Clock Town - Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland style

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This is one of my biggest fanart ever, a 65x22 cm drawing depicting Clock Town from Majora's Mask and mimicking the art style of Freshly-Picked Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland. I did it for a contest held by TLW.net in 2008. Its theme was a style crossover: a subject from a Zelda game drawn in the style of another specific episode of the series.



As my gallery shows, I've always enjoyed switching the styles of different Zeldas, but this time I chose that of a spin-off to the series rather than a regular entry. The reason, strange as it may seem, was that in my opinion Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland relates pretty well to Majora's Mask.
The second LoZ outing for N64 is kind of an oddball. At the time, a pair of direct sequels to the usual Triforce quest had already been released. They explored side stories with different goals, settings and nemeses; innovative episodes featuring different approaches to gameplay and atmosphere. Especially the dreamy Link's Awakening. But the nightmarish Majora's Mask went even further in that direction and probably combined more than ever its game design with its contents and themes. The focus shifted from the main quest protagonists to the subquests about the secondary characters. The result is a bizarre, twisted tangle of everyday stories with an occasional, unusual satirical aftertaste.
In the motley population of Termina, Tingle stands out (at least to me) as the most charismatic npc seen in a Zelda game (aside from the main characters, those featured in the story), so much that years later he even got a personal game for the DS. MsM was an alternative take on Zelda, whereas Rosy Rupeeland is a complete spin-off that couldn't be weirdest. It's a smaller (and far more flawed, for the record) project that inherits and radicalizes M'sM wry spirit and experimental approach. It also made explicit satire, going from vague undertones to an ubiquitous subtext conveyed through every character and game mechanic.

I decided to highlight the similarities between the grotesque mood of the two games through Termina's capital city visualized in the artistic style and the 2D presentation of Rosy Rupeeland. Clock Town is the heart of Majora's Mask just like Port Town in Tingle's title, they both introduce the player to the peculiar rules of the game, to its disorientating and slightly hostile atmosphere. There, most of the numerous subquests and character interactions are triggered.
So I reorganized the five parts of Clock Town in a horizontal scroll inspired by Port Town as it appears in Rosy Rupeeland (as you can see at this link), dual screen visualization included: that's why a large portion of the drawing is occupied by the sky. The massive Clock Tower made it higher than the original, by the way. I also scattered some visual parallels between the two: the guard at the beginning, the characters leaning out of the buildings, the state of abandonment of the north part at the far right. Here Link and Tingle, the two protagonists, meet for the first time.
The fairy child who lacks any sense of belonging and helps anyone in need during his travels through space and time and the ridicolous wannabe fairy, eternal child and merry outcast.