The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is undoubtedly one of the crown jewels of the entire games industry. Its massive world, open-ended exploration, and discovery-driven by experimentation have led to new discoveries being made in the game to this day. Just this past November, players discovered that you can actually feed the in-game squirrels! With a game this vast and intricate, it goes without saying that the code for the game is even denser than the Calamity-stricken hills of Hyrule itself. Modders and Data Miners have been spelunking into the depths of the game’s code for years now, and they’ve once again come up with arms full of treasure.
Twitter user and Mii enthusiast HEYimHeroic has discovered that the Hylian and Sheikah in-game character models are actually an advanced version of Miis labeled as “UMii” in the game’s code. Aside from “UMiis” being an adorable word when said aloud, you may assume that this is a pretty uninteresting discovery. You’d be wrong. Because the character models in the game are using an advanced version of the Mii avatars in the code, it’s possible to import original Miis into Breath of the Wild and convert them into NPCs!
Hi, Mii expert here. Turns out, the NPCs in TLoZ:BotW use an advanced version of the Mii format. This means that with modding, you can inject Miis into the game. 🙂
Thinking about opening commissions for Mii injects, both screenshot/images of your Mii and mod downloads! pic.twitter.com/8NfVr4zyqA
— i'm alice (@HEYimHeroic) January 4, 2021
This means that any Mii ever made can now technically be added into Breath of the Wild. If you’d like to see yourself, your grandma, or even everyone’s Wii Sports boxing arch-rival Matt recreated as a denizen of Hyrule, you now can! There are a few caveats in that some hairstyles aren’t supported, however, the game is actually programmed to match the NPC’s features to the closest approximation using in-game assets in such cases. Furthermore, special characters like Link, Zelda, and Paya aren’t UMiis at all and are instead unique character models.
HEYimHeroic confirmed her findings with the help of fellow modders on Reddit, Twitter, and the Breath of the Wild modding Discord, and is currently working on compiling all of her data into a full info dump and how-to. It will be interesting to see just how deep this Mii connection goes, and what other secrets lie hidden deep within the tangled forests of code that make Breath of the Wild’s Hyrule tick!
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Written by Marcus Ramirez
A writer and dreamer who loves all things tropical, bright, colorful, and shiny. Marcus is obsessed with Kingdom Hearts and patiently awaits its triumphant return to Nintendo hardware. He has a (totally real) court order that requires him to always have a 3DS or Switch on his person when leaving the house for more than a few hours.
