Zelda: Breath of the Wild NPCs are actually Miis, modder confirms

It turns out that The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the WildCharacter modeling really follows Nintendo’s Mii format. This means that an entrepreneurial modder has found a way to make NPCs look like specific Miis.

Twitter User @HEYimHeroic, who assiduously cataloged more than 100 official Miis on his Mii Library website, discovered over the weekend that Breath of the Wild NPCs “use an advanced version of the Mii format” called UMii. “UMiis has almost all the same parameters as Wii U / 3DS Miis, with a few minor differences here and there,” Alice wrote on Reddit on Monday.

For the record, there has long been speculation (since the game’s launch in 2017) that Breath of the Wild resorted to the Mii format to build NPCs to populate the vast open world of the game. Alice’s work confirms this and also reveals that Miis can be imported directly into the game.

Obviously, the art style of a Mii and the characters in Breath of the Wild it is quite different; but both use essentially the same attributes and parameters. It is a convenient way for the game to generate unique large-scale NPCs. The modder figured out how his Mii would look in Breath of the Wild, although the game converted the Mii’s hairstyle (which was not one of the Breath of the Wild hair options) into one that is compatible. (Hats and other accessories for the head have also been converted into different hair styles).

@HEYimHeroic credits The Breath of the Wild modding Discord with a lot of help, especially when testing and providing screenshots of Mii conversions for the game.

Importing Miis to Breath of the Wild it is not necessarily laborious, but it does require a modified Nintendo Switch, or Wii U, and the extraction and editing of a game’s UMii file to obtain the same attributes as the Mii file. It also replaces a specific NPC, so you’ll have to find out where they are and visit them in the world to see for yourself.