The Top 3 Zelda Dungeons

Search Engine Ostentation, your source for top ten bombasticles.

One of the many good reasons to follow VICIST and Thumb — still a Thumb? Maybe an Idler — Danielle Riendeau, are her frequent open calls for opinions or jokes on Twitter in which she’s demonstrably more engaged than the typical boiler plate blog sign-off of “What do you all think? Tell us more in the comments.” (Nearby: a recycling bin by reception cheerily labeled “The Comments” in some of that irreverent first season of The Office humor.)

Today, one of them hooked me by surprise, and suddenly I was writing and divvying up more than three tweets of content before I finally checked myself. This is now my barometer for switching over to WordPress. (Likewise, my ever-increasing indignation at the fucking shamelessly destitute theme options on WordPress’ free service is now my barometer for switching over to Medium; sorry about all that negative space around my, well, my negative space.)

(I also have a Blogspot.)

Maybe sourcing for an article on Waypoint, or out of sheer, inexplicable-yet-somehow-keeping-in-character interest in the thoughts of others, Danielle asked this afternoon for people’s favorite Legend of Zelda dungeons. While coming up with my response forced me to confront that the number of Zelda games I’d actually played, let alone finished, was an embarrassingly small and — as far as discourse is concerned — negligible amount, I still want to put my opinion to page because I feel strongly about the subject at this minute and probably for the next twenty to forty (probably long enough to carry me right until I have about three paragraphs to go, so if the post suddenly ends, uh, consider it a reference to Wind Waker’s development).

Also, this is America, and the First Amendment says I can write a blog about anything and, if you don’t read it, that’s censorship.

So, as I prepare for this SEO-friendly list article, I am trying my best to think of at least one dungeon that isn’t from Ocarina of Time. (Spoilers: I basically didn’t.) I’m also limiting this to three instead of a more traditional ten or my past listicle aspirations of fucking twenty-five because Danielle’s original prompt was for three and also, let’s be honest, I’m not sure if I’ve played enough Zelda games to total twenty-five dungeons or even ten memorable ones. (I swear I like the series.)

(Except for the bad ones.)

(And the 2D ones.)

(Come at me.)

3. Cave of Ordeals (Twilight Princess)

This made the list for two reasons:

1. It was going to be all Ocarina of Time otherwise and, obviously, lists are the only thing on the Internet in which people actually care about diverse representation.
2. I think something stupid happened to me the first time I found myself doing this where, like, I literally reached the bottom with one quarter of a heart remaining and a single digit number of rupees left on the armor that drains money. I’d forgotten about that until just now.

So, congratulations, Cave of Ordeals. Of all the dungeons that weren’t from Ocarina of Time, you were the least not from it.

2. Inside Jabu-Jabu’s Belly (Ocarina of Time)

It’s pretty fucking pedantic that that’s the actual name of this dungeon (according to the Zelda wiki) and not just “Jabu-Jabu’s Belly,” right? I mean, shit, are you sure you don’t want to make it Inside Lord Jabu-Jabu’s Belly? What about Inside Lord Jabu-Jabu’s Forestomach with Brief Excursions to the Duodenal Ampulla via the Pyloric Valve?

I looked up a diagram of a whale stomach and had to add like eight words to my browser’s dictionary for that dumbass joke.

Jabu-Jabu’s Belly has a couple of things working for it — although, on a practical level, a lot working against it. He has, like, an entire ecosystem of parasites down in there. It really doesn’t make any evolutionary sense that Link — who at this point only has like six hearts unless you’ve been a real completist— isn’t immediately disintegrated in a wash of gastric acid. Then again, I guess Hyrule is definitively the product of intelligent design, so there you go? (Political!)

The things the dungeon actually has working for it are plentiful, though. Ruto’s companionship is a genuinely unique gimmick. She has a personality — although, thinking on it, every young woman in a Zelda game either shares Ruto’s belligerent haute or falls into, uh, helpful obsequiousness? — and is used to solve puzzles — although, thinking on that, I realize that you use her to solve puzzles through essentially physically abusing her, so let’s cross that one off the list too.

You literally replace her with a wooden crate later on to receive the exact same mechanical benefits, so maybe I should just rethink the whole thing.

The Boomerang, though. Is it me or is the Boomerang always the best? Projectile weapons are great, projectile weapons with no ammo concerns are the greatest, and its equivalent as an adult is, I guess, the Hookshot, and while that has its charms, it definitely never actually seems to function in combat with the sort of efficacy you might expect from a jagged metal spearhead propelled at high speed into the body of an opponent at short range.

Give me the Boomerang and that sweet blue stun effect.

Most important of all, though, I think Jabu-Jabu represents a sort of excitement no other dungeon can come close to. This is the final Spiritual Stone. After this, it all changes.

You have to understand, before Ocarina of Time, my relationship with video games was very different. I owned them, was privileged to have them, but I was a young kid and they were toys and I played Mario and Sonic because they were the tent-pole franchises, not because I was good at them. I didn’t have older siblings to walk me through anything and no moment of crystallized virtuosity ever dawned upon me as I twitched my toddler thumbs all the way to World 8–8 and to see the end credits roll.

I loved games, of course, but finishing them was out of the question. They were too challenging, too immense. I would never even make it into the later levels, content simply to play the first levels of Mario and Sonic on any given day, when I wasn’t watching their cartoons.

That’s how it still was when I rented Ocarina of Time from Blockbuster and it changed my idea of what games could be. (Well, OK, by then I was thirteen, so I was watching Dragon Ball Z, not the Super Show.) Then, I rented it again. Then, again. Sometimes I’d start my own game, sometimes, since the saves were stored on the cart, I’d load someone else’s. One person had made it to the Great Deku Tree long before I could fathom doing so. Someone else’s save file started me in the entrance of Dodongo’s Cavern and I had absolutely no frame of reference for where I could be, only an immeasurable sense of curiosity and fear.

I can’t remember an exact moment of discovering it was possible to become an adult in the game. Nobody’s save was ever that far, to be sure. If I had to guess — and this presumes an awful lot about the Blockbuster experience — the rental copy had come with the game’s manual. I read it cover to back, probably more than once — a lot more, considering how well I remember it. Why wouldn’t I?

Ocarina of Time’s manual helpfully detailed every item you would find in every dungeon, which ones would be usable by Child Link and which by Adult Link. It listed every upgrade there would be to find. It let you know, “It’s a good idea to use a horse,” and “You must do something special before you can ride the horse.”

It told you: While you are playing the game, you discover that Link has aged seven years since his adventure began.

For months, I was fixated on the thought. Eventually, I received my own copy of Ocarina of Time, and I got the strategy guide for it with the best reviews on Amazon (find it, and you’ll eventually find the celebratory review fourteen-year-old me wrote for it as well).

I kept that guide in my lap and my eyes glued to it with every step so that nothing could take me by surprise. Games still scared me. Progress was still a foreign notion. The morning I finally finished not only the first dungeon but made it all the way into Hyrule Castle and met Princess Zelda, I went to my father’s room and woke him in triumph.

“Is that it?” he asked me. “You beat the game?”

No, of course not, you have no idea how far I have to go.

Another night, we were driving home. For all I know, I had the strategy guide with me, just to look through it in my spare time. (Spoilers didn’t matter, I wanted to know everything about this game. Besides, after that incredibly helpful manual, what else was there?) Apropos of nothing but my internal monologue, I told him, “I can’t wait till I get Epona.”

The horse. It still seemed so far away. So impossible. Making it so far in a video game, to see and experience such a powerful, dramatic part of it, could never be something I’d get to do myself.

“What did you say?” my father asked with a tone in his voice that caught me off-guard.

I repeated myself. I clarified. Epona. The horse.

“Oh,” he said. “I thought you said you can’t wait until you get a boner.”

I love Ocarina of Time, but there’s something to be said for the fact that it’s forced me to live with that moment for the rest of my fucking life.

So it came to pass that I finally did make it to Inside Jabu-Jabu’s Belly, and, unlike every previous dungeon in which I’d have to stop and take a break when my nerves overcame me and the tension of being in such a dangerous location, armed even as I was with my strategy guide, became too much, this time I didn’t stop. I couldn’t. It never even occurred to me to pause. I was getting closer and closer and I knew it, and when it was finally over, and I had the last Spiritual Stone, I ran.

I couldn’t believe myself. I’d been doing everything according to the guide; I’d gone at a meticulous pace, picked up every single Skulltula, every Piece of Heart. I played every mini-game for every inventory upgrade as soon as they were available and I traveled back to every location, out of my way, every time it said there was something new there waiting for me.

Indeed, tenets I carry with me still to this day.

That night, though, I got the Spiritual Stone of Water, but when saw what was next in the strategy guide, my heart sank at a whole new page of things to do. A final checklist before I could place the Stones on the altar and travel through time. None of it could be permanently lost, it assured, but once you go to the Temple of Time, you can’t come back for a while, so you might as well do it now.

For the first time, I didn’t.

Going Inside Jabu-Jabu’s Belly is a fun, vibrant experience. It feels different from everything else in the game in a silly, goofy, gross way, and I love it. But it’s really my second favorite Zelda dungeon because of what comes after you finish it.

1. Forest Temple (Ocarina of Time)

I’m not even the type to rose tint on retro game tunes, but Ocarina has some fucking music in it — that’s a whole other list. While maybe I can’t in good conscience invoke the hyperbole of calling the Forest Temple’s BGM the best music in the game, it’s an honest truth that if I try to recall it, I immediately can. I believe memorability to be a sign of well-composed tracks, even if, uh, upon further consideration, the music is really just higher-and-higher pitched “duduh-duduh-duduh-duduh” on a four minute loop.

Just thinking about it long enough to write that paragraph is actually kind of giving me a headache. Still, though, it sets a mood.

What defines the Forest Temple more than anything, perhaps, is what precedes it. (So, uh, sort of a reverse of the last one, and also sort of more proof that I’m not fit to really by writing about the dungeons in Zelda?)

You encounter Sheik in the Sacred Forest Meadow, having only just been reoriented to the world upon waking in the Temple of Time by him. (Him? I think they made Sheik canonically female down the line. Dragging my heels on this feels political in a way that is potentially very misguided, so I’m not sure if this is a hill to die on? Let me know, Tumblr.)

It’s an amazing story moment. Full stop. In the conversation of how story impedes gameplay in Zelda games — which we’re going to talk about later — people might put Ocarina on the more favorable side of the spectrum, along with the first game and Breath of the Wild, but I think that’s at least partially because the story is well-told. Unlike the aforementioned two, its primary descriptor and strength isn’t necessarily minimal. Good pacing doesn’t necessarily mean concise pacing, and the scenes you share with Sheik are every bit as much of a treasure as the ones you find in dungeons (even more so than the ones by the end like the fucking Hover Boots and Mirror Shield, come on).

The Minuet of Forest scene preceding the temple is, in my opinion, the most romantic one between Link and Sheik (uh, despite the one in which Sheik literally performs a Serenade). I don’t necessarily mean that in a, you know, romantic romantic sense, but neither am I trying to be cute and coy and you go ahead and ship Link and Sheik all you want — doing so certainly broadened my horizons pretty profoundly when I was fourteen.

I call it romantic because it’s wistful, longing, and it speaks rather smartly to what the player could be feeling at this point without needing any expository prompting. Link’s been taken seven years into the future (and, unlike most other time travel media, aged in the process). He’s returned to his home, the one he only left a matter of exaggeratedly fast-moving days earlier, after being told his whole life that leaving would be death, and found it radically changed.

What does the player find now in the one place in Hyrule where nothing ever had ever tried to kill them? Gigantic Deku Babas and the implication of, like, two dozen dead fairy kids. (We’d have actually seen their bodies if not for SJW censorship and Anita Sarkeesian ruining games; check out my videos on the subject growing like weeds unsolicited in your YouTube recommendations.)

I know, I know, Zelda always starts with the forest dungeon, but consider how much it impresses on the player what an emotional touchstone this should be, that the first place you’re meant to revisit in the new Hyrule is your corrupted hometown. (You know, after quickly stealing a horse from an old man and outracing the ghost of some creep you met as a kid so you can take his grappling hook and part of his life essence, I guess. I told you Ocarina had a story.)

The perfect microcosm of Hyrule under Ganondorf’s yoke, you pass through Kokiri Forest and into the same labyrinth of the Lost Woods you tread as a child (and I mean literally as a child, since you were playing Ocarina of Time as a kid and the idea of navigating a maze by sound was so fucking mind-blowing that it made it seem like absolutely anything was possible in video games and that’s why you spent the next six months getting tricked by every fucking Internet rumor that said you could unlock the Triforce if you just figured out why its lower left triangle in the inventory screen touched the Spirit Medallion, there’s something to that, god damn it).

Once more finding your way via the depression-vanquishing hot beat of your only friend — who was probably eaten by a Deku Baba or enslaved in a gold bikini by Lord Jabu-Jabu — you come upon Sheik, and he tells you:

The flow of time is always cruel…
Its speed seems different for each person, but no one can change it…
A thing that doesn’t change with time is a memory of younger days…

Were they not giving BAFTAs to games back then or what?

The Minuet of Forest is — unlike the aforementioned temple BGM — unequivocally a beautiful piece of music. All the warp songs are, in fact; probably because they don’t need to work as four minute loops ad infinitum.

Before you even get to the temple, you fight a couple of Wolfos at its gate and it’s a suddenly primer on what a back-flipping, hookshotting bad ass you are as an adult now.

(I keep saying adult, but really you’re seventeen and you’d be committing a felony for sexting, but hey, adult Link is what we call him; otherwise it’d be teen Link and tween Link.)

By the way, the only time you’d fought a Wolfos previously? It was when you came here as a tween to learn Saria’s Song. You fight one, only one, at the entrance to the meadow itself, and it’s treated as a minor boss battle. Yeah, a very minor one, but a noteworthy fight nonetheless. Now, you’re a millennial, you’re back, and you’re facing two at once. That’s continuity, that’s progression, that’s storytelling, and that’s beautiful.

The temple itself is creative, fun. It has an artistic vision which withstands scrutiny: it’s a Forest Temple, but it’s not simply an overgrowth like some other woodland dungeons have been in the series. Instead, it evokes an eerie regality, with just enough pastoral among its architecture to make it seem, well, organic to the area. Honestly, even though I dislike the potential laziness of leaving it to the player to come up with their own backstories (more on that below, I think), there’s something about the Forest Temple which becomes a little chilling the more one wonders what exactly its purpose was, who its inhabitants were.

Granted, the answer might just be in some Gossip Stone or a Japanese art book, and I guess that’d be fine too.

With its particularly memorable twisting hallways and perspective-shifting rooms, I think the Forest Temple strikes a admirable mix between foreboding and encouraging — precisely the tone you want for your first outing as underage Link. The Phantom Ganon boss supports that theme perfectly: a harbinger of things to come but one to truly take satisfaction in defeating. You wouldn’t do much to assure the real Ganondorf that you’re out for blood if your first victory were against Bongo Bongo.

The Forest Temple also has a subplot involving the Poe Sisters, which is about as loosely as you’ll ever see the world “subplot” used, unless you see it applied to a particularly ambitious porn film (and even then it might be slightly more accurate depending on the power dynamics at play).

They’re pretty to look at, which is a weird thing to say dismissively about a group of female characters and not mean it in a sexist way? I mean, they’re a bunch of colorful candy-colored ghosts?

A lot of things in the dungeon are candy-colored. The Floormaster enemy was such a shamelessly poor palette swap of the genuinely cool-looking Wallmaster that the best thing you could possibly say about the former was that it looks like it would be an OK-tasting gummy treat. (That, and I was legitimately, sincerely fucking terrified of getting caught by either of them because my young self was convinced that when they took you back to the start of the dungeon you lost an insurmountable amount of progress, to the point that you might as well just give up, delete your save, and take Epona out back with a shotgun.)

The Forest Medallion also kind of looked like a green apple-flavored hard candy I recall having at the time, but the game was obviously prevalent on my mind so the similarities might have been mostly of my own imagination.

Let’s close with one general point about dungeons and Zelda post-Breath of the Wild (before I actually close with the Honorable Mentions, on which I ended up working even harder).

It’s reductive to say that I play games for story, but anyone who’s seen me talk about games even the slightest, littlest bit knows that “story” is a facet of the much bigger and harder to define thing that also needs words like “feeling,” “atmosphere,” “theme,” to convey itself. (No, these are not SAT words or anything, I’m not claiming to be pompously media savvy — not in this sentence, at least.)

If you could call it any one single word, it would be art.

So, I’m going to do one of those solipsistic things where I speak for myself but presume that my experience essentially represent everyone else’s.

Have you noticed how way too much of this reads like fan fiction? Like, describing the dungeons and their accouterments in-Universe instead of objective journalism? Even on a list that should ostensibly be about the gameplay in Zelda, the story has taken precedence.

The cultural take on Zelda has become a lot more diffused since I was a kid and there were only five of them. Now people get to fight over polarizing titles like Majora’s Mask, or turn the series into a treatise on the stagnation of Japanese games, or write raps about them and put it on YouTube for a wider audience than that one song on Newgrounds or Napster that we apocryphally thought was by Serj Tankian could ever have dreamed of.

Back then, a fundamental part of what defined a Zelda game, if not the definitive part, was clever dungeon design. I remember this because I was a child and dungeons scared me; I was then, as now, playing for everything else. Only difference is, now I believe that dungeons, combat, all the things which are not explicitly narrative or aesthetic, should contribute to the everything else. That, and I’m less likely to literally have a jump scare if I open a treasure chest and it’s an ice trap, Gerudo Training Ground. (I forgive, but I don’t forget.)

On your list of favorite Zelda dungeons, whether it’s your top three, ten, the seven you meet in the Sacred Realm (this was a dumb joke, I’m sorry, I’m really wasting everyone’s time now), how much do you remember the actual puzzles?

You probably remember the generalities of times where you were frustrated by them: you can think back to the Water Temple and conjure a few images of those switches to raise and lower the water level and how cumbersome it was to navigate it all through trial and error.

I remember the big moments, vaguely. One of the two larger temples in the back half of Wind Waker, when you soar past a large fan blade with the Deku Leaf. Handling Valoo in Dragon Roost Cavern in some general, comedically insensitive way. My majestic ascent toward a confused and bumbling fight with Argorok in Twilight Princess.

Even fleeting memories of one solution to one problem or another are not enough, in my opinion, to name a dungeon as a favorite, though. If you were to judge this aspect of the game — which is ostensibly its mechanics at their most concentrated — you would have to recall, with clarity, enough puzzles to grade the continuity and craft of its design alone, i.e. to judge that one aspect holistically, removed from the trappings the art provides it.

And yes, I’ve never replayed a Zelda games besides Ocarina of Time (plus the several times I’ve tried and failed to really penetrate Majora’s Mask). If someone took issue with my read by saying I’m just too unfamiliar with the games, that’s fine. If someone claimed, say, Final Fantasy VII didn’t have memorable dungeons, while I could draw a map of the Cave of the Gi with my eyes closed, I’d object to that too.

Thing is: Final Fantasy VII dungeons are memorable because they come as part of the plot and have a unique aesthetic flavor, not because of their puzzles (and yeah, sure, I know it’s an apples and oranges comparison that I just made myself and tried to surreptitiously slide into the conversation as though it proved my point, shut the fuck up, leave me and my blog post alone).

I’d still maintain it is harder, on an innate mental level, to retain individual memories of mechanical experiences like puzzle-solving — even when it is extremely satisfying moment-to-moment — than it is to maintain more vivid memories of mood, emotion, and all the other same-ass words I can keep using to describe the same thing as before.

So, why is Breath of the Wild the greatest Zelda game in decades, if not ever, if it eschews story?

Well, I haven’t played it, so for all I know, it isn’t, and you’re all hopelessly fucking wrong about the whole damn thing. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time.

More likely? It’s because, while it may eschew what we think of as story as a detriment to a Zelda game, it facilitates a story that Zelda games are designed to tell. Nintendo isn’t BioWare (for better or worse; if it were, we’d at least get a female protagonist, but then she’d be hideous — thanks feminists); Zelda doesn’t need complex companion relationships. For as much as I glance side-eyed and suspiciously at the concept of “emergent storytelling” quite often, maybe that’s what Zelda does.

Maybe “emergent storytelling” isn’t the way some developers use it — the way that makes me clasp my hands to my ears as the battle trumpets herald the final defeat of narrative in games once and for all. It doesn’t have to mean, “There’s no more money in single player content, so we’re hoping players tell their own stories by admiring the way our physics engine has dynamically arranged these rocks in this cave. What could have been here? Who might have caused this chaotic assortment of rocks? Why did they leave this container of algorithmically determined loot behind? We believe the player will find just as much, if not more, intellectual and emotional engagement answering these questions by themselves, with absolutely no resolution whatsoever — besides, of course, selling that loot, which was expressly designed with no other purpose than to sell, to create busywork for the player; players love busywork, our metrics show — than they ever did from silly bespoke stories in the past.”

(That’s a quote directly from GDC, look it up if you don’t believe me and somehow harbor some dying embers of optimism in this endless fucking winter we call video games.)

“Emergent storytelling” is, in my interpretation — and admittedly this might be a definition which still skews more curated than it should, but I’m cool like that — coming home to Kokiri Forest and getting sideswiped by that Deku Baba. There are no words, it’s a story told through gameplay.

(And then you talk to Sheik and it’s a story told through words for a little bit, then back to a story told through gameplay: Forest Temple, best temple.)

Breath of the Wild might be more like that. I mean, nothing I’ve read about it makes it sound that way necessarily, but like I said, I still haven’t played it. It’s Schrödinger’s Zelda to me right now. Is the Arwing in it? Impossible to say!

Maybe what supports this incredibly spurious claim of mine is the fact that everyone loves Breath of the Wild and it doesn’t have dungeons at all. (Or does it? It will and it won’t until I open the box!) I venture: in past Zelda games, dungeons turned gameplay mechanics into the structure to be supported by the game’s other design pillars. The story, art, music, characters, everything — when you entered the dungeon, they converged to give you the experience meant to exemplify that game.

Breath of the Wild reverses that paradigm. It starts you with the gameplay mechanics rather than doling them out to you as treasures and thereby makes them the support pillars of an experience defined by a beautiful, immersive world. The game doesn’t need an aggressive, twisting narrative when it creates a sense of discovery so rewarding that finding a small town is more of a treasure than finding the Boomerang.

(If you’re, by the way, going to argue that the design of a world is more of a mechanical feature than an artistic one: first, go fuck yourself, you hair-splitting demon; second, ask yourself how much the design of Liberty City or Los Santos adds to Grand Theft Auto mechanically and not aesthetically, you stupid straw man idiot.)

See, that is letting your combat, your puzzles, and your items contribute to the everything else: art. Breath of the Wild is successful because it is art and — while on any other given day I will argue until I am as hoarse as Epona the artistry of a Zelda dungeon— the series has not captured something like that before. (Not explicitly, even if it was the same effect which Ocarina of Time had on me, playing it at such a formative time as I did.)

So, when you look at my list above and wonder why I talk more about the scenery and context surrounding the dungeons than the puzzles themselves, that’s why. It flies in the face of what I was told growing up, and what I’ve heard congeal into a more negative perspective in recent years: that Zelda games are about puzzles and clever and challenging dungeon design; that that’s their strength and their attempts to cram in narrative where it’s not wanted is ruining the series.

Well, what do you know? From my perspective (you know, the one that hasn’t played the game, but fuck it, I’m sure I’m right anyway), they just made their best game by taking out the thing that the series was supposed to be about (unless they didn’t, I think there are still some dungeons, whatever) and disseminating the whole game with what was supposed to be killing the series. (Except I guess there are also, like, anime cut scenes and from the second I saw of that they looked fucking awful; although it does prove me right about something else I’ve always said, which is that you really, really shouldn’t put voice acting in Zelda, you dummies.)

HONORABLE MENTION: Shadow Temple (Ocarina of Time)

So, this is actually one of my favorites (there is seriously something about fucking Bongo Bongo, man), but the music has this sample of synth strings that sounded so much like my phone going off at the time that it gave me a fucking panic attack every god damned loop.

Keep in mind, I was playing Ocarina for the first time when I was in eighth grade and discovered that I could skip miserable junior high school virtually every day without my father knowing, and all I had to do was intercept the automated robocall they’d send out during the evening. (I can still recite the first sentence of that robocall today, as I’d hear just that every time before I hung up and said it was a wrong number and that I wasn’t sweating.)

So, every other day, I had to spend my time playing Zelda with one ear on constant vigil for that landline ring, and it was the most tense gaming experience of my life, eat your stupid heart out Five Nights at Freddy’s.

Even right now in Persona 5 there’s a sound cue in the first dungeon that is far too reminiscent of my first cell phone ringtone and (as someone who loathes invoking this term as a joke) it needs a fucking trigger warning. Phone calls make me nervous, I guess, but I think there’s something about my phone ringing while I’m playing a game that feels like a home invasion happening specifically while I’m on the toilet.

P.S. Guess who got held back in ninth grade because of too many absences?

HONORABLE MENTION: Somewhat Shady Zelda Dungeon

Not to brag or anything, but I’ve just landed this pretty nice freelancer gig doing interviews with somewhat reclusive gaming aficionados. I recently had somewhat eventful introductory meeting with my first subject, a man known online only as “Trevelyan.” I’d guessed, excited, that that was meant as a reference to Dragon Age: Inquisition, as that’s the surname of the game’s human player character.

What a coincidence, I thought, my first Inquisitor was a Trevelyan; I assumed he and I would get along well, despite his somewhat foreboding claims that his “tastes are very singular.” While I’m certainly an enormous fan of Dragon Age (although my issues with the third game will be documented on this blog soon, likely after I finish this current project with Trevelyan), I hoped his passion for games extended beyond the one series.

As it so happens, it did. In his home, Trevelyan was eager to show off his “playroom.” Curious, I asked if he’d been persuaded to pick up an Xbox One yet, as he was clearly a man of considerable means — as I write in my upcoming article, “Seriously over-the-top Bill Gates–style wealthy.”

“No Xbox,” he told me. Hm, discerning, I suppose. I’d asked, you see, with the assumption he’d already had a PlayStation 4, of course. Even I have to admit, the PlayStation has been having a stellar time from the latter half of 2016 onward. As if reading my thoughts, however, he continued: “No PlayStation. Come.”

A tried and true PC gamer. Wow. It would make sense. With such Gates-esque wealth, he could afford a behemoth — likely a couple of Titan Xs running in SLI; hell, why not four of them?

I must note, as I will in my article, that there was some troubling evidence that Trevelyan had, at some point, been an evangelist for piracy on 4chan — one who would mock those who paid for games as suckers (using a derogatory slur I won’t repeat but which visitors of the image board’s video game forum might quickly recall). It was all the more difficult to fathom due to his otherwise … hm, how did I put it in the preface to our interview? “His civility? Wealth? Power?” I couldn’t understand why someone with those privileges would act in such a way.

Yet, during our correspondence, he told me something that seemed to reflect the sort of person who would partake in such acts. I asked him what the guiding principle was behind a man who could become so well-known in the gaming community, to be perhaps considered a figurehead, all while remaining so eremitic. Trevelyan replied with the following:

I don’t have a philosophy as such. Maybe a guiding principle, Carnegie’s. ‘A man who acquires the ability to take full possession of his own mind may take possession of anything else to which he is justly entitled.’ I’m very singular, driven. I like control… of myself and those around me.

One worry begins to take hold of me now, as I descend the stairs into the basement of this man I met online under a pseudonym while trying to desperately to keep my head above water in a gig economy: please don’t let him be one of those gaudy PC master race types.

For just a moment, I contemplate asking him why someone would need an entire playroom for a gaming desktop. Trevelyan doesn’t strike me as someone drawn to the current wave of couch multiplayer throwbacks, although if he wanted to go for a few rounds of Nidhogg I’d be down. He’d probably spank me, though. I’m pretty terrible at it.

Wait, of course, I’m so stupid: VR. The man probably has a collection of headsets and motion controllers from every manufacturer on the market right now. I’ve been so excited to try out the technology, but it had been cost prohibitive for me, as for so many others. In my eagerness, unthinking, I find myself placing my hands on Trevelyan’s shoulders while he is still unlocking the door to his VR chamber — visions of what the top-of-the-line roomscale set-up within must look like.

Suddenly, Trevelyan hisses, skirts away from my touch, and stares daggers into my eyes. I’m overcome with shame and, seeing my humiliation, he softens, slightly. My demeanor doesn’t change. I’m instantly miles away, envisioning how I’ll describe this moment to my therapist, how I was “all deer/headlights, moth/flame, bird/snake.”

The silence breaks when he explains that he simply doesn’t like to be touched. It’s stupid, I’m a fool for asking, but I can’t help myself and I say it: “Why don’t you like to be touched?”

“Because I’m fifty shades of fucked-up, Anastasia.”

He turns his back to me and finally unlocks his playroom. I am still reeling. However, I assure you, it wasn’t a non-sequitur. I know it might sound that way; I mean, who talks like that? No one in the world has ever used an idiom even vaguely similar to “fifty shades of fucked-up” before, I admit. What I mean, though, is “Anastasia.” It was the name I used to contact him, the name of my female human character in Inquisition: Anastasia Trevelyan.

Of course, being a BioWare game, a game which allows a custom first name, none of my companions or advisers had ever referred to me by it. It was never spoken aloud … until just now.

Reliving this moment, allow me pause to switch over to my article, as my mind is alight once more with the feelings being stirred. Here is what I have written there:

My subconscious is furious, medusa-like in her anger, hair flying, her hands clenched around her face like Edvard Munch’s Scream.

This is the sense of immersion which Bethesda attempted with such effort in Fallout 4 by allowing the player to choose their own name and actually having one, perhaps two, characters able to speak it aloud, though still removed from the context of any other sentence.

Here is Trevelyan, addressing me by the name of my Inquisitor, as though I were her. It was the ideal chased by every amateur cosplayer who’s ever donned cardboard armor. To inhabit the role you sought to play in your role-playing game in a world capable of reacting to you with perfect nuance.

The door to Trevelyan’s playroom swings open as my thoughts dissipate, as does the accumulated color in my cheeks — which I later joke to him, “must be the colour of The Communist Manifesto.” (I don’t think he got it, but it was my fault for being so esoteric.)

It is pitch black inside. There are no sources of dim light one might expect from a typical man cave: a blinking modem, a charging controller, LED computer fans, or even some sort of wall clock from Spencer’s Gifts. Without hesitation, Trevelyan makes his way toward a light switch, leaving me alone with my thoughts. I recall asking myself, “Why does he have such an unnerving effect on me? His overwhelming good looks maybe? The way his eyes blaze at me? The way he strokes his index finger against his lower lip? I wish he’d stop doing that.”

Any concerns I’d had about his apparent lack of interest in games quickly vanish, however. The playroom illuminates in a flash, momentarily blinding me. Was I too distracted to hear the flick of a light switch? Or was it that, as I’ve read, light travels faster than sound, so it would be natural for the lights to have registered for me before I’d have heard the switch flick? I was never much for science-y stuff.

There is no telltale flick but there is something else. Instantly recognizable to the ears of every gamer, the lights come on with a cued sound of Hey! Listen!

A smart house! Trevelyan truly has it all. The sort of home one dreams about as a child. Something to make Notch proud, I note. I wonder with a smile where he stores his candy dispensers.

Trevelyan hands me something to drink. To be honest, I don’t see him approach, as I am still acclimating myself to the room, trying to discern the various hardware stored within it. With a friendly wink, he says it might help restore my hearts. I taste it. Orange juice. Cute, and I chuckle, but orange juice is typically too acidic for me. Gives me reflux, I explain. With his fingers lightly pushing up on the bottom side of my glass, however, Trevelyan insists, so I continue to quaff.

I must admit, the taste improves, and I do not notice any acidity on the back end. He looks to me for my opinion. I tell him, “The orange juice tastes divine. It’s thirst-quenching and refreshing.”

He suggests we have coffee when we’re finished here and again, I flinch. I loathe coffee, the smell, the taste, all of it. Yet… God, allow me to once more consult my notes, if you will:

His voice is warm and husky like dark melted chocolate fudge caramel… or something.

That settles it. “I am going to have coffee,” I tell him, “and I hate coffee.”

With that, he walks me through his extraordinary gaming room. It is unlike any I’ve ever seen. I am subscribed to subreddits for Battlestations, Man Caves, even Audio/Visual Pornography and Trevelyan’s equipment is unlike anything I’ve ever laid eyes on.

Some kind of ergonomic gaming chair?

He tells me he calls her Epona. You don’t sit on her, you ride her.

Oh.

I am finally starting to understand. Nervously, I ask Trevelyan if this playroom perhaps serves a dual purpose: video games, of course, and secondly, well, love-making?

His answer makes me feel so exposed it’s like he’s holding a Lens of Truth up to me.

“No, Anastasia it doesn’t. Firstly, I don’t make love. I fuck… hard.”

He asks if I remember that moment of triumph the first time you receive the Goron’s Bracelet. You had been walking — no, sleepwalking — through Death Mountain, with such vibrant, tumescent, dangerous flora growing all around you, yet you were unable to pluck them. In possession of your own mind, yet denied your just entitlement to these bomb flowers and everything they represented.

Then, finally, they were yours. They looked like cuffs, but they were anything but — not symbols of incarceration but of liberation.

He asks me if I want to return to that feeling of liberation again. For a moment, I am speechless.

“Do you trust me, Ana?”

I remember: “Ana! ‘Yes, I do,’ I respond spontaneously, not thinking… because it’s true- I do trust him.”

“Well, then. The rest of this stuff is just details. Important details.”

He slips the Goron’s Bracelets onto my wrists and locks them more tightly than I’d have ever imagined them being in the game.

Through his teeth, his whispers two words. Deku Stick.

Captivated, reflexively I respond with the first thing I remember about these items: they break.

“No, stupid,” he admonishes me. They ignite, he explains, impatience creeping into voice. They catch fire with a touch and burn through barriers allowing you to reach deeper and deeper depths.

He chides me for having not watched any Ocarina of Time speedruns. I know he’s a prestigious benefactor of Games Done Quick events, they’re just not something in which I’d ever been particularly interested. Clicking his tongue with frustration, he informs me that the Deku Stick does twice as much damage as the Kokiri Sword.

With surprising speed, he takes me by my Goron’s Bracelets. He stares into my eyes and asks if I’d rather use a regular vanilla Kokiri Sword or a weapon like the Deku Stick, with some “kinky fuckery.”

As I have written in my upcoming article:

My mouth drops open.
‘Kinky fuckery?’ I squeak.
‘Kinky fuckery.’
‘I can’t believe you said that.’
‘Well, I did. Answer me,’ he says calmly.
I flush. My inner goddess is down on bended knee with her hands clasped in supplication begging me.
‘I like your kinky fuckery,’ I whisper.

He ignites me with his Deku Stick.

I hear him whispering under his breath as I come to. I’m hazy, but it sounds something like so underrated, so criminally underrated.

Struggling to stand, I ask Trevelyan — meekly, rasping — of what he’s speaking.

He shows me the display. Four Swords. So underrated. I understand. For the first time, his inner pain is evident. He cares for this series so much, so singularly, that even its titles which don’t get their fair due eat him up inside.

I have to ask: if he is so exclusively devoted to The Legend of Zelda, why is his username a reference to Dragon Age: Inquisition? It was our first point of connection, yet now it all feels so far away.

The mood changes in an instant.

‘Look at me,’ he breathes, and I stare up into his smoldering gaze. It is his Dom gaze — cold, hard, and sexy as hell, seven shades of sin in one enticing look.

Our eyes locked, he finally explains. He was never Inquisitor Trevelyan. He was Trevelyan9999, the anonymous Nintendo leak who has been at least twice correct on the internal development of the latest Pokémon games and the time of the Nintendo Switch launch before the console’s name had even been announced.

His means were undeniable, his love for this family-friendly Japanese game publisher staggering. That Dom gaze is gone, the meager, yearning heart of a Nintendo fanboy has taken its place. I stand upright for perhaps the first time since we entered his playroom — his own private Zelda dungeon — and walk over to him, and give him the kiss from the princess he so desperately needs.

‘Anastasia,’ he whispers. ‘What are you doing to me?’
‘I could say the same to you,’ I whisper back. Taking a deep breath, he kisses my forehead and leaves.

Taking one last moment to admire his collection with a contented sigh and a full heart container, I follow suit. Shutting off the light switch on my way, I hear the low-fi MIDI warning of Navi telling me to Watch out!

I return home, inspired and awakened from the greatest gaming session of my life, and feel my phone ringing in my pocket. It’s my mother.

“I think I kissed a prince, Mom. I hope he doesn’t turn into Frog Fractions 2.”

Yes, everything quoted or in quotation marks above is taken verbatim from 50 Shades of Grey according to these sources: [1] [2] [my own extensive knowledge of Mrs. E. L. James’ august bibliography].

And yes, before you ask, that includes the above Frog Fractions 2 reference, it was part of the ARG.

Sorry about these footnotes. You know what they say about explaining jokes: it’s like dissecting a Frog Fractions 3.