It’s So Beautiful: Music and Spirituality in the Wind Waker

If you believe in the afterlife, that there’s something out there, how do you prove it to yourself? How do you keep the faith without any evidence? How do you believe?

What does it take?

I didn’t grow up in a religious household. Neither of my parents had positive experiences with religion, growing up; my mother never even met her grandfather on her father’s side, since he had married a non-Catholic. They weren’t atheists, but for a long time we didn’t go to church, didn’t talk about God. This didn’t feel out of the ordinary to me until I realized that so many friends of mine in school were raised Catholic. They would talk about God, Jesus, going to Sunday school. More than one of them told me, with certainty, that because I didn’t go to confession I was going to Hell.

I started to feel confused and kind of scared. What was I supposed to believe in? What was I missing? To me, my friends had something that I didn’t have — faith, belief. They knew for certain that something was out there, something good, and they knew that when they died they would be loved and protected forever.

I didn’t have that. And I wanted it, so badly.

From a young age my relationship to music was intimate, private. Before I had access to the internet, music was elusive, impermanent. I would desperately tape songs off the radio, convinced that once they ended they’d be gone forever. Some of the earliest music I loved came from video games, which was even tougher to access — if a game didn’t have a sound test, the only way to hear a song I loved would be to get to the level, the scene, sometimes the one specific moment where it played. If I wanted to hear “On The Other Side Of The Mountain” in Final Fantasy VII, I’d have to play the game for 30 hours just to hear it once. I found myself sticking my tape recorder against the tiny speaker on my old TV, just to be able to own it, to capture it.

Music meant everything to me. During a time where I felt spiritually hollow and confused, music was something I could cling to. Music was real.

It’s no coincidence that my love of music and video games intersected with the Legend of Zelda series. I started with Link’s Awakening, a game that required you to collect musical instruments and play an unusal, lilting ballad to wake up a sleeping giant and escape a thinning dream. Next was Ocarina of Time, a game whose titular instrument allowed the player to control time and space, to call on rain and sunlight, to connect to places and characters. I remember running outside Hyrule Castle after jumping ahead 7 years and immediately playing Saria’s Song, just to see if she was still there. This continued in Majora’s Mask, with Link using the Song of Time to hold back armageddon. I noticed that as Zelda games became more reliant on music, they grew more artful, more heartfelt.

And then, there was Wind Waker.

By the time Wind Waker was released, my family and I had been attending a small church for a few years. I enjoyed the friendly communal experience of it all, but I still just didn’t have it in me to believe, as much as I tried. I eventually stopped going. I was 16 years old and found myself in a moment of crisis: what did I believe in? What was going to happen to me when I died? I didn’t have an answer. The emptiness I felt as a child was suddenly replaced with anxiety, fear. What if I’m doing this all wrong? What if Hell really does exist? What if I’m going there?

I remember, in a moment of desperation, crawling into bed, burying my face in my hands, crying and putting on “Hey Jude” by the Beatles. And I remember, in that moment, feeling safe, comforted, warm. Like someone had put their hand on my shoulder and assured me that my worst fears were not true. That chill I felt, that rising in my chest, those goosebumps — that was all real. The fact that chaotic, unruly noise could be arranged in a way that could reach out and dig into me and affect me — that was inarguable. I knew it because I could feel it.

The titular Wind Waker is a conductor’s baton that serves a lot of the same functions as the Ocarina of Time, allowing you to warp around the world map, change day into night, and control the direction of wind on the open sea. At first glance, it seems like music isn’t as important to Wind Waker’s plot as previous games — that is, until Link learns the Earth God’s Lyric, a song from the long-deceased Sage of the Earth that will help him revive the power of the Master Sword. In order to do so, he needs to “awaken” the new sage by playing the song for her; as the Sage says it, “The song… will open the eyes of the new sage and awaken within that sage the melody that will carry our prayers to the gods.”

The sage that Link needs to awaken is Medli, a Rito girl he meets earlier in the game and the attendant to the Dragon God Valoo. Up until this point, it is likely the player wouldn’t expect Medli to be a major part of Wind Waker’s story; while she does help Link with a dungeon and provide him with some key items, she’s mostly there to help prod the plot along. Even Medli herself has a low opinion of her own importance — she consistently doubts her own abilities as an attendant to Valoo, struggling to understand its language. She is someone who aspires for purpose, to live up to the person she is expected to be, but just doesn’t feel it. She is spiritually alone.

When Link approaches her with the Wind Waker, she is excited to play along, but still unsure of herself.

Link conducts her, and she plays the song back. After it’s over, she looks out to the ocean, pondering. There is some tension here — the player has no idea what the song is actually going to do to Medli.

Before either of them have any understanding of what’s happening, Medli collapses. The screen cuts to black; the audio cuts to total silence. The perspective now switches from Link, the player character, to Medli. She looks up to see the spirit of Laruto, the deceased Sage of the Earth, holding the same instrument as her.

Though her facial expression doesn’t change much, we can tell that Medli is somewhat fearful here. She is in the presence of something much stronger than her. She is at its mercy, and she has nowhere to run.

And then, Laruto plays her song.

She plays it slowly, and doesn’t complete it; she lets it hang on an unresolved note, as if expecting someone else to finish it for her.

And — realizing that it had been inside of her since the day she was born — Medli completes the song.

The two play together, united in the darkness.

And then, a confirmation of the song’s power: the Triforce, shining in front of her.

The enormity of the moment shocks her, but she accepts it. She has been blessed by a benevolent force, a force so powerful that it can snuff out evil. And that force is a song, the song that was living inside of her heart all along.

Medli has been awakened.

To this day, I don’t think I’ve seen anything — in any form of media, let alone a video game — that visualizes my feelings about the way music and spirituality intersect so clearly, so sensitively. When I first watched it, it felt like someone was peering right through me, like they knew me. I felt less alone.

But of course, it was just one cutscene. The game continued. Link and Medli got through the next dungeon, awakened the Master Sword, and it was on to the next. If I wanted to watch that moment again, that two-minute sequence that spoke to me so personally, I’d have to play through the game again.

I remember feeling disappointed that, after Wind Waker, the Zelda series drifted away from music as a core theme. Twilight Princess flirted with it, but in a much more limited capacity; since then, there hasn’t been a main console Zelda game that has featured a playable musical instrument as an item. I started to realize that maybe this aspect of the Zelda series was for me and me alone, and that nobody else really cared about it. Sword fights, massive maps and timelines were more of a priority than my own weird obsession with spirit music. I had to accept that.

So I kept coming back to Wind Waker, back to this particular scene. I still do. When I find myself having a moment of fear or doubt, I rewatch it. Sometimes its a clear HD feed of the Wii U port, with perfect audio; sometimes it’s a grainy recording of the Gamecube version, from a Let’s Play recorded a decade ago, with a well-meaning teenager talking over it.

No matter the context, it reminds me that someone out there feels the same way I do. That I’m not alone.

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