Watch the new Zelda have lock-picking just to spite me
December 12, 2016
2:58 am
This was going to be a joke about how the Gerudo skill trial thing doesn’t have enough keys but I spent all day playing The Last Guardian and ran out of time.
I assume to a Gerudo, finding out someone can’t pick locks is like taking a computer science course and they spend the first day bringing everyone in the room who doesn’t know how to save a file up to speed.
you know what they say: you can pick your friends, and you can pick your locks, but you uh … well, something like that, anyway
But you can’t pick the lock to their heart if you want to be more than friends and they don’t.
If you can’t find a pick, a knife will do just as well.
Oh, wait, you meant metaforically?
Metaphorically.^
Ha! That’s not a knife, this is a Knife!
thats a spoon.
There is no spoon
Mah spooon is toooo big!
I am a banana!
I am a sexualobster fan.
WHERE ARE THE KNIVES?!
Kinda? It’s a spork, admittedly, but….
Ah, I see you’ve played knifey-spoony before!
I see you’ve played knifey-spooney before.
So wait…there is no spoon,and the cake is a lie, so…what the heck am I eating?
And how are you eating it?
it’s a crab rangoon, and they’re eating it with a spork.
You Spoony Bard!
Nope.
Killed by a wossname, a metaphor.
Well, maybe its always a key, and when you stick it in people, it unlocks their death.
Isn’t that what the credit card trick is for? I think that still works. Or did everyone switch to paypal?
How do you pick a lock with paypal?
Hire a Gerudo?
Non-linear thinking, I like it!
Or maybe, you can swap the keys from different dungeons.
You’d think, but that doesn’t really work. All the keys are identical.
Keys from one dungeon can’t be used in a different dungeon
That’s only cuz Link keeps them separate since he can’t tell them apart.
How about making the keys with a durability of 0.01 so that Link thinks that he needs a way to raise their durability while it’d be impossible? Or make the keys out of cold butter. They’d melt too much to be useful at the door, especially in the fire dungeon where the key to the ice dungeon would be put.
Actually, in the first game, on the NES, you could – it’s how I beat the second dungeon…pretty much every time – there are enough keys, but it’s possibly to unlock the doors in the wrong order, and not be able to complete the dungeon as is…so I’d always go pick up a key from the 3rd dungeon, toodle back over to the 2nd, finish it, and then walk the last key from the 2nd back to the 3rd to finish that one. Don’t know why I always screw it up, but I do.
Because you’re just that special, Rippy.
You make lovely comics~ I love the look and the story that goes with it. I really like how Commander is such a strong fella but he is so kind and relatable with his interactions of those around him. It is nice to see a main character who is down to earth. Thanks for the wonderful read and story~
Your Ganondorf comics are inspired. In hindsight it just makes sense, but I never thought of it this way. I love this comic.
In the first game the keys weren’t specific to the areas. I think you could actually buy more too.
Plus there was a master key that could open all doors.
No, that was the second game. The Master Key, that is.
It was the Magic Key and was in both the first and second games. http://zeldawiki.org/Magical_Key
Yup. It’s because the last dungeon are more closed doors than keys. So, either you take the right path and get the Magic Key, either you end up completly lost and decide to buy lots of keys.
Point being : if Ganondorf is the Lord of Evil or something, why not murder the guy who sell keys and steal his stock? Wich bring us to the next question : is he really the bad guy or just a regular guy who try to build labyrinths for the children of his people?
If I was Ganondorf, I’d take all the dungeon treasures in Hyrule and hide them in the last room of my castle. And then each chest would be guarded by, like, ten darknuts or something.
I know, some of Link’s inventory is gotten in the overworld, or from one of his allies, but if I could keep the bombs or the bow+arrows out of his hands, he’d be screwed.
Offer Hylians a red rupee for every smashed hookshot target they bring you. Community outreach, stimulating the economy, screws over the hero who needs those hookshot targets.
Yeah, but then Link will just break the pottery that they store the rupees and steal them, right after smashing their pumpkin patch.
So, if they don’t smash actual hookshot targets, and just make fakes, similar to when Indians began breeding snakes in response to a British bounty on snake heads, they can come out ahead. Also, by not smashing ones in the dungeons, Link will spend his time there, and not in towns destroying vital pottery and crops in search of rupees.
So put a bounty on his head, he’s clearly a menace to society. He’s constantly breaking and entering, stealing, murdering G’s hardworking employees…. Need I go on?
That will just encourage people to start breeding Links.
If the shippers are to believed, there are already some rigorous efforts in that department.
Can’t the hookshot target, like, anything made of wood?
Regardless of if its strong enough to hold the weight of a full grown Hylian?
Nah, here’s what you really do. Find the chest containing the ancient treasure of the temple, then take that treasure, then replace it with something that seems important and unique, like a box that blows warm air in the fire level. Link will never ever come out again, because he’ll try to figure out how this new item solves all the dungeon puzzles.
Replace every dungeon treasure with fishing rods and fancy lures, then stock Lake Hylia with cool exotic fish. Link will never leave the lakeside again.
The problem now is there is a system to rent all of said items/ tool
…Well, he’s not wrong.
Although if lock picking /is/ part of the new Zelda game I will be absolutely elated. And I truly hope you will make a comic update specifically addressing it.
If they did that they would have to allow organic gameplay and a non railroaded structure. Can’t have that.
I’m guessing you haven’t watched any of the recent trailers for Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
They actually announced ages ago that it would be more open world. It is technically possible to go fight the final boss before finishing the first dungeon.
Breath of the Wild is designed in a way that it can be completed in whatever order you want with few exceptions. You can go straight to the final boss with nothing but a tree branch for a weapon from the beginning of the game. Heck, all indications point to the story progression being independent of game progression. It looks like it’s going to have more in common with the original and The Elder Scrolls than it does with any other game in the series.
Have you played it yet? No? So all we have is their word on that. I remember people saying similar things about Skyward Sword, and it was arguably the most railroaded of all the games.
I dunno, I think there’s a difference between fans saying “we are hoping the game will be this way” and the game’s producers saying “You can lits just beat the boss, we don’t care if you follow the story or not”. And the dev team for Skyward Sword flat out said they wanted the game to be less big in scope compared to Twilight Princess, which had a big open map but nothing to do in lots of it. When over half of the hidden treasures in the game are rupees in hidden rooms, it’s time to reel it in.
Besides, the game was playable at E3 and the most linearity anyone was able to find ended about 3 minutes in.
Also, like everyone else has said, maybe watch the trailers and the Let’s Plays Nintendo has been posting.
Well, yeah. If they’d kept things like the original, Zelda would be somewhere between Dark Souls and Elder Scrolls depending on how much focus the story got.
The story is going to be completely optional according to Aonuma, but also supposed to be pretty detailed if you take the time to do it. The combat seems very Dark Souls, as far as strafing and memorizing enemy patterns are concerned.
…Zelder Souls
Princess Zelder…from South Hylia…Daughter of King Bubbah.
Really if we’re going down this line of thinking, then Dark Souls is more like the original Legend of Zelda.
Relatively open world, little overt storytelling, enemies that will brutally murder you if you screw up even a little when fighting them…
If the new game is like that, it may cause a bit of a schism in the franchise of people who started with Ocarina or later and the people who have played it since the beginning.
I think you are exactly the type of person that needs to watch trailers for Breath of the Wild. You will be shocked.
Example: you can thwack things with the arms of monsters that you kill.
And you can set fire to nearly everything.
I’ve already told my friend our first playthrough of the game would be just that, even if it only lasted five minutes before we got bored and reset. Fire to everything while in our underwear.
These little scenes with the Commander and Ganondorf hanging out and being friends are my favorite scenes in the comic. I love how they seem to really like and respect each other, enough so that they’ll just chill and have coffee together occasionally. It’s very sweet.
I like to imagine that Link would take up a new form of lockpicking. With a lockpick called “Biggoron’s Sword”.
He tried it with the Giant’s Knife first. It didn’t go well.
Now I’m just reminded of this weird fancomic where instead of using keys, Link just made our with them until they opened.
I like to think some ancient civilization is just doing that very silly putting the key under the doormat or flowerpot thing, but they got no floormats.
These are all the spare keys you left at the back of the cupboard, behind a combination lock, and under the protection of a neighbor/guard dog.
I think canonically it’s the Minish? They collect things like little pack rats, and stash them in places, and Link finds them later in his travels. It’s something like that.
“Gandondorf assuming his unique upbringing isn’t all that unique” jokes are so great. Your version of his character is so well adjusted, it just doesn’t occur to him most people don’t grow up surrounded by thief warrior women.
Thief warrior women. Actually, with the thief part, shouldn’t Ganondorf be less of an upstanding citizen?
And in case that proves too troublesome, he can still get rid of just the big keys.
That epiphany face tho.
I really love how you portray Ganon and humanize the character as just a guy trying to get by. Instead of just the generic great evil that many make him out to be. It makes it so I always look forward to reading it the moment I see him in it.
Aaaah, I hope you’re enjoying TLG! Will we be expecting TLG comics in the future?
Lockpicking is essentially like a puzzle and Link is beyond an expert at puzzles ergo Link can pick a lock.
Ganondorf is better off like, trying to distract him with Cia.
actually, if you are talking about the Nintendo 64 version of the gerudo trials… you are sort of right. you are technically meant to just grab every key and go in from one door, not go for the nearest locked door. I found this out the hard way. it’s basically a puzzle within a puzzle challenge. you have to find keys to get the prize you desire, however, they give you just one less key than you need to open every locked door.
there fore the solution is whether you let greed for exploration and money win, or greed for greater power. one leads you to small chests with about 10 rupees each, the other leads you to the ice arrows, and about 20 less rupees or so.
it’s truly a puzzle about priorities. it sort of goes against the rest of the game, yes the rest of the game guides you upon what path you need to take, but not so heavy handedly that you don’t think you are exploring. this in turn makes you feel throughout the game that exploration is a key to success, however, in the gerudo dungeon, they have a style of life that says, you don’t need to see everything, you just need to go for the true goal. anything else may find you in defeat.
so to parse it out,
the majority of the game is, exploration is good, fun, worthwhile.
the gerudo dungeon is, exploration can keep you from the end goal.
personally I enjoyed it, despite how I could not have a second chance. it’s a metapuzzle. just like some dungeons are metapuzzles.
:)
Actually that’s not true. There are enough keys (9) in there to open every door. It’s just that a couple of the keys were really tricky to find leading people to assume that there weren’t enough.
Huh, I remember unlocking qll the locks in that mini dungeon….
Probably one of my favorite sidequests in zelda games ever, I remember I can’t find one missing key and I was blown away when I found it using the lens of truth. Ah the memories..
Yeah, like Adeon says, there are enough keys to open all the doors. I recently helped my nephews find the last few keys, after they had already opened a bunch of doors at random, and that last key was a bitch to find, took several hours of backtracking and careful study….
wait… there actually are enough keys? I feel almost disappointed now.
I know about the one with the lens of truth. I swear I hit every room in the place and always came out like one key short if I didn’t aim for the ice arrows from the start. and even then I couldn’t open the locked doors to like… two tiny chests. which in the grand scheme felt mildly unimportant.
plus it made the dungeon feel like a reflection of gerudo life. you go for the goal or risk dying in the desert because you were side questing all the time…..
now I feel the need to whack every wall and bring nothing but green potions so I can scan every room with the lens of truth in case their were two hidden walls.
Well Happy to see this comic back, it’s always a good laugh :D
It never stopped updating, there’s been a strip every week for nearly seven years.
I’m guessing it’s been a while since any particular strip made the social media rounds. There was a point where every new update was ending up on Cheezburger and 9gag.
Maybe they need to clear their cache more…
Do you even RSS bruh?
A sledgehammer is the most reliable lockpick.
Only if stealth is not a priority.
…do you really think stealth is a priority for Link?
since when was stealth ever a priority? well… I take that back. there was that time to get the zora eggs in majoras mask. and the other time in ocarina of time to meet the princess. and the time in skyward sword from the moblins in eldin province. I can’t think of any more off hand though. technically in twilight princess the only possible stealth part I can think of is just after getting back to ordon and going after the sword and shield, and you didn’t really have to sneak PAST anyone, just not get beaten by the swordsman, or too close to be seen instead of hearing the message between the mayor.
yeah. not a whole lot of stealth. oh wait, forgot the second in ocarina of time. the gerudo fortress. and the second one in majoras mask, the deku palace gardens. but otherwise yeah. he’s a kill all end all warrior with no stealth. just a really big megaton hammer.
There was also those horrible sequences in Skyward Sword involving tears of light and being unable to fight things. You know, the ones with the Guardians and those floating things and the water that alerts all of them if you touch it.
Not to mention the Temple of the Ocean God in Phantom Hourglass. Luckily, near the end-game, you can go loud and kill everything.
I kept missing that one Tear on the sliding sand in Eldin… several loops of the area later, I hit it, having long since run out of sleepytime. That one was tough, but I became good at avoiding things.
Getting to see the Zelda in Ocarina, yeah. I always just wanted to murder the guards. They didn’t help any when Ganondorf took over anyway…
If you think they did, do you really think Impa couldn’t have gotten Zelda away without the help of any guards? The guards probably were the reason that Ganondorf knew where Impa and Zelda went. Probably broke under interrogation immediately. Silently murdering them would have been a mercy (think of the torture that Ganondorf probably put them through) and done more to protect Zelda.
Sad thing is, I’ve been in a Computer Science course where they did just that.
So have I.
Did you feel that pain when they said “This is a mouse, and this is a monitor…” and then the dread gave way to full-fledged horror at the woman next to you taking notes.
I didn’t mind my class so much since the teacher would hand out sheets detailing what we needed to do before he started explaining the steps. Let those of us who knew how to operate a computer the ability to get done in minutes while those who needed help got it.
Did kinda hurt my brain a bit to learn that one of the people who were seriously asking questions about practically everything basic was aiming for a degree in web-design though.
You can thank ITT Tech for that.
ITT Tech’s commercials tell you all about how a degree in something tech-related gives you money and job security, and so there was a massive increase in Comp Sci students across the board.
I have many friends in IT who frequently bemoan how many of their co workers simply don’t care. They don’t -know- anything about the systems they maintain. They have certifications, sure, but they don’t bother retaining any of the information. They just go off existing flow charts and diagrams and basically do the minimum possible effort. Simply put, they’re not nerds.
I was doing a Bio 101 at a Texas community college. first lesson was on how to use a basic light microscope – that isn’t the troubling part. First set of question was about the possible magnifications (eye piece magnification * lens magnification), which many people found difficult – but that’s not the troubling part. The troubling part was – the eye piece magnification is 10.
Oh… Oh no :(
todays comic is a work of logic art
As someone who has taken a computer class recently and spent the first week on the whole “this is how you save” “this is how you select multiple files at once” “this is how you take screenshots” type bullshit, oh my gooooooood, WHY. Makes it impossible to take the course seriously. Its like starting the first session of a college algebra class practicing simple multiplication/division.
Because, believe it or not, basic computer competency is not a prerequisite for COM101. The course is written with the assumption that the student has never touched a computer before. And it has to be. I had to take it, since my degree is in software development. But so does EVERY degree now. The main concern is people who went to schools where computers weren’t mandatory or who lived in areas where computers aren’t even common.
Yeah, if I ever end up taking a computer course (and I’ll probably need to someday) I’ll definitely need to be walked through those kinds of things since computers weren’t used much when I was in school.
It’s understandable when you have a class with enough people that the teacher can’t be sure of everyone’s computer competency, but it turns into a bit of a joke when it’s say, a class of 15 9th graders that the teacher is absolutely aware have all been using computers in that school since first grade, but decides to stick to the lesson plan with rigid adherence.
Kinda sets the precedent that this is going to be “goof around on the internet and do whatever you want for an hour” class.
To be fair, most people never use the screen shot function.
My university calculus class started with “numbers less than 0 are negative, and numbers greater than zero are positive”
The prof continued to remind us of this fact throughout the year.
Thanks NEA for all the improvements to mathematics classes since the ’50s.
Oh, this is just brilliant on multiple levels.
Ganondorf Mind’s Status – Blown.
First day? Ha! Try Every Single Lesson!
I learnt sod all from that course…
Same with most people who had to take it. The only thing I learned at all was shell scripting for Command Prompt.
This is making an insane amount of sense to me
And judging by G’s face, he probably feels the same
Of course Link can’t pick locks. Link’s a player character. Zelda has been able to magically open doors since Ocarina of Time, maybe before then.
Zelda, of course, is an NPC. NPC’s all took lockpicking in NPC college.
That totally has to be the next comic–Link and Zelda are in a trap, Link sees no way out, Zelda picks the lock, Link is like _What?_ and Zelda goes “Everyone knows how to pick locks, Link.”
Nah, Lock-picking was part of her ninja/pirate training.
The Triforce of Wisdom taught her.
There Was another option Link had. In the second NES one he could use fairy magic and fly trough the keyhole. Don’t think it was used beyond that though.
He also had the option of a magical master key in both the NES games. Not used since and not likely to be, either.
Posting for the first time to say that this comic is brilliant thinking lol…
That expression on Gannon’s face, the way he’s holding his teacup down so as not to spill it… Priceless.
Of course, if Gannon did start destroying/hiding the keys, Link would just, you know, actually learn to pick locks; but at least it would be a 110% effort on Gannon’s part to be Dangerously Genre Savvy.
…..
Actually, now I’m thinking of some kind of Legend of Zelda set in a steampunk/magipunk time, like DisHonored. Gannon is some brown, short-pointy-eared kid from the dirtiest, fishmongeriest streets who’s been getting the shit kicked out of him by guys with whitier, pointier ears, who grows up big and strong and vows that he ain’t never gonna take that shit again, and sets out to show the whole of Hyrule that Gerudo boys ain’t second-class citizens.
Of course, when you set out to do that, you kind of have to break some heads along the way, ’cause ain’t nobody gonna respect some Gerudo guy unless he makes ’em. So by the time that Gannon’s an adult, he may be wearing fancy business suits and big enough and wealthy enough to command respect in parliament with his booming voice, but don’t ever think that means he hasn’t got a kukri in the small of his back and a pair of brass knuckles still in his pocket.
Link, meanwhile, is some bumfuck farm kid who grew up chasing the roaring steam trains on his pony Epona, as far as the railings of the farm would let him, tilting at windmills like Don Quixote and thrashing rodents of unusual size with a big old stick. His family breaks well in the milk industry or whatever, and move to the big city, which breaks his heart because he can’t bring Epona, but he sees Princess Zelda and goes gooey-hearted at first sight, resolving to learn everything he can about her. This leads to him getting his hands on a book of old legends, learning about how there’s always a Link, always a Zelda, and always a Gannon. So then he realizes that there’s now a Gannon living across from him… And things go sideways fast when he does something really, really stupid, gets in mega trouble with the law, and his family get taken to the cleaners in court, resulting in him winding up on the dirty streets that Gannon himself came from.
I would play that.
No, that’s a lie, I don’t really play video games, nor have I ever played Zelda.
I do write and would, however, read the FUCK out of that book. I kind of want to take it and run with it, do a thing with it.
It makes much more sense when you realize that as a tribe of desert nomads, the Gerudo are bandits and raiders, not generic D&D Thieves.
Good point. They wouldn’t bother with picking locks. They’d just bash the door in with swords and hammers.
To think we’d never have the Zelda series if Gannon had a key ring. I imagine this Gannon takes 1 key to drive to work, but hides the key to get into his house and just switches them out when he needs too. At one point this Gannon thought “No… The flower pot would be too obvious…”
Baby steps, man. Baby steps.
Gerudo canyon has barely any doors because everyone’s so adept at lockpicking they’re basically a formality.
What I would do to prevent lock picking is electrify the lock. So the minute anyone puts any tools in there to try to pick the lock, they get a nasty surprise. This may or may not work depending on what res stats and gear is equipped though. But it might serve as early warning system if nothing else.
Electrified Lock? No problem! That’s what your trap probe is for. Get a shock? Ground the lock with the probe, then start picking.
Or at least that’s how it was in TES Morrowind…
I did not know that, I’ve only played TES Skyrim, and that was a while ago. I’ve also never played any of the Zelda games, so I have no idea how stuff works in it.
That’s a great method. Of course, you could ground that current, and then just get on with what you were going to do.
I love the way you depict Gano ;) One of my favourites next to feathery-raptors :D
About the computer science class… how about what you said and one of the … less informed ones use* THE Mac Pro (the one that looks like a metallic turret). *How?
I gotta say, Ganondorf in a suit is pretty… Unf.
After all, if he could pick locks, why ever go out of his AT ALL for keys?
I have realized we never did see the epic goatamancer vs dragon battle.
Good general insight – what is “known” in one area is not necessarily so in another. Good idea to challenge assumptions.
I think the best part of this one is that look of ultimate realization on Ganondorf’s face. It makes me laugh every time.
Hey, just a heads up. I keep getting popups for an “Urgent Chrome Update” when I log onto your site. Might wanna look into that. I’m using Ghostery but I keep it turned off on your site so you can get ad revenue from me.
Otherwise, fun comic. Love how you draw Gannondorf. :P
I emailed some folks about it last week but I can poke them again.
If you’re in a computer science course and the first day they spend time on making sure everyone is up to speed on How to Save a File, you could just follow along and find something else to do on the side, like reading up on what you wanted to learn, via the Internet, or if you wanted, you could just bring along some knitting. You could, also, fuss and fume that they’re covering something so abysmally rudimentary, but that’s up to the individual.
The next strip should have a singed Ganondorf telling the Commander that the little blonde kid decided that, in a pinch, bombs are acceptable substitutes for keys.
except… they aren’t…
Watch Coela already having found out somehow that the new Zelda game will have lock-picking and now playing prophet before it’s officially announced.
Oh wow. Coleasquid, I know that feeling. My computer science course began with an entire thing on how to locate the power button. Me and two other girls spent the first four classes litterally screwing around in MS paint and playing games we weren’t supposed to download. When they got to the actual ACTUAL relevant work, we didn’t notice and fell behind slightly.