Many people rank The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap as one of the series' finest entries, though it has unfortunately not seen much support by Nintendo since its original release. There is hope within the community that the game might join the handful of other The Legend of Zelda Switch games, and one fan shows just what a sequel might look like.After developing the seminal pair of original Game Boy titles, The Legend of Zelda: The Oracle of Ages and The Oracle of Seasons, Capcom went on to release The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap in 2004 for the Game Boy Advance. This title was a combination of familiar top-down Zelda mechanics while introducing a variety of new ones that to this day haven't been seen since. The titular Minish Cap allowed Link to shrink to the size of the Minish, a species of intelligent creatures that Hylians thought no longer exist because of their miniscule size.Twitter user Sermella has shared gorgeous fan art of a The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap 2 on the Switch. In Sermella's imagining of a sequel, The Minish Cap would ditch its 2D roots and return in a new 3D adventure, with Toon Link standing within a Minish village, surrounded by towering flora and fauna, a house made out of a boot, and a fence looming in the distance. Not only does the fan art convey what the in-game world would look like, Sermella provides a look at the game's minimalist HUD, reminiscent of The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening remake from a few years ago.
Another one of the images in Sermella's post compares their illustration to a screenshot of the original game, helping highlight the transition form 2D to 3D. While The Minish Cap's pixel art works to distinguish its regular and ant-sized environments, Sermella's fan art teases how impressive such a contrast would be in a 3D setting.
Nintendo has implemented such a concept before like with Super Mario 64's Tiny-Huge Island, where the environment can scale between platforming on a very small, regular-sized, or massive objects. Furthermore, Nintendo has made an entire series revolving around traversing through environments from the perspective of a garden critter: Pikmin. Although these titles are traditionally top-down themselves, they continually spark a sense of wonder when the player encounters a new life-sized object like an abandoned vase or article of clothing.
If Nintendo could combine the changing world size of a 3D environment with the detail and scaling of Pikmin's biomes, then The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap 2 could happen just like in Sermella's picture.
The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap is available on Game Boy Advance.