The Legend of Zelda: The History of Every Rupee Ever

foreign without a doubt one of the most iconic currencies in all of video games is the Legend of Zelda's rupee I could probably ask my mom what they call the money in Zelda and there's about a 75 chance she'd give the right answer for those who don't know the rupee is a giant Gem of a collectible that's present across almost every Zelda game in the series 37 year history the rupees you collect across your Zelda Adventures are most often used to buy items from shops but they can also be used as entry fees for mini games to earn yourself special Collectibles like pieces of heart either way rupees are always great to have especially if it's your first playthrough of a game and you have no idea how many times you're gonna have to Fork over 20 Rupees to a beaver or some other weird NPC but there is one strange thing about rupees that I'm sure every Zelda fan has wondered about you see over the years and through the many different games the monetary value of each of the rupees which are separated mainly by their color has changed quite a bit and although there is some information online about what color rupee is worth what amount in each game I found most of the data to be incomplete at best or just outright wrong at worst so today I've decided I'm going to answer the question for myself in this video I'm going to go through every Mainline Zelda game and explain what value each color of rupee has and then take a look at everything together at the end to see what kind of Stories the rupees are telling us I'll be looking at simple things like which Ruby has the highest value across the entire series but also a bit more complex topics like which Ruby has had the most different values across all the games and honestly Above All Else what value is most common for each color of rupee but before we get started let's go over some ground rules I'm not going to be talking about any of the spin-off games no Zelda CDI no tingle games no links crossbow training we're talking about actual Mainline Zelda games here but even within the mainline titles I'm going to also specify that the HD remakes of Twilight Princess Wind Waker and Skyward Sword won't be included either these games were only really serve to double the rupee appearance rates and the data for pretty much no real reason I mean they're the same game they have the same rupees it doesn't make sense to count it twice as for Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask on 3DS we'll get there in a bit Link's Awakening and Link's Awakening DX will also be counted as the same game but the lynx Awakening remake on switch will be counted separately because it actually changes the rupee values and colors compared to the original game we'll go over that when we get there another notable Omission from the list here is Zelda 2 The Adventure of Link this isn't actually because it has anything wrong that makes me not want to include it but surprisingly this game just doesn't use Rupees at all it's the second Zelda game ever and they just got rid of the rupee completely you just level up with experience from fighting monsters and do Side Quests for villagers who just kind of give you stuff occasionally it's really strange that rupees aren't in this game at all but either way we don't need to talk about this one in this video and speaking of which there's actually one other Mainline game that doesn't use Rupees at all which is four Swords Adventures on GameCube this game opts to use an original but still very rupee-like try angular gem called Force gems again a bit of a strange decision especially considering how Central collecting groupies was to the original four Swords game and force gems are literally just rupees but triangles but I mean if they're going to give them a different shape and a different name it's pretty hard for me to count them as rupees for this list and I think that's it when I started making this video too that the kingdom wasn't out yet but now it is so I guess we'll be covering that one too so make sure to like the video and show your appreciation for this cutting edge info it takes two seconds and it helps way more than you even realize thanks so without further Ado this is our list of games to cover and we can start with the original Legend of Zelda on NES foreign ah the first ever Zelda game and the birthplace of the rupee no not that rupee this rupee you would think as the first game in the series it would keep things simple but even though it only has two types of Rupees to collect this game does definitely have its quirks this very first game is where the blue rupee got set in its iconic value of five for the first time this is definitely a trend we're going to continue to see moving forward and speaking of iconic values if I were to ask you what color a rupee with a value of one is what do you think you would say well most people would probably say green but nope not in this Zelda the rupee worth one actually flashes back and forth between orange and blue at the same time for this list it makes things a bit awkward how are we supposed to count a rupee that's both orange and blue at the same time for our data well it actually even gets more complicated because if we look at the original manual for the game it calls the orange rupees yellow this manual also calls the rupees rubies but I'm just gonna ignore that because I assume it's a translation error so in my mind this really comes down to either categorizing these rupees as orange or yellow it's pretty rough that the first game on the list is forcing me to make such a judgment call but if I had to pick one I'm gonna go with yellow it's what the manual says and even the official art that goes with it really makes it look like the intention was it to be a yellow gem with an orange Shadow to it so that's what I'm gonna go with but feel free to let me know if you think otherwise and don't you worry all you orange rupee fans your time is coming just you wait so here's what our data looks like for the original Legend of Zelda that's one game down and two rupees added to our list don't worry it only goes up from here as we skip right over Zelda 2 that means we're on to link to the past a fan favorite and for good reason A Link to the Past does everything the original game did with a much grander story and scale and with a Fresh coat of pain at that and this this game serves as a milestone as the first place we see the trio of green blue and red rupees begin green sits at the bottom of the ladder at one blue keeps its value of five and red comes in at a chunky 20. these three colors with these three values is probably the most well established out of any of the rupees in the Zelda franchise and a lot of games continue to use it in the future so to save both you and me some time I'm just gonna refer to these three as the rupee Trio whenever they show up in this order and trust me when I say this will save a lot of time Link to the Past doesn't actually use any other rupee colors instead any value greater than 20 just shows a regular green rupee but with a white number in the bottom corner like 50 or 100. this is honestly kind of sad because it's a lot more boring to get a green 100 rupee than it is something unique like a silver or a golden Ruby it makes it feel less special like instead of wow here's this awesome super rare thing I've never seen before it's more like ah you know I probably could have just gone and cut some grass for this right so we throw the rupee Trio onto our list and we're on to Link's Awakening Link's Awakening was originally a Game Boy game so it kind of makes sense that they couldn't have the one rupee be green when DX came out and made the game available in full color you could now see that the one rupee was blue and the 30 rupee was red and in this DX version they also added an extra dungeon called the color dungeon which has a secret room containing green rupees worth five it does feel a bit weird that the green rupee is only found in this extra dungeon but it is what it is so this is what we're looking at so far and I know these tables are only going to get harder and harder to read as the video goes on but don't worry about making sense of them too much I'm only showing them to make it easier to kind of follow along what I'm doing but at the end of the video I'm gonna put everything together in nice pretty visualizations and make them easy to look at so if that's what you're interested in make sure you stick around till then [Music] Oracle of Ages and Seasons take everything you know and love about the rupee and run it over with a 16-wheeler out of all the games I had to research for this video these ones were the biggest headache and took 10 times as long to figure out this is by far the most unhinged Zelda games when it comes to rupees as someone who had never played these games myself I actually had to go and play them in order to figure out what the hell was going on here and because I felt the pain so you the lovely viewer wouldn't have to let me walk you through it this is the basic rupee in the Oracle games it's green and it's worth one seems simple enough right well this is the red rupee and no sadly it's not going to fit the trio and be worth 20 like you might be hoping it's actually worth five so we're already starting off on the wrong foot but there's something else I need to mention did you notice that these two rupees aren't actually the same you see the green one is actually quite a bit smaller than the red one okay so that must mean that these are the games that started doing what are called Big rupees rupees that are the same colors but are just larger in size and worth a lot more than their smaller counterparts well you'd be right in thinking that this is the first game to do big groupies but this is what a big rupee looks like the Oracle games have the debut of the big blue rupee at 100 and big red rupee at 200 so altogether that means we have rupees big rupees and small rupees yeah this little guy is actually a new Ruby called the small green rupee and it's worth one and this is a regular red rupee worth five have you ever even heard tell of a small rupee because I know I sure haven't so if you're anything like me you're probably wondering what the small red rupee is worth if the small green is worth one and the regular red is worth five that doesn't leave a whole lot of wiggle room well you're not gonna believe this but the small red rupee is worth 10. the small red rupee is worth double the regular rupee and to complete the small rupee Trio the small blue rupee is worth five exactly the same as the regular red ruby for some reason oh yeah and I also haven't talked about the regular blue rupee yet because I thought if I just ignore it it might go away but here we are and I have to talk about it the blue rupee in this game is worth 20. except when it's not sometimes it's 20 and sometimes it's 30. just just because because why the hell not and just when I thought I was done with all this nonsense I found this footage of a regular red rupee being worth 50. do you see why these games are giving me some problems now so here's what we have for the Oracle games I'm not here to make sense of it I'm just here to report it oh yeah and would you believe me if I said this isn't even the Oracle game's biggest offense when it comes to rupees yeah there's actually something else about these games that I haven't mentioned yet you see there's actually hidden rooms in the dungeons that you can find by blowing up walls and they contain the comeback of the yellow rupee from the first game and what deer player do you think these yellow rupees would be worth well in an unprecedented move each yellow rupee in the room is worth a random amount of either one five or Twenty I should also mention though and you can find green rupees in the hidden rooms instead of yellow which are also the same and give you a random value you from 1 5 10 or 20. yep that's four different values for the same exact rupee it's fine everything's fine it's all gonna be okay so suddenly our very simple chart has gotten a lot more complicated it's gonna take a little bit of trickery to deal with this later but we'll get to that when we get to that and with that Goliath of a rupee table out of the way we can finally move on from the Oracle games and into the 3D zeldas our first stop is Ocarina of Time and with it it's time to dive into the rupee's extended family tree [Music] Ocarina of Time returns to using the rupee Trio as its base with one 520 being green blue red unlike the ungodly colors of the Oracle games it's nice to be back but on top of that Ocarina of Time fixes the main problem I have with linked to the Past rupees by throwing in some rare colors for a bit of extra spice we now have this really cool purple rupee worth 50. and even a solid gold rupee worth a whopping 200. like God damn that's some serious cash and I know we already used 200 for the big red in the Oracle games but I don't even want to hear that name right now to be honest and besides what feels more special a golden or a big red like who even cares when you pick up a golden rupee or even a purple one you can't help but feel accomplished like damn damn I really did something here huh the one other root be Ocarina of Time introduces is the silver rupee and it's not obtainable through regular means it's only used in Dungeons and you collect them all to open a door or let you progress or something now these really shouldn't count as rupees for our list because they're just used as Collectibles to solve specific puzzles and dungeons or at least that's what I would say but if you notice these silver rupees actually do give you a value of five rupees when you pick them up if it looks like a rupee and it spins like a rupee yeah you get my point for me personally Ocarina of Time is where rupees really started to feel like they had concrete values the Ruby family color wheel doubled in size over the course of a single game and it feels like we have a really solid base that any game moving forward wouldn't really have to change much with it feels like a lot of the values you need are covered and all the colors are nice and work well together and here's what that looks like in our chart so now we have Majora's Mask come along and as a copy and paste of Ocarina of Time assets I think we can probably just assume everything's the same and move on to the next game the rupee Trio returns as well as the purple at 50. the silver rupee has graduated to become an actual member of the family and can be collected regularly out in the world and it's boosted its value all the way up to 100 and at the top of the list we have the huge 200 value which was the gold rupee in the last game the silver Rupees at 100 in this game so you would assume it stays golden and of course it doesn't do that at all and instead we get a completely new rupee in the form of the absolutely disgusting and dingy orange rupee you want to tell me that this is the highest value rupee out of all of them better than this or this you already had a golden rupee in Ocarina of Time why do they feel the need to replace it with this monstrosity this just makes me so sad I love the golden Ruby in Ocarina of Time I think it looks so cool so to see it replaced with this ugly ugly orange color oh it's just heartbreaking but then I come to find out that this change was reverted in the 3DS version which does actually use the same golden rupee as an Ocarina of Time see this is why I have trust issues before you ask yes Ocarina of Time on 3DS is exactly the same as the original but George Mass 3D may only have a difference of one single rupee but that's still enough to give it a different entry on our list and here's what it looks like in the table next up we're gonna hop back to the 2D games for a minute and look at Four Swords on Game Boy Advance this game starts with the return of the rupee Trio but instead of having other colors mixed in force hordes uses big versions of the green blue and red rupees that are worth a lot more just like the Oracle games did Oracle games we go from red at 20 to Big Green at 50 big blue at 100 and big red at 200. Four Swords is also the first time we see the black rupee which causes you to actually lose rupees when you pick it up and although it's not really useful for our purposes this rupee is also referred to as the Rue poor which I just think is a really funny name it's kind of a suitable name though to be honest because if you're on fortunate enough to pick this thing up you're about to drop 80 rupees yeah this thing isn't messing around and the last Edition four Swords makes to the rupee ecosystem is the rupee shards which aren't worth anything on their own but if you manage to collect four of them you'll be rewarded with 500 rupees again we're kind of gonna have to make a judgment call here the shards themselves do look like gold rupees so we could count the gold rupee as 125 but on their own they're literally worthless and don't increase your rupee count at all so that doesn't really seem like the right way to do it I think because you can only get the value if you have four pieces to put together for the sake of our analysis this is going to count as a big gold ruby when you complete it it shows it's the same size as the other big rupees in the game and big golden rupee is a category that other games use later so we might as well just use it now and while we're on Game Boy Advance we might as well take a quick detour to Minish Cap because it's exactly the same as four Swords just without the shards and the black negative rupors the trio and all the big groupie colors are the same so we might as well just put them on the list at the same time and with that it looks like things are finally starting to settle in a little bit but who knows what could happen in the next 3D Zelda game The Wind Waker Wind Waker starts off strong with our favorite rupee Trio and the nice edition of a yellow rupee sitting comfortably at a value of 10. I always thought it was a bit weird that the other 3D games didn't do a 10 cost rupee so I'm happy to see it here I think it fits in perfectly and yellow is a really good color to use for too purple still sits at 50 and we've taken the orange and silver from Majora's Mask and made them make a bit more sense the orange droopy which fits in with all the other standard colors and has also had its color adjusted to look a lot better tops things off at 100 and the metallic silver is the cream of the crop above everything else at 200 and believe it or not that's every rupee and Wind Waker and actually to top it off Twilight Princess does the exact same thing no changes no additions everything is exactly the same as it was in Wind Waker could it possibly be that we've finally reached some level of consistency you might be starting to think think so but I'm sad to say that after Twilight Princess one of our beloved rupees from this family tree was never seen again foreign over to Phantom Hourglass where the rupee Trio is still intact but makes a few minor changes outside of that the big red rupee is back at 200 like usual but this time the Big Green rupee is worth 100 instead of 50 and the big blue rupee is nowhere to be found at all maybe they just figured they didn't need a 50 for this game but they didn't want to have a big red and a big blue without a big green I don't know no matter what is at 100 it's weird to have two big colors without the third one this is also the first time we get to see the big gold ruby as a full collectible on its own but it's only worth 300 here instead of the 500 for collecting the four rupee shirts that's not all either because the root poor is back and this time it's at a value of negative 10 which is a lot more palatable and we actually even get a big group or at negative 50 which I think is pretty cool I still don't really get how collecting something like this can make you lose money like it's a big black gem bro just don't put it in your pocket just drop it on the ground walk away you don't need it but overall Phantom Hourglass does a good amount of new things with its rupees and we haven't seen that in a while so it's a notable member on the list for sure then Spirit Tracks comes in and it obviously will follow the same mold as Phantom Hourglass but it actually just takes out a bunch of stuff it doesn't include the big green or big red rupees or the root pores at all so all you get is the trio and the big gold at 300. I'm not really sure why they took away so many options from Phantom Hourglass for this game but other than that there's not really a whole lot to say next up Skyward Sword and using the trio we all know and love along with bringing back the rootboard from Phantom Hourglass at negative 10. the silver rupee is back at 100 and the golden rupee returns as well and it's not at 200 but a whopping 300 so you're telling me a gold rupee this big is worth the same as a gold rupee this big inflation is just ridiculous these days the strange emission from this game is the purple rupee at 50 which is nowhere to be found I'm not sure why they didn't feel the need to have it here especially when the rupee counts in this game specifically can get really high I guess they would just rather shower you with red rupees than toss you a purple 50 every now and again but with purple being one of my personal favorites I would be lying if I said this didn't bump me out and past that we're pretty much set the next four games all use the same rupee setup which includes A Link Between Worlds Triforce Heroes breath of the Wild and the lynx Awakening remake on switch we have the rupee Trio with purple back at 50 silver at 100 and gold at 300. it may have taken us a while but we got here eventually so after all our research this is what our data looks like we have a lot more information on a lot more of the games and we've dedicated columns for every rupee type even if they only show up once so now we can finally see which values are the most common for each of the rupee colors across all of the games a lot of them are exactly what you would expect green at one blue at five Reddit 20 and purple at 50. yellow ends up as a tie with two games that use one and two games that use 10. but if you don't include the Oracle games which have a varying value that just happens to include one 10 is actually our winner silver and gold have settled in nicely to the 100 and 300 slots and have been in use ever since Skyward Sword and honestly I'm not sure that's going to be changing anytime soon orange was locked in at 100 just because Wind Waker and Twilight Princess both used it but it has consistently been replaced by silver ever since the big Trio is most common at 50 100 and 200 with the big green rupee being the only one of the three to ever step away from these values when it was worth a hundred in Phantom Hourglass the rupo sits at negative 10 from Skyward Sword and Phantom Hourglass over the original negative 80 from four Swords and the big group or in the small Trio have only ever showed up in a single game each so these ones are pretty self-explanatory it's just their one and only value so that answers our main question of which value is most common for each rupee but I don't think it'd be worth all this work if we didn't do at least a little more digging to see what we can find and don't worry I'm not just gonna continually read numbers at you because the easiest way to find the highlights of our data is actually to visualize it into charts and take a look at it with different sorting and filtering options for this video I'm going to use an online application called Tableau it gives you plenty of options for making charts and this is a pretty simple data set so I think this is the easiest way for me to do it so give me some time and I'll be right back so here we are over in Tableau and I've taken the time to make a couple little charts here that we're just going to go through and sort of talk about what we can see this first chart is all the rupee values in their respective games at their different colors so at a glance it's very easy to look at this and see things like the rupee Trio in games or like which games have gold rupees which games have rupors it also makes it very easy to see at the end wow look at that the last five games have all had the exact same rupees so we finally landed on some sort of consistent system for the color values which is neat this second chart is sort of the opposite instead of being grouped by the games we're grouped by the colors which makes it very easy to see the change over time that each of the colors has gone through it does make it very easy to see levels of consistency levels of inconsistency and changes over time pretty cool this is the rupee appearance rates across all the games so how often each color appears in the games these bubbles on the left here in this bubble tree map are larger the more games they appear in and then on the right we have a more simplified bar graph of the same numbers so you can see blue is the only color to appear in every single Zelda game that we looked at since the very beginning if you don't count the first game green and red have also been in every single Zelda except for the original on NES I think that's pretty cool and this also makes it really easy to see the one-off rupees down here the big black from fan mower glass as well as the small rupees from the Oracle games which I do hope that we never see again and finally we have the distinct values for each color so this is how many different values each color has had across all of the games we can see that yellow red green and blue are all at four but if we go back over to the value by color graph we can see most of that does come come from the Oracle games if not for the Oracle games green would only have two values for example by being worth five in Link's Awakening and actually we can filter any and all of these graphs so if I take out the Oracle games just like that the chart will adjust and I can see that silver is the next most distinct values which if we scroll down we can see here yep it was worth five in Ocarina a hundred in Majora's Mask 200 in Wind Waker and Twilight Princess and then back to 100 so that is an important aspect of doing this in Tableau I made sure to set this up so that we can adjust any of these charts as necessary for example if you wanted to look specifically at the 200 value you can change this slider up here and see all the different color rupees across the games that have shown up at the 200 value interesting to note here for example that all of the 2D games have used the big red rupee but the 3D games tend to use something to different sometimes it's gold sometimes it's orange or sometimes it's silver the highest value rupee and the lowest value rupee both come from four Swords on Game Boy Advance with the four rupee shards making the big gold 500 rupee and the negative 80 root poor and the award for the most consistent rupee across all the games has to go to the purple rupee this rupee has showed up 10 times at a value of 50. it has never been in a game and not been at 50. and there's a couple other options like the big blue and the big red at three and four games respectfully the same values but still 10 games at one value just blows any other rupee out of the water green blue and red might stand a chance if they didn't have the Oracle games messing them up but even then they have a couple Oddball options thrown in there that would take away their 100 accuracy on one value so the winner is purple no other arguments to be made a couple other fun statistics here 16 out of the 19 games use the rupee Trio as their base Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks are the only 3D games to use the big rupees which if I'm being honest is probably just because they were on the handheld DS along with most other 2D games which were on handhelds at the time and of course the Oracle games win the award for most color value combinations in a single game with nine different rupee types that can have a total of 16 different values it shouldn't be possible and yet here it is and I think that's just about gonna wrap it up I could probably spend all day just digging around and finding random stuff to talk about here but I think I hit most of the major highlights and if you'd like to dig through this data yourself and see what you can find it's all going to be publicly available at the link in the description so feel free to check it out and then you can even leave a comment and let everyone know what you found thank you so much for watching this video especially if you watched it all the way up until this point I do really really appreciate it and if you liked the video remember to give it a like because it helps me out so so much and it lets me know this is the kind of stuff you guys want to see thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one bye bye for now [Music] foreign

Channel: Stabilize

Views: 304,164

Keywords: the legend of zelda, tears of the kingdom, zelda, zelda tears of the kingdom, legend of zelda, breath of the wild, breath of the wild 2, zelda lore, zelda trivia, zelda facts, did you know gaming, zelda did you know gaming, legend of zelda easter eggs, TOTK, botw, zelda totk, nintendo, zelda secrets, zelda history, zelda facts to fall asleep to, the legend of zelda tears of the kingdom, zelda breath of the wild, legend of zelda rupee, zelda rupee farm, zelda rupee

Id: ZTOJ2ytIhK4

Length: 27min 36sec (1656 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 01 2023