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Stovepipe Island and GC Island
An older form of Link was sketched, but never modeled. Link was to physically grow during the course of the game (at a more subtle rate than in Ocarina of Time), but implementing this idea was too difficult, so it was scrapped.[citation needed]
The Skull Hammer was confirmed to have a different name and design during the development phase.[citation needed]
Link's clothes were to have the same color scheme as his clothes from the original The Legend of Zelda. This was only changed to the final color scheme late into development.
As seen in the SpaceWorld 2001 trailer for the game, Link originally had a sneaking function, possibly created to be used in the stealth sequences of the Forsaken Fortress. This was replaced with hiding in barrels.
In the same trailer, Link's voice from Majora's Mask was used as a placeholder voice, as the final voices had not yet been recorded.
Hyrule Historia contains concept art of two islands that were never included in the game:
Stovepipe Island was planned to be a volcanic "island of steam and smoke" with a hot spring lake and a valley of magma. Link would have potentially entered the volcano's crater, as with Fire Mountain in the finalized game.
A mysterious item, marked only by Japanese text translating to "Water Boots", can be loaded and used through hacking. However, no model appears, and the animation for putting the boots on and off is the same as that of the Iron Boots. It is therefore possible that the Water Boots were, in fact, Iron Boots with different functions, such as sinking into water (as evidenced by the item name).[1]
Until surprisingly late into development, the A Button was mapped to the sword, with B being the roll command.
Enemy swords can be picked up and used in the final game. In earlier builds, however, the sword button icon changed to reflect the enemy weapon Link was using.
Two placeholder sail icons were found on the game disk, whose internal names suggest they would have been called the Zora Sail and the Tingle Sail. No information is known as to why these extra sails were not implemented, but Eiji Aonuma has stated that the GameCube hardware limited the boat speed, which resulted in the Swift Sail in The Wind Waker HD.[2]
↑"If I had to say one thing in particular I wanted to improve in the original, while I was developing the original, it has to have been the boat speed. I can't give you an exact number, but it's almost two times faster in the Wii U version than it was in the Game Cube [sic] version, and that was because of limitations with the hardware." —Eiji Aonuma (Nintendo's Eiji Aonuma Pulls Back The Curtain On 'The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker HD'.)
