Several Thousand Words about Zelda in Advance of Breath of the Wild
Boy Meets Zelda, Boy is Separated from Zelda, Boy Spends Way Too Much Time Thinking about Zelda
The original The Legend of Zelda was the first videogame that really captivated me. When I was maybe four-years-old, I popped the golden cartridge into my cousins’ NES and got completely lost. I shot octoroks with beams from my sword and panicked when I took damage and had to get in close enough to actually hit them. I don’t think I ever even discovered the first dungeon, but I knew that, if this was a videogame, I loved them. I begged my parents to buy us a Super Nintendo.
After my parents relented, I discovered that I was a too big a wuss to play many games myself. I watched my dad chugthrough A Link to the Past more times than I can count, but it was years before I got up the courage to venture as far as the Eastern Palace myself. The Armos Knights at the end of that first dungeon just seemed too hard. When I finally did push through and realized I could play through the game completely differently than the way my dad had, it was exhilarating and liberating.
I never owned an N64, but I was still a Nintendo Power subscriber when Ocarina of Time came out during middle school (I didn’t quite believe that they could stop making SNES games just like that). I obsessively read their coverage and got incredibly excited. On weekends, I would watch my best friend play while I took advantage of their dedicated phone line for internet access to look up the locations of skultulas and heart pieces for him. In high school, I eventually got to put that knowledge to use myself, sitting in that same friend’s room and playing OoT alone while his band practiced after school.
I spent a silly amount of my senior class trip in high school sitting in a hotel room playing a borrowed copy of Minish Cap. I got the the final boss on the bus ride back from Florida, but I couldn’t quite finish off Vaati.
Like many people, I was skeptical of Wind Waker when its art style was first revealed. Then I played the first boss battle at a mall kiosk. I couldn’t forget how gorgeous and fluid it was, but none of my friends owned a Gamecube. It wasn’t until my junior year of college that I finally got to explore the Great Sea for the first time: hunkered down in a makeshift cave under my bed with a roommate’s spare TV and discarded Gamecube, while everybody else in the apartment obsessed over the shiny new Wii.
A different roommate’s Wii let me finally explore the wonders of waggle controls and looping timelines as I unwound after work with Twilight Princess and Majora’s Mask during the summer before my final year of undergrad.
Between lack of means and lack of time, the only Zelda game that I’ve been able to play freely when it was new was Phantom Hourglass (which probably explains why I’ll eagerly defend it against all comers). Everything else I only got to play in fits and starts at other people’s houses or on borrowed consoles well after they’d faded from the zeitgeist.
As a direct result, Zelda games have developed a sort of negative space in my mind that’s been nearly as significant as the experience of playing the games themselves. Between not being able to play when I wanted to and not being able to talk about them freely when I finally did get to play them, I have thought deeply about Zelda games in a way that only Chrono Trigger and Mass Effect can match.
It should come as no surprise, then, that my Wii U essentially turned into a Zelda box the moment I bought it. Wind Waker HD was one of the console’s chief selling points for me, and having never played Skyward Sword, I went out and bought a used copy almost immediately. Virtual Console gave me the means to beat Minish Cap, to toy with sequence breaking in Ocarina of Time, and to finally power through The Adventures of Link (with a lot of help from save states and the only Let’s Play I’ve ever watched).
I’d deeply considered most of these games individually in the past, but this steady dose of Zelda in my life over the last couple of years has helped me finally start to consider the games in relation to each other. As a result, I’ve come to new understandings about why some of these games resonate with me so much more than others.
Exploration is the Key
Two sounds define the Zelda experience for most players. In case you’ve never played a Zelda game but are still reading this for some crazy reason, those sound effects represent “you found a secret” and “you got an item” respectively. Now, getting things is always exciting. Lots of great games have been built almost entirely on getting new things for the sake of getting new things (Diablo, Borderlands, almost any MMO). But in Zelda, the real joy of hearing the “you got an item” sound is that you know it will create new opportunities to hear the “you found a secret”.
You need the raft so you can cross the lake to the next town/dungeon. You need bombs so you can unblock the path to Zora’s Domain. You need the Pegasus Boots so you can get the Book of Mudora so you can open up the entrance to the Desert Palace. You can’t get that conspicuous heart piece in Lake Hylia until you come back with the hookshot. Yeah, beating Ganon is all well and good and exciting, but the joy in Zelda games comes from coming back to a place you’ve been before an unraveling the puzzles that you didn’t even realize were hidden in plain sight the first time around. It’s Metroid-like in that way.
A couple of years ago, I would have stopped here and focused on the design of the puzzles and the items you get as the defining aspect of a good Zelda game. I would have said I didn’t love Twilight Princess because items like the Spinner and the Command Rod and even the Gale Boomerang were only useful in hyper-specific contexts. Skyward Sword fell flat for me because — on top of the iffy motion controls and the fact that it was at least 10 hours too long — the whip and the digging gloves and even the slingshot felt completely tacked on.
Those things are (really) important, but I’m increasingly confident that there’s another factor at play: the plot.
Something is Happening vs Something Happened
All stories, whether we consume them from a movie or a book or participate in creating them in a game, are about events that are unfolding. But the question is, why? In most cases, it’s because there’s some sort of active, immediate stimulus that the character needs to respond to (which has a consequence that requires response and lather, rinse, repeat). But sometimes, and especially in certain genres of videogames, it’s because something already happened that needs to be understood and/or undone.
In a game that really rewards exploration, it makes better thematic sense to go the Something Happened route. Think about most Final Fantasy game and how nonsensical it feels to be running around breeding chocobos when the Earth is supposedly at risk of imminent destruction, and then think of Final Fantasy 6, where most of the side quests take place after the world has already been functionally destroyed. It made so much more sense wandering around, reuniting the party and building their strength when the goal wasn’t to save the world but to make sure you were strong enough to destroy the insane tyrant who ruined it.
At the same time, we’re not in the era of the original NES anymore. Games are more sophisticated, and it’s risky to just plop players onto a map, give them a sword, and expect them to go about the hard work of saving the world without motivation. Some sort of plot (beyond what’s printed in the manual) is essential.
Unsurprisingly, the newer games were the ones that tried harder to instill motive in the player, following the trend of videogames as a whole. They do this both through heavier use of cut scenes to communicate story points and by locking off regions of the world (or locking you in) until certain criteria are met instead of letting you explore freely where you have the means to. But, like most things, “something happened” and“something is happening” isn’t a binary, it’s a spectrum, and It’s been interesting for me to see how different Zelda games approach it.
Something Happened ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The NES Games: Both The Legend of Zelda and The Adventures of Link live here almost out of necessity. Zelda was kidnapped! The O.G. Zelda has been cursed to sleep forever! Do something about it hero-elf-boy! That said, the joy of discovery, especially in The Legend of Zelda, where there’s a secret on nearly every map tile, is strong.
Link’s Awakening: Link wakes up on Koholint island and that’s it. The rest of the game is about unraveling the mysteries of the island, the Wind Fish, and how you got there. It’s an evolution of the original Legend of Zelda in that there’s more direction to be found, but there’s no immediate, pressing reason to tackle any particular task beyond a desire to know and to leave. It’s also one of the most compelling games in the series.
Epic Adventure Ahoy!
Twilight Princess: Playing the HD remake is what finally helped me understand this point. Twilight Princess tries so hard to suck you in with tragedy and abductions and action set pieces on horseback. And then you just want to run around Hyrule Field and bomb every boulder there is instead of rescuing “the tots”, as one annoying Ordon resident constantly calls them. The tots are creepy and weird and abusive towards each other. I hope they get eaten by moblins. Also, Ilia, I’m not that into you and I don’t appreciate your unwanted assertions of ownership of my horse. Go away.
The dungeons are so well designed and the majority of the boss battles are so fun that it was strange constantly being reminded how little I cared about the ongoing machinations of Zant and Midna and the people caught in the middle.
Skyward Sword: Skyward Sword really wants to be an origin story for all Zelda games, and it has you chasing Zelda all over the map while interacting with a brutish romantic rival and being warned about the impending return of the “Demon Lord, Demise”. It’s…a lot. And it’s not particularly well told and it frequently fails to make sense. Combine that with the fact that, again, levels are unlocked almost exclusively by story cutscenes and not the player’s ingenuity with their tools, and you get a recipe for a game that I was never going to adore, even before the various gameplay frustrations. Still a fun game, but not nearly the masterpiece (to my eyes) that folks were pretending it was when it came out.
The Hybrid Theory
A Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time: Both of these games hit on the same masterful strategy. You spend the first chunk of the game learning the ropes trying to acquire the Master Sword so you can prevent catastrophe. Then you spend the last two thirds of the game doing what it takes to clean up the mess of your failure.
In both games, you get to explore the entire map from two perspectives, one of relative innocence and one that’s been deeply damaged, and you get to travel back and forth between them with relative freedom. Knowing what it is you’re trying to protect and what you’re trying to protect it from instills motive. Being post-consequence (and/or having the ability to temporarily return to a time before) gives the freedom to wander, bear witness, and increase your strength.
This is absurdly smart story design, and the fact that they got it so right in these places is part of why it’s frustrating that the newest games changed gears.
Oddballs
Majora’s Mask: There’s a lot going on at any given moment of Majora’s Mask. At any given moment that you’re not just exploring the map, there’s somebody’s struggle that you’re actively trying to resolve. But you can’t, at least not permanently. The world is doomed, and every three days, you need to turn back time, undoing whatever good you did before the moon comes crashing down. This is the thing that “happened”, and it envelopes the rest of the action of the game, and the individual wants and needs of the citizens of the world make it that much more imperative that you find a way to set things right.
Wind Waker: Again, there’s nearly always some immediate need to be met. Primarily, you need to stop Ganondorf from following through on the plan he started so long ago. But then there’s the Great Ocean, dominating your experience of the game. The vast emptiness provides a lot of its own character, but it also makes it hard not to feel like Gannondorf both won and was thwarted already. The world you’re exploring and adventuring in is not the one Gannondorf is seeking to rule.
The much-maligned Triforce hunt is a way of forcing the single-minded player to experience more of the map and to feel ownership of the world above the waves. All of the sailing and hunting and finding the hidden secrets on each tiny island creates a sense separation from the supposed threat of Ganondorf. The dissonance would be frustrating, except that there’s the near-perfect ending. The King of Red Lions recognizes that it’s not fair that you or anybody left living should have to fight this fight. Ganondorf’s grudge has nothing to do with you or the world as it exists today, and the only appropriate course of action is for Hyrule to disappear from history for good.
I want to cry just thinking about it.
Why I’m Hopeful for Breath of the Wild
I was playing through Skyward Sword around the time the first trailer for what’s now known as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild came out, and as much as I was at first excited by some of the aesthetic choices, I was also incredibly worried. Skyward Sword has a lot of weird, unexplained technology-ish elements that are relics from the era before the events of the game. Breath of the Wild has showcased a lot of weird, unexplained technology-ish elements.
I was concerned that Breath of the Wild would continue trying to establish a central cannon/chronology for the Zelda series. And in some ways, I still am. But the approach, from a story-design/gameplay perspective, seems a lot more promising than what Nintendo pursued with the last two major releases.
The “wake up from a long slumber and discover what went wrong” approach feels like what you would do if you were trying to recreate the original The Legend of Zelda today. I’m not psyched when I see things in trailers like “Calamity Ganon” as a proper noun. Not psyched at all. But when I read things like Stephen Totilo’s first impressions, I feel hopeful that the plot won’t bog down the experience of discovery, even if it does get preposterous.
The assurance that each small encounter (at least within the first chunk of the game) feels intentionally placed and designed instead of just glommed on to make the game bigger and more Elder Scrolls-ish, is huge. And the sense that I get that puzzles involve a smaller set of tools used more creatively (or that if you’re skilled/creative enough, you can head to the final boss immediately), I’m hopeful that the designers have remembered how much more important this noise is than this one for a deep experience in the Zelda tradition.