this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2025
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Yeah, Link surprised me, he's left handed in most games before BOTW, which is neat.
He is right handed in the Wii games with motion controls for the benefit of the majority of right handed gamers, but left handed everywhere else.
Twilight Princess was crossgen between GameCube and Wii. The two games are mirror images of each other because it made it simpler to port the game than mirroring the character animations alone.
Weird that they never bothered to swap him back to left handed for the Switch games, though.
Isometric Link (Link's Awakening remake) remains left handed at least, but Switch era 3D Link is right handed.
I'll just chalk that up to the Switch games wanting to switch (heh) it up a bit, with his primary color association also switching from green to blue. Maybe if they decide to make an older style 3D Zelda again, they'll go back to left handed Link.
It’s not even that they “didn’t swap him back”.
Twilight Princess for the Wii U uses the original left handed link from the GameCube version (it swaps to the right handed version of the game in the harder difficulty).
Link is left handed in all of the 3DS entries, Hyrule Warriors, and Smash 4. In Smash Ultimate, both “Young” and “Toon” Link are left-handed while “Link” is right handed (he’s based off of BOTW in this entry).
In The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, you primarily play as Zelda, but Link is left-handed when he appears.
It was a very deliberate decision to make BOTW/TOTK Link right handed, and it’s not as simple as “not changing it back”.
They are different characters. OoT Link has always been a leftie, BotW Link has always been a rightie
Almost all of the Links between different games are different characters, but they were all still left handed until the Wii era. That includes Wind Waker Link, Twilight Princess (GC) Link, Oracle Link, and even NES OG Link who are all distinct from OoT.
BotW Link is right handed either because they forgot he was originally left handed before the Wii era, or because it was a deliberate choice to break convention from older games (like also having BotW link wear blue instead of green).
I wouldn't be surprised by either possibility, just given that BotW deliberately had relatively few series veterans working on it.
They probably made BotW Link a rightie so that when using a bow, our 3rd person view can see the bow while keeping him on the left side of the screen, as is convention in most games (not Zelda games but all games)