Headscratchers / The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap

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Seeing the Picori

• The Picori and their creations are Invisible to Adults. Fridge Logic dictates that if the Picori were truly only visible to children, they would merely be the in-universe equivalent of an urban legend. A significant number of people in the game believe that the Picori exist. Therefore the invisibility effect is either something that the Picori are doing themselves as a form of protection and can be "switched off" at will, something that can be circumvented with magic/Magitek, or both. After all, people could see Vaati just fine. Presumably the Picori's re-sizing magic (the hollow tree stumps, etc) also cancels the invisibility, meaning that the invisibility can be countered comparatively easily by anyone who can use magic.
  • Presumably, adults used to be able to see them when they were children themselves. That explains how everyone knows about them, though the exact way the Picori's invisibility works is still never explained precisely...
  • The king says that the Minish "only reveal themselves to children," so it's entirely possible that they just keep themselves hidden without using invisibility magic. And besides that, a number of NPCs, including Zelda herself, think about the Minish as a fairy tale.
  • I was poking through a few different houses as a Minish in Hyrule Town the other day when I came across one Minish who says she wishes she could be an apprentice to the boss of the carpenters, but that he never seems to notice her no matter how many times she tries to approach him. Given this, it'd seem that the Minish's invisibility to adults is more likely an inborn trait of the species rather than a magic they're required to maintain.
    • Link is a child, and he can't, nor any of the other Market Town kids, see them either. The Minish are similar to the Korok, they are both Invisible to Normals. Unless a Minish Sage (Elzo) intervenes it's impossible to directly observe them, only everyday objects they're interacting with. Presumably, the sealing away of the Triforce and Master Sword in this timeline, has left Hylians little more than Muggles.
      • Where in the game is it said that not even children can see them? The Minish are never shown outside their homes in the rafters or inside mouse holes and the like, so we wouldn’t know if Link can see them because they’re never shown out and about. Plus, I seem to recall at least one child character who claims to have glimpsed one the other day.

Library Books

• So the library in Hyrule Town has books that have Minish living inside them...What happens if someone tries to check one of them out?
  • Well, the game shows that they already had the issue with people checking out the books they use as ladders. So it's definitely an issue that could arise, but I imagine that it's kinda covered by the magical Perception Filter that allows Minish to be unperceivables to adults.

Inside the Temple of Droplets

• How is it that Link is able to open skylights inside the temple? It's built below an ice flow in the middle of Lake Hylia with water on all sides of the entrance, and being Minish-sized, it seems too small for its interior to be able extend beyond the reaches of the lake - shouldn't any holes in the ceiling flood the entire dungeon?

Minish vs Bricks

• The Minish are too small to climb doormats and wade through puddles, but they're apparently big enough to not fall through the gaps in between bricks in pavements. I've seen plenty of ants go down them as they cross them- so why does Link walk over them as he would regular soil?
  • There is artwork out there showing that Link as a Minish is about the size of a cherry, which isn't sufficiently small enough for him to fall between cracks in the pavement, while still being unable to swim through a small puddle on the ground. (Note that it doesn't matter how deep the water actually is - if it's deep enough for him to swim at all, he'll drown unless he has the flippers.) The doormats are somewhat pointless details, since it's not like the Minish are able to open doors anyway.

Wishing cap

• Why didn't Vaati simply use the mage's cap to wish for the Light Force to be given to him? Even if we were to assume that the hat isn't powerful enough to affect the Force, couldn't he have just wished to know where it was, or to be taken to its hiding place?
  • It probably can only make one wish per person, and he already used it to become the world's most powerful sorcerer. Notice how it seemingly turns purple when Vaati uses it, but turns red again upon his defeat.

Virtual Console

• Why didn't the European Virtual Console version fix the bugs that the American and Japanese versions fixed and add the missing Bomb Bag upgrade? I know Virtual Console releases are mostly unaltered, but not fixing the infamous glitch that made the Goron sidequest missable is just insulting to European players.
  • I'm pretty sure Virtual Console releases are emulations of other versions of the game - they don't change anything about the base game or its coding.
  • Phantasy Star IV fixed a Game-Breaking Bug, and other games toned down animations to reduce the risk of seizures and some altered dialogue (like changing "YAHOO!" to "YIPEE!" in Link's Awakening and "bugger" to "pest" in the European version of Super Mario RPG), so they could've carried over the changes from non-PAL versions.
  • Obviously this was just a case of Nintendo of Europe not giving a damn.

The Minish being responsible for the stuff you find under grass and stones

• The game claims that the rupees and stuff you find under grass and stones was placed there by the Minish. Um, what? How does that make any sense? For the Minish, stuff like rupees, bombs or arrows would be giant-sized and impossible to carry.
  • Either magic, teamwork, or they have their own pairs of Power Bracelets to help them carry things. Or it's something like in Ant-Man, where the small size of the Minish also gifts them with greater-than-average strength somehow. From what I recall, Minish Link is able to pick up and carry a bean seed several times his size at one point, before obtaining the bracelets.

Waking up Rem

• Why does Link goes through the trouble of finding the key to the house in Lon Lon Ranch, crossing Lon Lon Ranch to Lake Hylia, getting to Syrup's house, and buying a Wake-up Mushroom from her, just to wake up Rem? Couldn't he just, you know, have tried waking him up by shaking him and/or yelling?
  • The most obvious implication is that Rem is such a deep sleeper that shaking or yelling at him wouldn't have worked, which is why Link had to go out of his way to get something meant specifically for waking people up.
  • It's suggested in A Link Between Worlds that being a Shrinking Violet-type is central to Link's character. (His counterpart in Lorule is a rambling Motor Mouth, in contrast.) Could be that, being an introvert, he doesn't feel comfortable raising his voice enough for Rem to hear it.
    • Some more evidence of this: in The Wind Waker, you need to button mash and fill up a very long meter just so Link can raise his hand and make a bid in the auction. It seems the poor kid really does have a problem finding his voice sometimes.
  • Or this is just another example of how Link being a Heroic Mime creates a Just Eat Gilligan situation, much like when you had to retrieve your stolen items in Oracle of Ages.

Why not assign the Shield or the Pegasus Boots to L?

• One common complaint about handheld Zelda games is that the Shield and Pegasus Boots are selectable items, which means that they take up one of the two item slots, by contrast with the console games, in which each has a button assigned to it, so they can be used at any time. This may be understandable in the Game Boy and Game Boy Color games, which had only two face buttons and no triggers. However, outside of Kinstone fusing, the L button is never used by this game. So why didn't Capcom assign either the Shield or the Boots to L? It would be used for Kinstones when you're next to a fusee NPC, and for the Shield or Boots the rest of the time.
  • Maybe they didn't want to have players dashing off of narrow ledges by accident when they pressed the button at the wrong time. Or it was just a design flaw. All games have at least one.
  • For that matter, why isn't the L button used for items in general? Did we seriously need a button specifically for Kinstone fusions instead of having having a pop-up menu or making the Kinstone bag an equipable item?

Timeline placement

• What was the reasoning behind placing TMC and FS at the beginning of the timeline (until SS came out)? Other than introducing Vaati and the Four Sword (both of which come off as minor elements in Zelda lore, compared to Ganon and the Master Sword) and showing the symbolic origin of Link's hat (despite Ocarina of Time previously being the "origin" of Link's green getup, hat included), nothing about TMC says "first chronological game". Ocarina of Time and Skyward Sword made sense since they told the origin of Ganon and the Master Sword, but TMC and FS? They could as well take place between TP and FSA, and nothing would change; especially now that the hat symbolism was disproved by SS.
  • Probably because The Minish Cap has a lot of qualities about it that are best explained via chronological Early-Installment Weirdness. Like there only being one town in the entire kingdom, and the areas being named Mt. Crenel instead of Death Mountain and such, or the question of where the Master Sword is during all of this or why there are only six Gorons and no Zoras. All of these are more plausible if we accept that the game takes place early in Hyrule's history, before its mainstays have had time to take root.
  • There's also the fact that it shows how Hyrule came to be filled with monsters (even though Skyward Sword had monsters since it was set before they were sealed in that chest). However, the fact that the Gorons' figurine says there used to be more of them and they lived on Mount Crenel indicates that Capcom meant for the game to take place after OoT, and they just weren't consulted for Hyrule Historia. The presence of so many characters from The Wind Waker (Carlov, Sturgeon, Dill and Zill) is also bizarre given the timeline placement, but characters like Tingle and Beedle also appear in games that are unconnected timeline-wise.
  • The thing about the Gorons could be explained away if you envision Mt. Crenel as being Eldin Volcano and assume that the Gorons lived there before the events of Skyward Sword. Whichever way you look at it, the reference still fits.
  • "it shows how Hyrule came to be filled with monsters" < Actually, the monsters released at the beginning of TMC are turned into stone in the ending.

Minish vs. Picori

• Other than for a bit of realism, was there a reason why they included the detail of the Minish coming to be known by humans as the Picori? Was it because terms like "Minish Festival" or "Minish Blade" didn't roll off the tongue quite as well or something?

Visible Invisible Barriers

• Ignoring the MST3K Mantra, some of the ways the game railroads progression are confusing. How is Minish Link unable to walk through tall grass? How are rocks that can be destroyed simply by flipping them over immune to bomb blasts? Why can't Roc's Cape allow Link to jump over rocks that don't look taller than a speed bump?
  • Given the speed at which he has to wade through it, Link already has trouble moving through tall grass at his regular size. It'd be like a jungle if he were to try to penetrate it as a Minish. Bombs are incapable of destroying boulders in the same way that they can't demolish people's houses — they're presumably only strong enough to break apart things that already have some structural weakness. The rocks seen in-game may look small, but that could just be a cheat in the graphics so that they don't take up too much space on-screen. The Switch remake of Link's Awakening shows that the rocks you have to lift and toss aside are actually boulders as large as Link is.

Four Sword's duplicates

• So why does the Four Sword's duplicating power work differently here than in Four Swords and Four Swords Adventures? In those games, it permanently divided its wielder into four separate-minded duplicates with different color schemes from the moment it was drawn, but in The Minish Cap, the duplicates require special tiles to be created, are all the same color as the original Link, appear holographic and ethereal in nature, only last for a few seconds, and don't appear able to act independently of him.
  • Maybe the sword's power evolved between games, or if it is the same Link using the sword, he got better at using it?