The Ghosts of Misery Mire - A Link to the Past Mystery

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#zelda #alinktothepast #thelegendofzelda

[nodrance]

So the conclusion here is basically "they misplaced an enemy that just so happened to be the jankiest enemy in the game, and everything else is working as intended"

[kakarikokage]

Link- "Well, uncle, you came back from the dead, so..."

[sa]

Misery Mire sounds like an alter ego of Monster Maze.

[Broofthewild]

Dude the devil swamp part just cracked me up “what the hell?” Hahah

[dirtsgamecafe]

Man, these last few uploads are the exact kind of thing that got me in to Zelda lore in the first place. Little tidbits that have way more detail behind them than you'd expect. Thanks for the entertainment and the nostalgia, my man.

[acoupleofschoes]

My guess is "Ancilla" is short for ancillary (an-sill-ary). Meaning subordinate, secondary, subsidiary, auxiliary, etc. It's a secondary state value that's tied to the time and/or the AI state, and used to determine vulnerability.

[CZsWorld]

The fact that you reverse engineered a glitch is insane. I love how in the 90s stuff like this just became a mystery, as if there was some in game secret people had yet to figure out. Whereas today it would probably just get patched.

Like the Mew under the truck, It seems like one of those things that was more fun before the internet.

[WNBunker]

I have been playing A Link to the Past literally since the day it was released. It is my favorite of all the Zelda games. But this is the first time I've heard about "The Ghosts". And being a computer programmer old enough to have written in Assembly, the explanation was totally fascinating as well. Excellent video! Keep up the great work.

[xcoder]

I doubt they misplaced the enemies. It's more likely that someone changed the landscape after the enemies were placed, and whoever did that didn't realize that they were going to create a problem by removing deep water from certain locations, because maybe a tester complained "there's too much deep water in the swamp" and some executive gave the order to remove some.

I recently had a similar problem in software development. If you resized the window of one of our applications, everything would break apart, but it worked fine before. What happened was that there was a box with three icons in it; those icons were not always visible, but they were always there. These icons made sure that the box had a minimum width. Above the box was a table, and since it looked weird if the table and the box had different widths, the table width was set to always be the same as the box width. It was decided to remove one of the icons, which caused the box to have a smaller min width. As a result, the table now had a smaller minimum width. However, if the table width went below a certain value, the drawing calculation would overflow, causing elements that should have been drawn into the table to be drawn all over the place in the window.

Whoever removed the icon probably did not expect the table drawing code to break when the window was resized. Likewise, the guy who removed some deep water areas did not expect that this would become a problem for three of the placed enemies, as they would no longer have access to any deep water around them.

[devonm]

It was probably planned for the Ku to have a walking variant, but for whatever reason it didn't happen. After all, they exist in A Link Between Worlds.

[Romalac]

I legit never even knew these "ghosts" were a thing, somehow more than two decades went by without me stumbling on _anything_ talking about them. Cheers for the info, and for going so ham on investigating them!

[GreenOfFields]

This may be my favorite thing about the Zelda fan base: they apply their puzzle-solving beyond the planned applications. Take a mystery, gather all available information, collate the data, test hypotheses and draw a conclusion.

And once all that has been done grab a shovel and keep digging until you hit bedrock!

[GossipGeist]

H-he's fast!

Another great video man, loving the deep dives into old Zelda mysteries and oddities surrounding developmental decisions.

[Axolautism]

10:49 that's less of a butterfly effect and more of a snowball effect

[DaNintendude]

Very satisfying end to the video, with all the loose ends being tied up.
After going into how everything worked, the erratic behavior made complete sense

[Leeloo-Foxx]

i love the visuals of the ghosts just being floating john cena heads. because you cant see them.

[wizcatcheslightning]

Amateur Mellitologist here: bees love and need water, but will only go for freshwater for nourishment. They don’t typically attack fish, but there are cases of this happening. Why? No idea 😅

[Stare]

Always cool to hear about fun stories from the older end of the series. I grew up with windwaker and twilight princess so stuff like this is totally new to me. Great to see these older titles still getting love all these years later

[WretchedRedoran]

HOLY CARP!!! THAT ZORA ANIMATION!!! WHAT THE HECK!!!! That was

[schnader]

Those first two sound effects from aLttP already shot weeks worth of nostalgia directly into my veins