintendo Didn’t Release It in North America

My first thought whenever I think about the Tingle series of games is ‘why would Nintendo not release them Stateside after putting so much work in? Particularly Rupeeland, which has a much tamer premise’. And while I still stand by that thought for the most part, I can see the rationale for not releasing it here.

From the opening couple of minutes – hell, from the first time you look at the back of the games box – you can tell the experience is going to be weird. In the Zelda games, Tingle is characterized as sort of a weird guy who believes he’s a fairy and may or may not possess some special skills, but in Rupeeland, Tingle is presented as… well, an emancipated loser who is “still single at 35 and trying to escape his dull everyday existence”. Yeesh. The way that Tingle moves and bops around and sticks his butt out while covering his mouth when he discovers something neat certainly isn’t your ideal image of the “strong American hero” archetype by any means, and the rest of the adventure is filled with similarly erotic and over-the-top characters (shout out to the bridge builders!), so I can see where Nintendo may have been hesitant to release it if they didn’t think that Tingle would connect with a core American audience who they might have assumed preferred macho hero’s.

Still though, this game kind of gave me similar vibes as the WarioWare series – itself, a weird series full of strange characters and a lead character who sticks his butt out and wiggles his hips – so it is a little disappointing that Nintendo didn’t take a chance with North American audiences. Probably hindering its release stateside was the relative infancy of digital only games, particularly on a Nintendo system, back in 2006. If a similar game was made today, I have no doubt Nintendo would release it digitally to avoid the distribution costs, but make something back on the game.

Going back to Tingle for a second though, I found it actually kind of refreshing to play as this endearing loser who wasn’t the ideal hero, who wasn’t chosen by destiny, who didn’t look like the type of guy a game would be based around, who couldn’t really fight his own battles, but did all this stuff anyways in spite of that. I mean, I guess he went on this adventure out of greed and his own personal gain, but hey – credit where credit is due!

I made a April Fools Day post about Nintendo releasing the Freshly Picked Tingle Collection Stateside, and I hope I live long enough to see that happen one day (I probably won’t, who am I kidding) because I think there is an audience for it over here.

 

The Game is Actually Really Fun!

I was actually more surprised by this than anything else if I’m being totally honest. I bought Tingle’s Rosy Rupeeland more as a collector item / novelty item / ‘cross off my bucket list, say I’ve played it’ kind of thing rather than because I was expecting a great Legend of Zelda experience, but a great experience is what I came away with!

Rupeeland is very different from other Zelda’s in that literally everything revolves around rupees –  rupees are actually your health, so when an enemy hits you, you lose rupees, and if you go broke, game over pal. Rupees are also what lets you progress in the game – give your tower a certain amount of rupees and it grows, unlocking a new area for you to explore. Literally everything is based around rupees, but I dug it.

I liked the way that this game handled fighting – obviously, Tingle is not much of a warrior, so the way you fight is you approach and enemy and basically enter a Looney Toons-esq scrum where you’re all fighting in a dirt cloud until you drain your enemies life. You lose a certain amount of rupees every second or two, so you wanna finish them off fast, buuut if you chain together a few enemies (there can be up to five enemies, a bodyguard, and Tingle in these cloud brawls) you can get some pretty decent spoils, be it rupees or materials. It’s super simple, but really effective. I’ve long criticized both Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks for how they handled touch screen controls, so thankfully, Tingle’s Rosy Rupeeland presents you not only with this super simple combat system that doesn’t have you drawing boomerang lines or swiping hammers, but also lets you move Tingle around with the D-pad.

Rupeeland gives Tingle the option to hire some bodyguards too, making these scrums far easier and providing Tingle some much needed muscle. There are different types of bodyguards – big, small, passive, aggressive – so you can mix and match and find the perfect one. My go-to was a bodyguard literally modeled after Hulk Hogan, so if you’ve ever dreamed of a tag team featuring Tingle and the Hulkster , A) what’s wrong with you, and B) your dreams are now a reality.

Of course, it is a Zelda game (kinda), so you know there’s bound to be a few dungeons, all of which are pretty fun and appropriately strange. The dungeons certainly wouldn’t challenge any of the main series’ for the title of ‘Best Ever’, but the boss fights stand out as being so ridiculous that they become incredible. Tingle goes one-on-one with a Pirate Stalfos in a Street Fighter style fight, he flies balloons and bombs giant bugs, he stretches his body to ascend giants mountains – it’s weird stuff, but it’s memorable as heck and super fun.

This game was so fun that I decided to beat it to 100% completion in fact – something that, if you asked me when I first started entertaining the idea of playing Freshly Picked Tingle’s Rosy Rupeeland, I would have Tingle-giggled in your face at. But 100% it I did. This meant going and scrounging the games 3 continents for all 23 empty bottles (you thought Majora’s Mask had a lot of those, ayyy) and collecting 31 special items called Rupee Goods. I would liken Rupee Goods to Pieces of Heart in that you do the same kinds of things to collect them as you would the Heart Pieces. Collecting all 31 Rupee Goods led to one of the craziest scenes I can remember ever being in a game not rated AO for Adults Only, and especially the wildest that’s ever been in a Zelda game. For anyone that’s had the (mis?)fortune of seeing this scene, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about, and for anyone that hasn’t yet, I won’t spoil you, but I’ll just say maybe Tingle isn’t as much of a loser as the back of the game box would lead you to believe he is!

 

Certified Freshly Picked

Playing Tingle’s Rosy Rupeeland was an experience that was long overdue but well worth the wait. It kind of feels like a disservice of me to keep saying how pleasantly surprised I was by the quality of this title, but I really can’t overstate it – I was not expecting to like this game that much. I really just wanted to have it so I could point to my Zelda collection and feel good knowing it was there; but Rupeeland, much like Tingle himself, was not what it seemed to be, and even though it came in with a bad reputation and was very unassuming, it really stepped up and crushed every expectation I had of it.

Anyone who’s not played this yet – do it! I feel safe in recommending it to even casual Zelda fans. There’s a lot of quirky, goofy stuff here that’s bound to have you smiling as you’re playing.

Now that my odyssey into Rupeeland is at its end, what’s next for me you might ask? Well, as we all know, Tingle didn’t just have one game released in his name – he had three! Yes, I intend to keep charging headfirst into the madness that is Tingle, as I track down and play a translated version of Ripened Tingle’s Balloon Trip of Love, a game so allegedly bizarre it makes Rupeeland look tame. Will this obsession with Tingle cost me everything? Perhaps. But it’s a price I’m compelled to pay.

 

Andy Spiteri is the Editor-In-Chief of Zelda Dungeon. To hear some more of this thoughts on Tingle’s Rosy Rupeeland, check him out on The Champions’ Cast, and be sure to follow him on Twitter as he slowly slips into madness playing Tingle’s Balloon Trip of Love.