To prevent introducing any glitches, I also had to stick within the same character length when replacing words.

I’ve already gender-neutral hacked several of my other favorite games from the Zelda series to fix the same grammatical bug, but this Twilight Princess gender-neutral hack took a bit longer since there was such a large amount of in-game text to review and edit. I think the old GameCube version of Twilight Princess still holds up well today, so I decided to gender-neutral hack it for my daughter and other non-male gamers to enjoy fully immersing themselves in the experience of being Link in both human and wolf form.

As an old school gamer, I’m not a big fan of motion controls and I prefer the accuracy and comfort of a standard controller. I have fond memories of playing through the original Twilight Princess when it was released for the GameCube in 2006. This matters because male leading heroes are abundantly overrepresented in popular games. Link’s physical appearance and grunting vocalizations don’t really identify Link as a specific gender, and there’s absolutely nothing in the story of the game that requires the hero to be specifically male. As an HD remaster of a decade-old GameCube/Wii game, the graphics are visually much sharper and the new GamePad controls are excellent, but there’s a long-standing grammatical “bug” that still remains: female players who choose to rename Link with their own name are still awkwardly referred to as male by many of the characters in the game. Last week, Nintendo released The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess HD for the Wii U.

Zelda twilight princess iso gamecube