Link, the bravest little girl who ever was

Gave us a proper lump in the throat, this.

Dad Mike Hoye loves to play The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker with his daughter. Three and a half year old Maya likes sailing, scary birds and remembering to be brave, rescuing her little brother and finding out what’s happening to Medli and her dragon boat”.

When Mike reads Maya the text he swaps Link’s gender – and rightly so. Maya’s the hero of this story!

But loving his daughter, Mike understandably became a bit irritated by the game’s gender inflexibility. And proving he too is a hero, he did something about it.

Using the N64 emulator Dolphin, Mike manually altered Windwaker’s GameCube disc image, changing all the text so our young hero Link would become a girl.

I think I’ve gotten this right – this was all done directly on the original disk image with a hex editor, so all the changes needed to be the same byte-for-byte length, in-place,” Mike wrote.

I haven’t had time to play through the whole game to test it yet, and some of the constructions aren’t perfect. I’ve borrowed Donaldson’s ‘Swordmain’ coinage to replace ‘Swordsman’, for example, and there’s lots of ‘milady’ replacing ‘my lad’ and ‘master’, because I couldn’t find a better way to rewrite them in exactly the amount of space allotted. If you come up with something better, I’m all ears.

FemLink or you’re doing it wrong.”

Instructions on how to perform the swap can be found here.

Mike, Maya – MCV salutes you both.