(All of this is in rupees. Also keep in mind that he also sometimes discounts items)
Now, what about some of the other items sold in Hyrule for comparison? Here are a few examples:
20 rupees: one serving of milk
50 rupees: a (basic) shield, red potion
100 rupees: a bottle
200 rupees: blue potion (also requires 10 monster tails)
But, what about the items sold in Lorule? Well, here are some:
50 rupees: a (basic) shield
77 rupees: a fairy
Also, for 88 rupees: a literal bee
This means two things. The first important take away is that Lorule and Hyrule price their shields the same, meaning that the two worlds' economies can just be lumped together.
Secondly, Loruleans (and therefore Hyruleans by extension given that first point) value a single bee more than a magical sprite with the power to essentially bring you back to life upon dying. I don't know about you, but this definitely seems perfectly reasonable to me!
(Also, I am aware that it's because of a pun on the Japanese word for "bee," but just ignore that for a second)
Of course, it’s difficult to then make judgements on the entirety of Hyrule's and Lorule’s economy based solely on this. As a result, I'm instead going to compare Hyrule's prices to real world ones (this obviously ignores supply and demand, inflation, average wages, other various economic terms, etc. specific to Hyrule). That 20 rupee price for a serving of milk is probably the best place to start. So, using the UK as the stand in for Hyrule because Hylians are apparently British, let's get to calculating then, shall we?
The average price for 4 pints of milk in July 2025 in the UK was £1.51. I tried to look for medieval prices for milk specifically as well, but I couldn’t find anything.
Assuming that 1 serving of milk = 1/3 of a pint, we can do the following calculations:
4 / (1/3) = 12 servings of milk in 4 pints
1.51 / 12 = £0.125833333... per serving of milk
0.125833333... / 20 = 0.0062916666... ≈ £0.0063 per ALBW rupee
So, 1 rupee in ALBW is equivalent to approximately £0.0063, 0.0084 USD, or 0.012 CAD (Everyone else will have to do their own conversions)
Now, this is obviously very little (and not reliable at all), but I'm going to continue anyway.
£0.0063p * 50 = £0.315 ≈ £0.32 or 0.43 USD or 0.59 CAD
£0.0063 * 800 = £5.04 or 6.70 USD or 9.23 CAD
£0.0063 * 100 = £0.63 or 0.84 USD or 1.15 CAD
£0.0063 * 1200 = £7.56 or 10.05 USD or 13.84 CAD
This means that you could rent your very own unlimited supply of bombs until you get defeated by enemies for only £0.32 or could blow up anything in your way forever by buying them for a measly £5.04!
Alternatively, you could rent a magic arson stick fire rod for £0.63 or buy one for £7.56, which would be like buying about 20.4324 non-British pounds of bananas or 8.946745555555555... muffins at some unspecified location. These are probably not helpful comparisons, but they are the ones I chose, and I will not apologize.
Going off of this, either weapons of mass destruction are incredibly easy to make and are therefore not worth much in the world of Zelda (which is incredibly concerning), or Ravio is selling everything at an extreme discount and is not nearly as much of a scammer as you might think. If anything, maybe he’s the one getting scammed…
(This was partially inspired by the fanfic "Ravio's Scams" by @void-confusion. Go check it out if you're interested! Let me know if you want me to remove the tag.)
i don't draw much but, here is a little jonsa doodle i worked on during the time i started wanting to slam my head to the wall because i am doing my little cousin's math project. cheers!
It makes me so excited whenever I remember that this is my last term where I must take any non-science courses... Soon I will be free from all this extra crap I don't care as much about...
