A Hero, In Time
An adult reflection on a childhood classic
What’s your name? …Hudson… Strange, it sounds… familiar.
By yaboyhud
One of the first memories I truly remember having happened is from kindergarden. Our class was graduating and we needed to make graduation hats, out of construction paper. The teacher told everyone in the class to choose our favorite colors and I chose green. As I grew older, one of the things people would constantly ask me was what my favorite color was, and my answers would sometimes change from green to red, and sometimes to blue. But it was the color green that I first chose to wear on top of my head.
My parents never understood why I liked video games. I was brought up to be very frugal out of family circumstance, and hard-working almost to a fault. Spending time, let alone money, on video games was just not seen as valuable. As all my friends around me got N64’s and Playstation’s, the only thing I could do was invite myself over to watch those cool graphics and listen to the fun sounds.
My Chinese tiger mom finally gave in when our family changed school districts for middle school and got me a brand-new N64 system. I didn’t have any games so I walked by the setup everyday and played with the controllers; my favorite was the atomic purple one. I talked all the time about games when we sat at the dinner table and drove in the car. When she would take me along to go shopping at Walmart, I would run over to the electronics section to look at the Brady and Nintendo Power guides. One day, when I got back from school, my mother was smugger than usual and I was instantly on the alert.
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Our local supermarket had a small VHS rental section and sometimes they would have used games there as well. My mother was intense, but she was incredibly observant. Looking back, I realized that every week when she went shopping for groceries, she must have been flipping through that used games section to see if there were any games I had mentioned or was excited about. I thanked my mom endlessly and then sat down on the floor in front of the TV. Hooves against a dirt road, a piano, some strings and the strange sound of an ocarina framed two ever-present words staring back at me. PRESS START.
Search “greatest video game of all time” and the first result Google spits back is The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Looking at Wikipedia’s “List of video games considered the best” entry returns OOT topping the chart with the most references starting from 1985 at forty-two, even though the game was released in 1998. At the time of its release, OOT was immediately hailed as a benchmark in control, graphics, and gameplay. Almost twenty years later, the game remains one of the most adored on the Internet. You are almost guaranteed to see somebody decked out in green, holding a Master Sword and Hylian Shield at any large cosplay venue. People spend hundreds of dollars on Zora’s Sapphire engagement rings. What is it about the story of Zelda and Link that resonates with so many of us?
I have good friends but don’t get to talk to them much. One of my best friends from college is also a huge video games/Zelda fan and it was one of the core things we had in common. As our lives separated after graduation, we had to condense our conversations. So we started comparing things that were happening in our lives to events from Ocarina of Time. “I’ve definitely pulled out the sword already”. “I’m stuck in the Water Temple man.” Our problems were the same as Link’s problems. Fear. Intellectual challenges. Issues with girls. They were all there inside the game we grew up with and it was easy to reduce our lives to a common element we both found relatable. And fun. Just like a game.
Our problems were the same as Link’s problems. Fear. Intellectual challenges. Issues with girls.
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, is quite simply a timeless masterpiece in storytelling, narrative, and pacing. The act of playing the game is simply the means of experiencing it. As my generation searches for its own unique story to tell, for an identity to belong to, the stories we identified with while growing up serve as the blueprint. In the rest of this article, I interpret the epic of the Ocarina of Time as a parable for my own life. That secret, personal, quest for something I know nothing about, but must strive for nonetheless. Gotta get to that end-game content.
Boyhood: The Tutorial
Can Hyrule’s destiny really depend on such a lazy boy?!
Every adventure ever told started in the same place, at home. Childhood is a sandbox to try things and a time to explore. The Ocarina of Time starts you off in much a similar way. You wake up one day in a safe community where you wear pretty much the same things as everyone else, (it just so happens everyone else loves green too in Kokiri Village) but you know that you are different, unique in some way. There’s not much to do in the village except talk to people who say the same things over and over. The C-buttons, the B-button, the R-Button…you can tell they are meant to do something, but right now they have no meaning. No parents though, which means no bedtime…
After poking around the village you are told that you need to see the village elder, who happens to be a tree. Armed with measly 40 rupees made from mowing lawns and house cleaning, you purchase the apparel necessary to be accepted by the village bully so you can get on with life. Having only seen this much of the world, your ambitions can only expand so much. The first challenge arc in life is to save the elder and prove yourself the village hero.
Your inaugural test as a kid, the Great Deku Tree is the framework and foundation from which you use to build intuition for the rest of the journey. Get your bearings first, find the map and compass. Solve puzzles, slay enemies and get your quest item, this one being the classic boyhood trouble-making slingshot. Beat the boss and be rewarded.
Is this it? Quests as a kid almost seem too simple. When I was younger, I kept asking myself that question. By any measure of the Chinese-American community I grew up in, I was speedrunning. I memorized Für Elise when I was 9, aced the math portion of the SAT at 12, and was studying physics at Harvard when I was 15. Under the safety of parents and familiar territory, confidence swells and nothing seems impossible. Childhood ambition turns into a constant force telling you to leave. After the first taste of danger, and consequently, success, the Great Deku Tree compels you to take the fresh dirt road to the big city, Hyrule.
To move forward means leaving what you know behind. Childhood friends, your home, they seem insignificant compared to what is ahead. They will always be there, frozen in time, whenever we want to come back and visit. But when it comes time to leave, only one person is there to see you off. She gives you the first taste of what music is truly capable of, invoking friendship in just six simple notes. Saria’s Song.
Your first steps outside of the safety of the forest are in a great open field. It takes a full day of rolling to get to the big city, and when you get there you are greeted with a closed gate and skeletons. But for a boy just coming off his first dungeon, spending a night outside is nothing. You’ve got a girl to see. Those pesky skeletons are easily taken care of and you finally make it into town the next morning as the cucco’s sound off. Time to go to school on how princesses work:
- Girls don’t make it easy for you to see them. (Highest towers, dragons, pissed-off guards)
- Girls take their dreams super seriously.
- Girls are incredibly persuasive and you literally cannot proceed if you say no.
You quickly learn that girls are difficult, but they serve a very, very important part in your story. They provide the main quest. Princess Zelda, the beautiful daughter and only child of the king, tells you about the secret history of the land and leads you to your destiny door. You, are going to save the world.
Adolescence: Easy mode
Your clothes, they’re so different. Wait, are you from the forest, fairy boy?
So you’ve bagged few skulluta’s, talked to a princess or two and seen a bit of the world. There are problems everywhere and you are capable of setting them right. Now it’s time to use and hone those adventuring skills. The Dodongos, fire-breathing lizard creatures, are causing a headache for the Gorons in the mountains. That sure sounds like a fun adventure and you might even get to blow some stuff up!
One of the first things you have to overcome is the fact that everyone still treats you like a kid. You understand things, you know you do, but when you try to help, no one takes you seriously. Much the cause of teen angst everywhere, you finally meet friends who recognize your talent. They not only let you help them, but complement your strengths with theirs. Darunia is one of those grownups that just gets it. He mentors you in the arts of pyrotechnics and sends you off on your next test.
There are no curveballs in Dodongo’s Cavern, and you run through the level without too much of a hitch. The fire dungeon means the battles are more intense, but mentally you are sound enough to never get stuck. Easy mode. Upon completion, Darunia becomes your Sworn Brother and gives you the second piece of your puzzle, the Goron Ruby.
Not everyday is an adventure, and constant campaigning can burn you out. In the meantime, you visit other locales such as Kakariko Village and complete side quests for the townsfolk there. Prizes are small, but it is refreshing to not be a main character for once, and just a helpful person interacting with NPC’s. Those fun little tangents tide you over until your next quest, which takes you in the opposite direction of all the bombs and rocks of the mountains and into the rivers and waterfalls in Zora’s Domain.
They say when it rains, it pours, and after helping one princess out with her troubles, you meet another one. This one is slightly more…sassy. Lecture number two on princesses:
- Girls never admit when they have a problem
- Girls take all the credit
- Girls will end up wanting you to marry them if you help out too much
To reply in person to Princess Ruto’s message in a bottle, you enter the belly of the whale, looking for the final piece of your childhood quest. This time, life gives you a run-around and the puzzles require a stroke of ingenuity. The enemies are more clever and much more annoying to dispose of for good. It’s actually a sign of what is to come but you aren’t looking that far ahead. After saving Ruto, you take her engagement ring with you as she starts going into clingy dialogue. Best to ignore that and pretend you’ve got bigger things on your mind than stupid girls…
All in all, it’s been an easy time as a kid. The tutorial years got you on your feet, and now you’ve beat everything life has planned for you. This is what life is like right? Confident as can be, you come back to see Zelda, quest items in hand, but that’s exactly when things start to go horribly wrong. “There’s no time to explain” she says and you are suddenly thrown out of the story you thought you knew the ending to already. Zelda is gone. There’s nobody telling you what to do anymore. Lost and confused, you finish the last thing you knew, which is to use the assembled Spiritual Stones to open the Door of Time… Walking up to the Master Sword, it’s almost taller than you. You always know what the right thing to do is when you see it.
Adulthood: Open World Start
Look! You’re big now!!! You’ve grown up!
The Master Sword is always sitting right there behind the Door of Time. But it takes immense courage to go in and pull it out. It predicates the realization that childhood, innocence and idealism will end. The act of growing up necessitates practicality, memento mori, and a responsibility to finish what you dreamed as a kid. For some people, this process is started by something incredibly happy, for others it is by sheer luck. Sometimes it is caused by tragedy, and for many, they never truly grow up.
Life was very different hundreds of years ago. People from ages past married off in their teens and would be considered a fully functioning part of society as a family unit at the same time the present generation would still be having quarter-life crises. Pulling out the Master Sword begins the true main quest of the game, throwing you into an open world. Choices are yours to make, and consequences are yours to bear. Everything is different now as an adult from how you pictured it as a child; cheery townsfolk have turned into zombies, your friends are all doing their own thing and oh yeah, evil is everywhere. So what are you going to do about it?
Forest Temple: Recapitulation
The Sacred Forest Meadow. It’s my secret place! I feel… This place will be very important for both of us someday.
The first thing you gotta do after waking up is check up on what’s been happening at home while you were gone. In the years since you’ve been gone, time has touched everything you knew. The village is now mostly empty of the children you knew growing up…good riddance, you don’t care about them, but what about Saria?
As you venture through the Lost Woods, in search of her secret place that she shared with you alone, you never mess up even once. It has now been overrun with brutes and creatures with no respect for what came before. Slash! Cut! Stab! As your new blade flashes, and your heart meter beats dangerously, you finally reach a sense of familiarity. This is what you were born to do.
The Forest Temple is the first of your tests as an adult, and it represents a rehashing of what you may have forgotten while you’ve been dreaming all these years. At the same time, it also serves as a calibration for adjusting the adventuring skills you learned as a child and extending them into your new form. The puzzles are definitely adult, spanning multiple rooms and levels, and the enemies are troublesome, sometimes forcing you to run and wait for another day. But despite all this, the Forest Temple is still familiar; it is in your home turf, and your best(only) friend is at stake. Clearing the level means finding the Hylian Bow, playing around with perspective, and fighting off a phantom sent by the final boss to test where your strength is at. Little does he know that you are learning after every battle, that hasn’t changed one bit.
Fire Temple: Brotherhood
You turned out to be a real man, just as I thought you would!
Some problems require care, some problems require fire. Your next test takes you again into the mountains, but this time around, the stakes are much higher. Your friends, the Gorons, are going to be eaten alive and your Sworn Brother has requested your help.
Still cresting as an adult, you are very direct in how you apply your age. Sometimes a big Megaton Hammer will work for just about everything. The Fire Temple symbolizes a time where problems require brute force, fueled by passion and anger. Alongside your best bro, you fight fire with metal and force with strength as you speed past your hyper-masculine phase.
Upon completing your second dungeon, you realize that being adult is for much longer than you anticipated. Being an adult is for life, and your heart meter begins to ache. Where is that damned Zelda? The one that turned your whole world upside down? All you get is this mysterious wanna-be ninja, who has been useful, but it’d be nice to see a pretty face once in a while…
Water Temple: Cognitive Overload
You’re a terrible man to have kept me waiting for these seven long years…
If you’ve been paying attention to your quest menu, you will notice that there are only three temples left to go. You’ve reached the half-way point. Your fighting skills, mental ability, and drive are all peaking and it couldn’t have come at a better time. The Water Temple is the point at which most players would rather give up on the game than continue on through. You begin the campaign by sinking deep underwater, nursed by slow, calming music and you are greeted by a former flame. Now a fully-endowed woman(?), Princess Ruto tells you that she now has a grown-up problem for you to solve. You forgot about me.
That’s a simple one compared to what’s to come in the dungeon. The Water Temple is built in three floors of four different halls facing the cardinal directions, but the kicker is that each of the halls act differently depending on the water level in the temple. And there’s three different levels you can set the water. Some quick math since you are good at word problems: 3 floors with 4 halls= 12 halls. 12 halls at 3 different water levels=36 unique rooms. Now factoring in paths that you need to take, as some rooms depend on the successful completion of an earlier room, and you are left with a sopping, wet mess.
For most kids playing an N64 game, that sopping, wet, mess would be their brain. The water level resetting and the non-linearity of the temple means even saving the game and coming back to it after some rest is largely useless. The Water Temple personifies a period in adult life where you have the physical ability to work, but are entirely limited by your mental capacity to solve problems. The tricks that used to work no longer do, and you still have no partner. It’s a single player game.
In a room unlike any other in the Water Temple, you find your toughest enemy under a solitary tree. You stare back at yourself, and see a pair of red eyes. You stab, he jumps. You cut, he cuts back. Your worst enemy is your own dark side. Left alone and repressed, our shadow functions as the counter to our own ambitions of heroism. Letting go of the familiar mental grooves and loops that you have come to rely on, you are forced to think outside of the box in order to defeat him.
Clearing this level lets out the pressure contained in the apex of your journey and it begins the home stretch. You are now on a downward slope, building momentum for the inevitable collision with Ganon that has been coming since you first met his eyes at Hyrule Castle. In the meantime, you take care of some other miscellaneous storylines, such as winning Epona from the treacherous hands of Ingo and fashioning the Biggoron’s Sword. But as you help others, a change in the world starts to materialize. There is less a sense of doom and more happy folk going about their business. Off-days not adventuring can now be spent sipping Lon-Lon Milk or at the local Shooting Gallery.
Shadow Temple: Fear
Go around! Go around and around and around! What fun!
Located under a graveyard, the Shadow Temple start off like a breath of fresh decaying air. You find the quest item almost immediately and you think it is going to a breeze to get through after that Longshot of a Water Temple. But that’s how the magic of the Shadow Temple deceives you. You circle around and around, map and compass in hand, Hover Boots on, and you can never seem to find what it is that you are looking for. What is real, what is not, what you can see, and what you cannot defines the Shadow Temple.
Fear is simply the repeated rehearsal of a negative outcome. The Shadow Temple represents a period in life where the mind can trap you within encircling doubt. Things that you can see are not always what they seem, and the truth is that there are layers upon layers hiding between, beneath and behind everything. It’s up to you to figure out what to place trust in and what to disregard as shadows. The Lens of Truth helps a great deal in aiding your forward progress, but in the end, there is no putting it off. Fear must be overcome if you are to save Zelda and Hyrule. Your destiny is to wield the Triforce of Courage.
Spirit Temple: Puer Aeternus
If you can successfully get the Silver Gauntlets… I’ll do something great for you!
The launch of Ocarina of Time was a long time coming. It was developed concurrently with launch titles for the N64 but came out almost 2 years later. Miyamoto, the game’s creator, says the camera controls for Ocarina of Time were changed during development to reflect a focus on the game’s world, whereas those of launch title Super Mario 64 were centered on the character of Mario. It was the first time a game could be considered cinematic, as it was the first 3-D video game with an AI-controlled camera. And similar to a movie, by the time you reach the last temple, pacing and cutscenes indicate falling action as you wander, weary but alert, into the hypnotic heat and tunes of Gerudo Valley.
The Spirit Temple arc utilizes the mechanic of turning back into a kid to perform some feats that are not quite possible for a fully grown adult. This seamless back and forth change between being a responsible adult and a resourceful child is the main storyline of the Spirit Temple. We all have childish tendencies that we nurse from time to time as adults, and controlling these feelings is necessary if one wishes to move forward in the game. But some things in life can only be done with the freedom that comes with a child-like imagination.
Ganon’s Castle: Final Boss
I underestimated that boy.
You end your quest back where it all started, with a crazy girl’s dream and now a crazy man’s ambition…Hyrule Castle, now turned into a seat of evil. The final battle begins as Ganondorf tries to soften you up with some mini-dungeons that test the essence of every dungeon you had previously cleared. To stop him, you will have to unite all the different lessons you have learned and use every last item in your inventory. Enemies are relentless in setting you back and the puzzles squeeze you to think in ways unimaginable. Before the point of no return, you run throughout the world and set what you can the way you would like them to be because you aren’t coming back.
Stairs and an organ. The stairs get wider. The organ gets louder. You finally see your nemesis. He’s laughing at you. Although you may have only interacted with him for a grand total of five minutes, he’s the one who has been on the back of your mind for these past seven years. The final boss, Ganondorf, the king of new Hyrule. You have fought back your childhood home, bonded with brothers, gone to your mental limit, battled the unseen foe known as fear ad nauseam, and played both parent and child. Through the lives of people you’ve touched, you have transformed from a little kid in a green skirt into the stories and tales that will be told for ages to come. The passage of time has made you a true hero. Now its time to win.
Throughout human history, we have answered many questions. What the blinding disk is in the sky, why things fall to the ground, and why ships cannot fall off the edge of world. There has only been one unanswered question. What happens when you die? Winning means an end to the game. There has not been a single person who has won the game and come back to tell everyone else what happens. The dream, the game, the life simply cuts to black with the last two words anyone ever sees: THE END
