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

If you’re Nintendo and you need a bunch of non-playable characters (NPCs) to hit you soon Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, What are you doing? Apparently you can use your Mii creation tool to generate it. Twitter user and self-proclaimed Mii expert Alice (@HEYimHeroic) discovered that some of the minor characters in the game’s world (retailers, residents, etc.) are based on Mii characters, and that Miis can get into the game directly – albeit with a fair amount of effort.

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

Image: @HEYimHeroic

These characters in Breath of nature is not exactly Miis, as you can see by just looking at a picture of them. UMii files have much the same characteristics as Mii files, and the game interprets them in the characters you can see in the game. As a result, it’s relatively easy to convert a Mii into a UMii, since they have basically the same features. This will make your Mii come alive in the game and in the art style of the game.

If you really want to install Mii Breath of nature, you need a modified Wii U or Switch (although this was obvious). The process involves extracting and editing the .bumii file of an existing game character to match the values ​​you have Mii, and then visiting in-game. Apparently the Zelda Modding Discord is quite active if you really want to dig into the system, and Alice credits it to help them test their hypothesis.

If it seems like a lot of work or you do not want to modify your console, Alice mentioned that they take orders even though they seem to have received many requests. Incidentally, it went exactly as expected.

There are many characters in the game that are not created this way. Main characters like Link, Zelda, Mipha and almost everyone who is a big part of the story will be made in the traditional way as personal 3D models.

Let the fact that some Breath of nature characters are basically Miis with a few extra tweaks is a lesson: you do not always have to invent the wheel to get a system that works. If there’s something you’ve been doing a lot of work on, like Nintendo apparently did with the Mii system, think of other ways the system can be used. It’s not just a good game design; this is good life advice – although your results will hopefully not be as frightening as the Breath of nature-made Miis sometimes is.