Revisiting That Time Link’s Cameo Changed The Life Of An Anime Character

Revisiting That Time Link’s Cameo Changed The Life Of An Anime Character

While we hear Kimishima talk about future Nintendo IP movies, we have to acknowledge that Nintendo does not simply loan out its characters under most circumstances. However, this does not seem to stop or bother this Chinese anime from putting some Nintendo references into their show.

The Chinese anime we’re talking about is “Chao You Bing”, literally meaning extremely ill, or in this case, severely mentally handicapped. At one point in the anime, the main character, Luke, was out hunting for monsters to earn some gold so he could buy a house and, hopefully, propose to his crush. Having never killed any monsters before, Luke eventually settled on killing the easiest form of monsters, goblins.

After a while, Luke meets this cute little goblin but hesitates as he points the sword at the goblin. After all, who could lay their hands on such a cute and adorable goblin right?

This is when a mysterious fighter steps in and shot the goblin in the head, stunning the still hesitant Luke. The goblin died with the same jingle you hear when Mario loses a life in Super Mario Bros.

It turns out that it was Link who shot the arrow. Making a grand entrance with the Legend of Zelda theme playing in the back, Link proclaims that he has just saved Luke from imminent death. Whether or not the adorable goblin was really about to attack, we might never know. Link then leaves (probably to save Hyrule), telling Luke to keep the gold.

Although the whole engagement was less than half a minute, Link’s appearance really changed Luke a lot, as we realise later when he (arguably accidentally) incites a genocide against the whole goblin race.

Of course, this won’t be the first time Link’s appearance changed the larger environment as a whole. Link’s first appearance in The Legend of Zelda changed the console gaming environment by introducing a save feature, and more recently, Breath of the Wild changed the open-world paradigm.

You can watch the full episode below, Link’s appearance happens around the 4-minute mark although you might want to actually watch the first four minutes to understand what is going on.