I’m reading the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time manga for an upcoming edition of “Oh, the Humanity!”. I complained about this the last time I read a manga, but it bears repeating—mangas are near impossible to read. Japanese is written from right to left. English is written from left to right. To read a Japanese comic in English, you have to read from left to right and right to left at the same time. My brain still can’t handle this challenge.
Now, if these book publishers were sensible, they would simply reverse all the images when they replace the Japanese text, in order to make their mangas possible easier to read for English speakers. Apparently, the book company has gotten a LOT of complaints about this, because the book starts with a bold disclaimer about how they did not reverse the images in order to preserve the integrity of the original artwork.
This is ironic, because when they ported Zelda: Twilight Princess from the Gamecube to the Wii, they reversed the entire game.
So I guess the moral of the story is that Nintendo cares more about the artistic integrity of their Zelda mangas than their videogames. I guess that explains the existence of Toon Link.
