LEGO Link Takes a Breath of the Wild
/Zelda is one of Nintendo’s most iconic games—and LEGO and gaming certainly go hand-in-hand when it comes to nerdiness. (We’ve only written about LEGO and The Legend of Zelda occasionally here at BrickNerd.)
I perfectly remember playing the first Zelda video game on NES in 1986. Since then, the saga has continued until The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild appeared on Wii U in 2017. Link has had a few different looks evolving each game, but BOTR’s visual style was impressive and realistic.
It is this realistic style that builder Sebastien Racicot has recreated with an incredibly large brick-built Link, based on the highly successful video game.
I reached out to him for a bit more information about the build. Sebastien actually made this creation over a year ago after playing the game Breath of the Wild. He was inspired by the dark blue azure colour of the character—one of his favourites! It took him around six months to build Link from about 3,000 parts and was exhibited at the Canadian Brickomanie convention in November 2019.
It all started with a piece on the sword: the dark blue dragon wings as handles. Sebastien thought it was an almost exact representation of Link’s sword in the game. This element set the scale to the rest of the creation—but then came a lot of headaches to design the rest.
Of all the details, Sebastien knew he had to get the clothes right. Sebastien found references for the outfit and equipment online, and he took care to detail the Triforce symbol on the Hylian Shield with the perfect element: triangular tiles.
The Sheikah Slate, shown below, is faithfully reproduced, with a BrickHeadz eye in the middle.
The biggest difficulty for Sebastien was Link’s face and hair. He wanted to achieve something not too static for the hair, so he used a variety of dark tan curved slopes for texture. Sebastien said he had to redo the head five or six times to get this final result.
The final kneeling position was an inspiration from a sequence in the game., and the boots and foliage on the ground complete the scene.
Reproducing human-like characters with LEGO is no easy task, and Sebastien did a very good job packing in the details with respect to the character’s proportions. As I, too, am a fan of the game, I appreciate his effort in this creation and would give him a Korok seed for what he has accomplished!
If you need to take a breath, here’s a link to the Sebastien Racicot Flickr gallery for more photos.
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