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If you’ve spent a good amount of time with the N64 classic The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and its sequel The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, you may have become quite familiar with the visuals of each games and which assets were brought over from one title to the other.
The keen-eyed among you may even notice some small differences, too. One of these happens to be the texture of the deku stick, a key item in both games that can be used to give enemies a good whack while also acting as a pretty handy makeshift torch. Apparently, the slight difference in the stick’s appearance between both games wasn’t by design, but rather a bug that was left during development. This comes via Twitter user ‘darkeye’ who discusses the curiosity in a thread (click through to view all posts):
In a nutshell, the texture for the Deku stick in both Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask is a bit skewed, as the commands sent to the N64 to draw the stick tries to essentially load a 16×16 pixel texture on an 8×8 pixel asset. So what happens is that some of the data after the texture command is used as if it were part of the same texture.
So for Ocarina of Time, Link’s hair texture is used for the stick, but for Majora’s Mask it’s a little bit more complicated. The texture here actually incorporates something called a ‘joint table’ seen within the main menu of Ocarina of Time, which displays an “image” of Link holding whichever item you’ve chosen to equip. The joint table itself isn’t used in Majora’s Mask, but the data commands for it remain; specifically, the command for ‘Child Link with the Hylian Shield’ appears directly after the deku stick data. So in essence, this image is used to form the texture of the deku stick.
It’s an odd set of circumstances, to be sure, but the inclusion of such a bug apparently didn’t bother the development staff all that much, as the result is a simple minor alteration of the deku stick texture and appearance. As for what the stick might look like had the bug been fixed, well… Darkeye has the answer to that, too:
We have to agree, the “intended” design for the deku stick looks a bit bland here, so we’re actually quite thankful that this particular bug remained within the game!
What do you think, dear readers? Is this something you’ve noticed yourselves? Do you prefer the stick design without the weird bug? Let us know!
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