In a 2010 interview, Link’s Awakening director Takashi Tezuka revealed the inspiration for this memorably bizarre cast of characters. “At the time, Twin Peaks was rather popular. The drama was all about a small number of characters in a small town,” Tezuka said. “So I wanted to make something like that, while it would be small enough in scope to easily understand, it would have deep and distinctive characteristics.”

... [Mark] Frost reveals in an interview with The Verge, he actually spoke with Nintendo about the Zelda franchise. “I don’t want to overstate it. It was a single conversation. But it was fun,” he tells me.

“They were talking to me about a Twin Peaks game, and they mentioned Zelda at the time,” says Frost. “They said, ‘One of the things we love about your show is how there’s all sorts of sideways associations that can drive the story forward.’ They asked me about that as they were thinking about expanding the Zelda universe.”

Though he’d never played a Zelda game, Frost had enough experience with fantasy storytelling that he had some suggestions. “I’d played lots of Dungeons & Dragons when I was young, so I was familiar with the kind of story they were thinking about,” he says. “I think I said, ‘Don’t be afraid to use dreamlike, Jungian symbolism. Things can connect thematically without having to connect concretely.’ It was things like that that I was urging them [to consider].”