[Nate the Great]

The sprite effect reared its ugly head in the original Legend of Zelda, but shouldn't we be past this by now? Hey, I'm no computer programming wizard, but as I understand it, sprite physics work on a few basic principles:

1. Every character has a basic imaginary "skeleton." This just means that the action is designed for the character's eyes, hands, knees, etc. to exist a certain distance from the ground and each other.
2. The "skin" (clothing, sheathed sword, etc) of a character creates a shell around the skeleton. The skeleton dictates which part of the skin is on the outside. For example, Link's legs are essentially hollow tubes that extend above the bottom of his tunic "skirt." The tunic is designed to be on the outside, so his upper thighs are generally tucked away inside his skirt until a larger jump requires more of his leg to show. It would be too complicated to actually have his leg end at the skirt and "lengthen" it as required. For a similar effect, get the camera stuck in Link's head. You see that his bangs just hover there, and that the only surfaces are the two that form the peak away from his forehead. The inner surface where it touches his "skin" isn't there because we're not supposed to need to see it.
3. When Link unsheathes his sword, he's essentially extending the sprites' skeleton. The interaction of sprite skeleton's is what causes damage effects to be applied. Note how he can walk through the outer fringes of some enemies as well as the floor of Jabu-Jabu's Belly because complete surface interaction would be very intensive in terms of processor speed and so on.

All this is to set up the following hypothesis.

Link being left- or right-handed is just a matter of which arm of his skeleton is designed to allow the possibility of sword extension. I imagine that his "skin" is symettrical enough to allow most of it to be flipped along with the skeleton. The only asymmetrical components are the shoulder his sheath strap goes over, the side of his belt that is tucked in, the side that his hair is parted on, etc. Now, his hair and belt can be considerred static for this example, but this sheath strap is a very important concept. He needs the sheath on his left shoulder if he's right-handed and vice-versa. A simple mirror reflection of the coordinates of the critical points of the sheath, his sword, etc as well as a reflection of the relative vectors of his sword and shield movement should be all that's needed. Compared to the processor capability necessary to render a dozen monkeys on the screen at once, this handed-ness should not be that difficult to set up.