Man mods Wind Waker's pronouns to make Link a female role model

Mike Hoye wanted to give his three and a half year old daughter Maya a positive female role model in video games, but found himself at a loss for strong leading ladies in titles appropriate for kids. When playing The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker with Maya he would read the text aloud to her and swap the gender specific pronouns on the fly to make it sound like Link was a girl, but this was "annoying and awkward," so Hoye decided to take things one step further and actually hack the game to change all the pronouns, thereby turning Link into a girl.

He also chose to change Link's little sister into a little brother. Given the game's wide-eyed cartoony art style, the children look gender-neutral anyway, so a young player unfamiliar with the series wouldn't notice any discrepancy between the visuals and text.

"I'm not having my daughter growing up thinking girls don't get to be the hero and rescue their little brothers," said Hoye on his blog, where he detailed the process of modding Wind Waker via the Dolphin emulator.

Evidently, this was much harder than one might think as all the changes needed to be the same byte-for-byte length. Thus "my lad" and "master" have been changed to "milady" and "swordsman" is now "swordmain." Hoye admitted these translations aren't perfect, but "if you come up with something better, I'm all ears" he insisted.

Instructions for applying the patch are detailed on his blog for any parents in a similar boat (pun intended).

"FemLink or you're doing it wrong," Hoye stated.