Headscratchers / The Legend of Zelda

• Why are sparkling rupees/rubies worth less than non-sparkling ones? Wouldn't it be more sensible and intuitive for it to be the other way around?
  • Value isn't always based on beauty. Sometimes it's based on rarity. Non-sparkling rupies are probably harder to acquire, so they're worth more for being rarer.
    • The question was talking from a game design standpoint.
    • Oh... well in that case it's easier to explain. Law of Chromatic Superiority. The game uses three colors to denote power levels of items. In order of effectiveness they go: green, blue, red. The weakest sword has a green hilt, the mid-tier sword has a blue hilt, the strongest sword has red/orange hilt. Weakest defense Link wears green (no ring), mid-tier defense Link wears blue (blue ring), strongest defense Link wears red (red ring). This even applies to "two tier" items. The wood boomerang has a green stripe on it; the magical boomerang is blue. Ordinary arrows have a green shaft; silver arrows have a blue shaft. Red candle is better than blue candle, red potion is better than blue potion. So now we move to the rupees. Yellow are worth 1. Blue are worth 5. So why yellow and not green? Palette limitations. The NES could only display so many colors on screen at once, with additional limits of how and where. Green was already being used for bushes, Link's default outfit, and various other sprites. While they could have also used green for the 1 rupee (and been advantageous for the palette limit), they probably decided upon yellow to have it stand out more from all that other green. (I would also add that yellow is close to gold, and in fantasy settings gold coins are intuitively identified as money.) The 5 rupee still kept the blue color, following the "second tier is blue" format. However the original color for the 1 rupee was probably planned to be green... as later Zelda games changed it to green, then added a red "third tier" rupee to be 20. There probably wasn't a red rupee in the original Zelda, because money maxed out at 255 (a limitation due to Hex value). Rupee values of 1 & 5 were more than enough for money grinding.
• Hang on. The MacGuffin you're searching for, the Triforce of Wisdom, was hidden in the 8 dungeons by Princess Zelda to keep it out of Ganon's hands. So all the monsters and the bosses, are they not servants of Ganon? Because if they are, why haven't they just handed the Triforce over to him yet? And how did Zelda get all those Triforce fragments into there in the first place? Does she command the monsters, not Ganon?
  • The monsters are definitely Ganon's. Most likely the triforce pieces are effectively inaccessible to Ganon and his armies, meaning Ganon and Zelda are in a stalemate. While Ganon presumably would like to have two or more pieces of the triforce, keeping Link from getting two triforce pieces is obviously a higher priority. After OoT came out, it also become canon that Ganon/Ganondorf has seen the MacGuffin Delivery Service trope in action, and it didn't turn out well for him.