Nintendo’s Breath of the Wild mostly uses fancy Miis as NPCs

If you’re Nintendo and need a group of non-playable characters (NPCs) for your next achievement Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, What to do? Apparently you can use your Mii Creation Tool to generate them. Twitter user and self-proclaimed Mii expert Alice (@HEYimHeroic) discovered that some of the minor characters in the game world (traders, townspeople, etc.) are based on Mii characters, and Miis can be integrated directly into the game – but with a lot of effort.

It has been speculated before that Breath of the wildNPCs were somehow related to Miis (especially after their game files were discovered to be labeled UMiis), but Alice’s discovery reveals that Miis can be directly mapped into the game, with some exceptions.

Picture: EHEYimHeroic

These characters in Breath of the wild aren’t exactly Miis, as you can tell by just looking at a photo of them. UMii files have many of the same attributes as Mii files, and the game interprets them as characters that you can see in the game. The consequence of this is that it is relatively simple to convert a Mii to UMii, since they have basically the same attributes. This will bring your Mii to life in the game and in the art style of the game.

If you really want to bring your Mii in Breath of the wild, you’ll need a modified Wii U or Switch (although that might be obvious). The process involves extracting and modifying an existing game character’s .bumii file to match your Mii’s values, then visiting them in-game. Apparently, the Zelda Modding Discord is reasonably active if you really want to dig into it. the system, and Alice credits it to help them test their hypothesis.

If this all seems like a lot of work or you don’t want to tweak your console, Alice mentioned that she takes commissions, although it looks like she’s had a lot of requests already. These, by the way, went exactly as planned.

There are a lot of characters in the game that aren’t created this way. The main characters like Link, Zelda, Mipha and pretty much everyone who is a significant part of the story are going to be made in the traditional way, as custom 3D models.

That the fact that some Breath of the wild the characters are basically thick-skinned Miis, with a few more tweaks, one lesson: you don’t always have to reinvent the wheel to get a system that works. If there is something that you’ve already worked a lot on, as Nintendo seems to have done with the Mii system, think about other ways that this system could be used. It’s not just good game design; this is good life advice – although I hope your results weren’t as terrifying as the Breath of the wildsometimes certified Miis are.