Father includes gender neutral language into The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past

[DivinePaladin]

Cloudman said:
That's cool and all, but if you're just going to change some of the text to be gender-neutral, it seems a bit pointless and a waste of it. Sure, it's nice to have things in common with the character to identify with, like gender, but it's not always necessary. What's wrong with a girl playing as a boy, and vice versa? Sometimes the protagonist is their own character, and not a blank state to insert yourself into. There also also female heroes, which I am sure guys are okay playing with.

I mean. the thought is nice, but if he was going to go that far, may as well change the sprite as well. And is he going to do that to every game his daughter plays? May as well leave the game as it was originally intended.

Link is literally the definition of a blank slate character though, and the LttP model can easily befit either a boy or girl. Those two things together led directly to the hack in question. If she were playing Duke Nukem or any other game with a definitively, unchangeable gender for its main character I'm fairly certain he wouldn't make this change.  

 

To move past directly replying to Cloudman here, I'm not entirely sure why OP decided VGC would be a good place to link this. Not many people here understand that the logic behind something like this is to have the guy's young, impressionable daughter (I'm assuming of age not much higher than seven) play a classic game without psychologically hammering it in that game characters are boys and that's it. Let's face it, that type of thinking is true with 90+% accuracy even today, but this way she ends up (hopefully) positively impacted by this moment in time. 

 

I've heard of hacks before that'd swap Mario and Peach and such, which come off as stretching it and  even pretentious at times, but this one is one that's absolutely understandable. I mean imagine, for one moment, if this hack had released as the real game in 92. The gaming world has (possibly) another non-Samus female protagonist that it at that point desperately needed, and we could very well have a good chunk of women in the industry that never in our current world tried games because they were a boy's club and they stuck to their barbies as kids or what have you. 

 

I'm not normally one to tout this kind of mentality because in almost every case it changes the entire theme of the game in question but this one changes a handful of words and keeps EVERYTHING else intact should a player take the plot that way. (Alternatively it's a story of friendship and not underlying romance, if she sees it that way.) At some point the girl will know that Link is a boy, that's not a problem - but something as small as this could hook her into gaming forever.