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The Legend of Zelda Series and its place within the History of Video Games
[NOTE ZERO: Spoilers! While we are not going to do a deep dive into every
story twist and mechanic of these games, we will certainly mention some
touching endings, amazing moments with weapons and ingenious tools at the
player’s disposal. So if you want to go into these games completely fresh,
better go play ‘em]
[NOTE ONE: This will be a four-part deep
dive into the Legend of Zelda video game series, that is planned (ha!) to
be published bimonthly. While certain sections will look at aspects of the
series as a whole, it will mostly be chronological, so the most recent
games won’t be the focus until the final part. But if you want to know
right now if you should play 2017’s
Breath of the Wild or 2020’s
Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, the short answers are an emphatic
yes and sure]
[NOTE TWO: Hey, do you like video games? Like, a lot? Then some of this
essay might tread over some very obvious areas of your base knowledge
(whether concepts behind games, or the history of the medium, or parts of
the Zelda series). It's designed to be for both hardcore fans and those
with a passing interest in the (still growing) culture, who obviously know
about Mario, maybe played Sonic, Halo or GTA all those years ago, and have
at lest heard of Atari. Not to say that you'll be totally bored if you can
rattle off your top five Zelda dungeons whenever need be (people like
reading nice things about things they like…and I will proudly defend
Ocarina of Time's Water Temple),
but just a heads up, there might be some ‘yeah, obviously’ moments for
you]
[NOTE THREE: Advances in computer technology have allowed for video games
to improve in quality over the decades and become more and more of an
essential piece of popular culture. At the same time (and also thanks to
computer technology) the video essay
can be created and viewed much easier, the former typically only requiring
an interest in the subject and editing equipment that is available on most
commercial laptops, and the latter only requiring eyes and an internet
connection. As these are both visual mediums, it makes sense that there
are many more video essays covering and analyzing video games than
traditional written essays (it's easier to prove a point about graphics or
gameplay by showing them). But...that's not going to happen here. This is
the old fashioned written word all the way. Which means there can be a
slight disconnect, a bit like reading a book about music that you may be
unfamiliar with (you can’t really understand the music the writer is
describing until you listen to it). So for those who would wish for a
glossary of sorts, or a quick resource to get a visual image and more
basic description of the main points and minutiae of what is being
described here, it is recommended that you have the websites Zelda Dungeon
or Fandom’s Zelda-pedia open in a new tab, ready to clarify]
Chapter Four: Reaching Out For a 'A Link to the Past'
This
one is a top-shelf motherfucker.
Nintendo would continue to make many (many) 2D top down Zelda games, but
this one from 1991 (1992 outside of Japan) is not only one of the best
games in the series, or one of the best 2D games of all time, but also one
of the...wait for it...best games of all time, no matter how many
dimensions we’re counting. When a new top down 2D adventure game – Zelda
or otherwise – is released today, the influence of
A Link to the Past is markedly
obvious and is part of the reason they’re so good.
Despite its title (although in Japan it was
epically called ‘Triforce of the Gods’), this game felt like the future of
the video game landscape, which is something plenty of Zelda games have
come to encapsulate.
The first two titles in the series are
landmarks of the third generation console era, and nearly five years had
passed between Zelda II: The
Adventures of Link and A Link to
the Past. It made sense in the sense that going from 8-bit to 16-bit
processors was massive.
The first game and
Zelda II still felt and looked
like 1980s arcade games in your home.
A Link to the Past (sometimes
shortened to ALttP) was a much more immersive and personal experience. Released
in late 1991 on the Super Famicom (and the Super NES the following year),
this title was where many gamers’ love for the series began. Many people
can peg childhood memories to specific games and consoles, and this one
was the zeitgeist.
While it is understandable that someone may have to wear a
very strong pair of nostalgia goggles to really enjoy the first two Zelda
games, A Link to the Past
requires a much, much weaker prescription.
As Miyamoto and Nintendo has constantly stated and demonstrated, higher
quality graphics are not required to make a game fun, but here the designs
of the characters, monsters, environments, and even the furniture inside
the houses and castles have become so much more detailed and that
undeniably makes Hyrule feel more alive and real. NPCs can move around
freely and you can talk to them while they are in the middle of their
daily routines. Their dialogue has gotten a little livelier, especially in
Kakariko Village, which is the first time the iconic town makes an
appearance in the series.
In addition to overworld and dungeons,
A Link to the Past introduced
the Dark World, which is an evil, mirror version of the overworld (in this
game, the overworld is called both the Light World and Hyrule). Because it
has its own set of enemies and environments it feels like a whole new area
to explore, doubling the size of the game, but because it’s based exactly
on the overworld mapping, it doesn’t take up as much disk space as it
could have.
Even
the UI (which refers to the text (and text boxes) that appear onscreen) is
a step up, as instead of block letters on blackness you get a nice clear
text box that sits atop the environment that Link is currently in. It
certainly infers that the words are being said to him (and you) by a
character within the world, not a game developer from on high.
Obviously improved tech doesn't guarantee a good game, but if you were
already pretty talented at that, you now have a chance to let your
creativity run wild.
More complex puzzles, deeper combat (in terms of enemy AI), a
smoother and rewarding increase in difficulty, and subtle
item-or-challenge-based gates.
While it may not have been the first game to introduce a new certain
style or gameplay, the Zelda series certainly improved and/or perfected
them, which it would do time and time again.
And
its continued popularity meant that as people look back (as, y'know, we're
doing now), Zelda titles are the ones people hold up as being the most
representative of its time, and in 1991/1992, this certainly is the peak
of an amazing adventure you can have thanks to your video game console.
Beyond the swinging of Link’s sword,
everything feels more important, and there is plenty of lore introduced,
but it’s not done in a way that slows down the action. Yes, once again the
manual goes into great detail about the story setup (Ganon – or
occasionally Ganondorf when he is in his human form – as opposed to the
pig monster) and everything you can expect from the game, but even if you
skip that and quickly boot up a save file, atmosphere is heavy right from
the start.
Link has a dream of a mysterious woman
begging him for help, and when wakens in the middle of the night his uncle
is getting ready to go to the castle because apparently it’s under siege.
He tells Link to remain here and then leaves, and in giving a fine example
of the sort of agency video games both allow and demand, you can pretty
much guide Link right out the door second later (you aren’t the boss of
me, Uncle!).
And into a howling rainstorm.
You rush through it and sneak into the
castle and find your wounded Uncle just in time for him to impart some
important advice…and then die in front of you (sorry, Uncle).
‘Cause it’s a kids game.
In no time
you’ll be escorting Zelda to a safe (for now) location, by hacking through
hordes of monsters and baddies, and be branded as an ‘enemy of the state’
by the puppet regime being controlled by the evil wizard Agahnim (who will
eventually challenge you to a game of ‘tennis’, the first and not at all
last time you’ll be sending the villain’s attacks back at them).
If that
sounds pretty normal by now, don’t worry, soon Link will negotiate with
monkeys, make essential purchases from sea monsters, and be turned into a
pink bunny rabbit.
With more disk space and better processing
power, this game can truly stretch out and become an adventure.
You’ll be
zipping back and forth in the much larger land of Hyrule, collecting
mcguffins that allow you to find the Master Sword in the Lost Woods and
then mcguffin maidens who -
when combined - will help fix the seal that separates the Light World from
the Dark World (which was once the Golden Land, and further proof that the
translators have upped their game since the early nineties). Once again,
saving storage space by overlapping these designs was key, because when
developing games, your imagination might not have any limit, but
cartridges and discs do. And for ALttP, a lot of it was taken
up by music files.
Totally worth it, though. The melody that kicks in when you visit Kakariko
is wonderfully soothing, and we get our first taste of Zelda’s Lullaby
when you are rescuing the seven maidens.
A Link to the Past introduced many elements that would become mainstays
in the series. It is the first time we get the master sword, an extremely
powerful weapon that could only be wielded by the chosen hero. Whether it
is a complete rip-off or homage to Excalibur, the quest to find it in a
haunted forest makes it feel a lot more impressive.
This is the first game with bottles, and that begat the not-so-optional
side-quests to earn them. For you young
Breath of the Wild
whippersnappers, you could only so many carry health potions into
dungeons, which made maxing out on bottles themselves all the more
essential.
Speaking of which, it is the first time with
side quests that
are actually triggered by talking to NPCs. But no check-list or log in the
menu screen, though, you have to remember to look for the smithy’s brother
all by yourself.
Talk to the flute player in Hyrule, and then return to the same spot in
the Dark World to witness the tragic change that has befallen him. And
rather than healing him by playing some music, he just thanks you for
doing so before dying (or transforming into a tree, it is not exactly
clear).
A Link to the Past is also the first game where the amount of items
expanded exponentially. Hallmarks from the first two are here (your
lanterns, bows, and bombs, hammers), but they also add the hook shot, ice
and fire rods, zora flippers, the shovel and the cane of somaria (how can
you make a video game without that?!). The bomb, ether and quake
medallions are like combo super moves that will become standard in plenty
of fighting and hack and slash games.
Just as the very basics of Zelda story and
gameplay will repeat in various ways over the series, items return in some
titles and not others, and not necessarily quickly. The bug net shows up
here (a great way to stop annoying bees), but won’t be back for twenty
years, until Skyward Sword.
Meanwhile, a four year gap between games was pretty big in the eighties,
and it is a testament to how much Nintendo had faith in Miyamoto's team to
let them take so long (considering the first game was followed by
The Adventures of Link only ten months later).
In terms of the Hegelian triad, the first
game was the thesis, the second is certainly the antithesis, which make
A Link to the Past the
synthesis, the combination of both, and by that virtue, superior to them.
While it obviously
took the most from the first game, it vastly improved the experience of
towns, brought back the magic meter, and had some challenging pre-dungeon
segments, all of which were products of
The Adventures of Link.
It is a perfect
example refinement and expansion for a series that began on an early
console, and one could find other big name series that began in the latter
half of the eighties (from Mario to Metal Gear to Final Fantasy) doing the
same. For Zelda fans, everything got better with
A Link to the Past.
What can you do with a 16-bit system? Like
the 8-bit era before, Miyamoto and his team took their time with
understanding the capabilities of a 3.5MHz CPU and 128 kilobits of RAM
available with the Super Famicom/SNES.
The availability of colours went from 48 on
the previous console to 256, and it was dazzling. Now flames flicker and
flower dance. The bosses in the dungeons have elaborate attacks and phases
with unique animations for both. There are weather elements, with wind and
rain and fog, and you can even faintly hear storms when you’re inside the
castle. The atmosphere helps heighten the moment you come across the
master sword in the Lost Woods. The world changes as your adventure
progresses. You can experience the difference you are making (by opening
the dam inside the swamp ruins, you drain the swamp outside).
In the sense of battling unforgiving enemies with narrow hit-boxes, the
game goes a long way to making combat a more deeper and rewarding
experience. With more weapons available and the ability to do a spin
attack, fighting is easier than in the first two entries, but got harder
in a different, more intriguing way. The dungeon puzzles in
TLoZ and
Zelda II were – for the most part – extremely simple, and that was in
part due to the limitations of the technology at the time.
In A Link to the Past, dungeons
are multileveled and full of mental challenges. For the first time, the
enemy wasn’t necessarily a sprite and the tool to defeat it wasn’t a
sword. It was an understanding of how your actions in one room can affect
the layout and functioning in another (or on a completely different
floor). Switches could be activated to open one path and block another,
and a well placed bomb might get you enough time to get to where you need
to be before it explodes.
This is where staring at your screen for way
too long and then checking every other room in dungeon to see if you
missed something began. Bombing random walls won’t cut it anymore. Trying
to get back to that one room that had the other exit you didn’t take might
require you to loop all the way around and have to avoid
half-alive/maybe-robot jerks like winder and beamos.
The killer – and which
makes you go fucking nuts – is that dying at any point in a dungeon (even
at the boss) sends you back to the beginning of the dungeon. And while
this is a Zelda mainstay, the dungeons of the first two games are
considerably smaller, so with the multi-leveled expansiveness of
ALttP means starting all over again was doubly draining
(although it’s still an improvement over
Zelda II, because when you get a
game over screen and start again, it’s at the beginning of the whole damn
game, unless you’ve made it to the final dungeon).
It’s not just the dungeons, mind you.
Sometimes you complete one and feel all triumphant and realize that even
with the next location flashing on your map…you have no idea of how to get
past the enemy, boulder, or broken bridge in your way, with all your
weapons and items completely ineffective. But Miyamoto and company know
this, and allow you to slink back to Kakariko Village to ask the fortune
teller for a bit of a hint of what to do next (for a couple rupees).
This is also the beginning of 'Zelda humour'. While saving the
kingdom/world is a serious business, you’ll meet some goofy characters who
crack jokes, townspeople who stab you in the back (some only
proverbially),
and as you
weave your way through cliffs to the desert, you will come across an
awkward looking man beside a sign which describes him as a thirty five
year old who wishes to be left alone (not to be confused with Chris
Houlihan and his secret room).
These quirks help strengthen the story, which has a few more twists and
turns than before. Zelda is mostly an exposition dispenser, but talking to
all these people, rescuing the maidens, and striking down the
tough-talking enemies, something happens to you, the player.
You care.
Immersion in video games can come easier
when you aren’t just endlessly cutting down monsters, when getting to a
new area feels like an accomplishment all by itself, when the surprises
mean you just don’t want to stop playing because you feel like you’ll be
letting this imaginary world down.
Right out of the gate,
A Link to the Past was lauded as one of the best games released on
the Super Famicom/SNES, and it was also one of the bestselling titles of
the generation (yet always trailing Mario). It’s depth, challenge and
top-notch ‘dressing’ (graphics, music) has always made Zelda a more
rewarding experience than its competition.
An overworld map is just not the same as
deeply interactive overworld, and a title card that just states ‘World
2-3’ doesn’t cut it anymore, whether we’re talking the streets of New York
City or a Dreamland.
The nineties would be the biggest leap
forward in video games, and A Link
to the Past’s release early in that decade helped show the industry’s
true potential.
It's bright, creative, fast-paced, and just the right amount of goddamn
hard.
[And it came out at the right time, too, because it's 1991 in Japan and
1992 in the rest of the world, and the early nineties was the time of the
great Console Wars.
The Super Nintendo and its main competition, the Sega Genesis, were
massively popular, 16-bit fourth-generation consoles that finally proved
video games were not a fad, and that the 1983 crash was an outlier which
wouldn’t be happening again. Also in the running and nipping at the heels
of these two were TurboGrafx-16, Neo Geo, the Atari Jaguar and the
Phillips CD-I (more on that one later).
Sega released their 16-bit console in
1988/1989, meaning it had a hell of a head start. But it wasn’t until they
revealed Mario’s rival, a blue hedgehog named Sonic, that sales took off,
and more so in North America and Europe than in Japan. An ever-growing
library of high quality games is what keeps your company on top, and the
Super Nintendo still outpaced its competitors in that regard, not only
with Zelda, but later titles like
Super Metroid (from what is easily Nintendo’s most underappreciated
franchise), Star Fox and Donkey Kong
Country (as well third party titles like
Square’s Final Fantasy IV, V and
VI and Capcom’s classic brawler,
Street Fighter II: Many Editions).
But identities were settling in. While Sonic
was really just as family friendly as Mario, Sega tried to market
themselves as cooler and more mature than Nintendo. By offering a wide
range of Electronic Arts sports games (Nintendo wanted an exclusivity
agreement and EA said no) like early incarnations of
Madden Football and the gore of
Mortal Kombat when it ported
from the arcade (Nintendo’s eventual release removed the blood), Nintendo
began to get a reputation as much more family friendly.
This angle worked in Nintendo favour when
video games were suddenly put in the crosshairs of both the hand-wringing
media and law-making politicians for being too violent. Better graphics
meant you could really see the blood dripping off that spine after you
violently removed it from your opponent. But the game that got the most
attention at the Senate Hearings in 1993 was
Night Trap, which was a corny
interactive movie game where you press buttons to stop slow moving
monster-goons from attacking a bunch of cheerleaders at a slumber party.
The fact that it was available only on the
Sega Genesis was just fine with Nintendo, especially since this sort of
danger factor didn’t translate to bigger sales for the Genesis, but Sega
would prove to be just Agahnim. As Nintendo’s true and future Ganon would
be a company they are just about to piss off by backing out of a massive
business deal at the last minute.
In the early nineties, electronics titan
Sony was
beginning to make overtures into the video game business, making
preliminary agreements with Nintendo to develop a CD add-on for the Super
Nintendo. The SNES CD-ROM System was nicknamed the ‘Nintendo PlayStation’,
and there were even a few prototypes built before Nintendo decided that
the agreement was too much in Sony’s favour (Sony would have been in
charge of all software licensing on the system), and pulled the plug on
the deal.
Instead Nintendo made an agreement – more beneficial to them – with
another electronic bigwig, Phillips, to work with in the development of
Mario and Zelda games for their CD-I system (once again, more on that
later).
Spurring Sony was seen
as Nintendo's attempt to keep them out of the video games business
(lawsuit zipping back and forth would keep them both in court for much of
the early nineties), although time has shown that this just backfired
completely. So this is
just a helpful reminder that any product, no matter how
essential or superfluous, no matter how many lasting memories it can
create for consumers, there can always be a plethora of poor and petty
business decisions behind its development.]
When it comes to recommending
TLoZ or
Zelda II, there might be a tendency to add some caveats (‘it’s good
for it’s time’, ‘imagine what gaming was like before’). There is no need
to say anything like that for A Link
to the Past. It is near perfect from start to finish, a joyful
snapshot of what the fourth generation could offer.
Ocarina of Time gets plenty
of credit (and rightly so) for providing a pivotal blueprint for what 3D
games could do and what they would look like going forward, but it seems
to be forgotten that A Link to the
Past does the same for 2D games. And some companies didn’t wait that
long, as Sega released the rather obvious Zelda-inspired Crusader of Centy
for the Genesis only a few years later. Lead Castlevania producer Koji
Igarashi sings its praises. ‘2D Zelda Clone’ is practically its own
section on the online games marketplace Steam.
If
2D games are now seen as a retro sort of gaming style, something that
indie developers excel at (since it is possible to make these titles with
a comparatively small crew), it's fair to say that
A Link to the Past is one of the
influential games of all time. But beyond its impact – and so much more
importantly – it is a glorious and shining amount of fucking fun.
[Playable on: Nintendo Switch Online, Wii,
Wii U and 3DS Virtual Console, SNES, Gameboy Advance]
Interlude: Sisyphus Forever!
“when these events were obscured by the
mists of time and became legend…”
-from the
A Link to the Past intro
Light, darkness, the power of three, and the Fisher King
(not the Zora).
A
kingdom in peril, kidnapped princesses, unfathomable evil monsters, magic
powers, enchanted items, sleeping spells, old men giving the young hero
advice and assistance, betrayal of trusted advisors, royalty disguised as
ordinary folk, minions preparing the world for the arrival of their evil
masters, fiendish construction projects, entire towns and villages laid to
waste.
Your Beowulfs, your King Arthurs, your Lord of the Rings,
it's all here.
The Legend of Zelda is overstuffed with the most common
fantasy components.
It’s an easy, universal story grove to pluck
from, and as more and more games were made, its own lore was slowly
cobbled together. The problem with any good story (even a simple one) is
that people want more, even after the happily ever after.
How do you acknowledge the fact that yet
again the evil Ganondorf is plotting to take over or destroy Hyrule, and
that Link and Zelda have to team up in some way to thwart him?
By making it the first time, over and over
again.
There can be centuries or millennia in
between certain games (while others have the gap of perhaps a few months).
The Link you play in TLoZ is not
the same Link as in Ocarina of Time,
nor the same Link as Wind Waker
or Breath of the Wild. So why do
these things happen again? Why does Hyrule slowly beget the same trio of
wisdom (Zelda), power (Ganon), and courage (Link) over and over again?
Is it reincarnation? Destiny? A cruel show
put on for the amusement of three goddesses who created the world? A
simple case of Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence? While it’s tempting to
attribute this to a more philosophical notion of destiny and fate, where
people cannot help but imitate the past (especially one so hazily
understood), it’s really just a bit of blood and a bit of spirit. The good flows through the
veins of the hero, the bad is pumping in the heart of the villain, and
Zelda is the goddess Hylia reborn in a mortal body, a truth uncovered in
the first game in the series’ own timeline,
Skyward Sword (which came out 25 years after the series began).
But they never know this when each new game
starts (well, Ganon has an inkling). It’s a long enough time that previous
events have become mythologized (maybe even legendary?), and many games
start with the acknowledgement that in the past a hero defeated a great
evil that spread across the land, and that now it seems like a similar
sort of villain is returning to power after all these years.
But the recurrence goes far beyond these
three and their fateful roles. Many settings and situations and characters
return, each an unwitting reunion with old friends and foes.
Seven sages are young
maidens to be rescued in ALttP,
are characters-of-various-races-turned-guardians in the Sacred realm in
Ocarina of Time, and are
ultimately towering statues in BOTW’s Gerudo desert.
Swag seller Beedle will always have bait,
bombs, and arrows, there will be bored carnies in towns, citizens will
lose their chickens, bullies will size up our hero, and spirits of nature
will cheer you on.
They are all here to help Link save the
world yet again from an evil that always seems to make its way back even
if it takes many, many generations.
For Camus and his take on the Sisyphean
myth, our hero and his situation encapsulates humanity perfectly. Forever
rolling that boulder up a hill. And he does so stoically. Saying failure
is not an option is incorrect, since you will see that game over screen
many a time, but not trying is certainly not an option. Link is always
ready. Link cannot fathom any other destiny.
If these games scratch and tickle the
childish-joy of exploring a fantasy world, it also embraces the child’s
question of what happens after ‘happily ever after’. There’s another
adventure, obviously. The idea of the young hero growing old in the land
he saved from ruin is reassuring, but maybe a bit dull (or perhaps there
could be a Stardew Valley or
Sim-inspired Zelda game where Links just farms and does mundane,
regularly scheduled daily tasks). What is Sisyphus without his rock?
Sometimes it is known that there is a bloodline of heroic descendants,
sometimes it seems like a random young man is chosen by the goddess who
possesses all the correct noble attributes. It’s tragic that several
incarnations of Links have to risk life and limb on a fairly regular
basis, but that’s their purpose. Even if you’ll never fully eradicate
evil, Ganon’s destined to fail each time as well. No side can truly win
because if that happens…Nintendo’s investors truly lose.
Of course with ruined medieval kingdoms,
magic swords, and kidnapped women, the Arthurian Legend obviously runs
strong through the Zelda series (minus all that adultery). In this case,
Link is clearly Sir Galahad, the chaste, humble, slightly naïve youth
destined to kick major ass and find the holy grail.
This epic macguffin of mythic history held
incredible powers such as eternal life, permanent happiness and items in
infinite abundance, and correspondingly, the triforce in the Zelda series
has the power to grant wishes of the one that possesses it. Despite the
essence of the triforce not being able to tell the difference between a
good wish and a bad one, the few times it talks to Link, it seems to
really prefer his ‘save the world’ take over Ganon’s ‘kill it with fire’
approach. In the few games that do not feature the triforice, there is
always another power that must be harnessed or wrested away from evil. The
point is that there will never be a final story because no one wants the
good (and therefore bad) times to end. Sorry Link and Zelda, you have to
keep going on and on for our amusement.
The series wisely bailed on numbered games
after the second one – no one calls the third game ‘Zelda 3’ – and by
doing so it was able to escape any sort of doubt or fatigue that might
come with twenty entries in the series (the only game series that seems to
have no qualms about counting into the teens is Final Fantasy).
With different
names under the ‘Legend of Zelda’ banner, each game could be fresh and
original in terms of design and gameplay while within a very recognizable
story frame. Stop us if you’ve heard this one before, but in
Minish Cap, Zelda is turned to
stone by an evil wizard (and it’s not Ganondorf! It’s Vaati!) and you have
to defeat them to break the curse…by collecting elements to temper and
strengthen your sword. Sounds so good, they turn her to stone again in
Phantom Hourglass.
The more you play, the more familiar the
tropes become. They are like warm blankets when you meet up with a goron,
or come across a name that goes back thousands of (fake) years. The game
intros make it sound like you’ve already fallen into a world that
acknowledges past games as fairy tales. How evil was vanquished beforehand
was so broad – and how you defeat evil right now so similar – that with the possible exception of the nightmarish
weirdness of Majora’s Mask and
gothic overtures of Twilight
Princess, Zelda stories could easily be condensed into bedtime stories
for children. A Zelda film would be so ridiculously clichéd, that you
might have to break the fourth the wall and have a self-aware character in
the world to make it palatable. The one attempt to take the series out of
the console and onto TV screens didn’t go well (more on that later).
But playing it? Handing the controls over to you?
You
forgive plenty of plot twists you see coming a mile away and are excited
by familiar 'just in the nick of time' rescues, because you know that’s
exactly how these stories have always been put together, and the fact that
you are the one fighting and running for you life, not just reading or
watching the story gives it much more emotional depth and feeling of agony
(when you fail) and joy (when you succeed).
Video games’ ‘try, try again’ approach is
rooted into its very being. Giving people a chance to live forever, our at
least until you have to eat dinner or get back to work.
You're either an over
the top hero in a sci-fi/fantasy world/mushroom trip, or you're a gritty
anti-hero in a much more realistic world.
It says a lot about
ourselves, what we enjoy (not actually) doing in our imaginary worlds. And
this is nothing new, since almost all mythic heroes (Hercules, Beowulf,
Arthur and his knights) were celebrated for slaying scores of foes,
feeling the sting of failure, and ultimately triumphing.
Obviously you are
more of a hero if your target is monsters rather than innocent bystanders
stuck under the wheel of your car, but hey, that's freedom in the virtual
world.
Or is it? Link, Mario, Cloud Strife and Solid Snake only have so many
options available to them. There are only so many secret exits out of a
level, a limited amount of towns to visit in any order, and even eighty
different weapon-armour combinations is nowhere close to an infinite
amount.
‘Endless ways to play’ is just a marketing term, but if you can make
playing the game for second, third or ninth time as a fun as the first
go-around, there’s no better example of top quality game design.
After the first Zelda game (and until
Breath of the Wild), Link’s
adventures became exceedingly linear, where you could not access a new
area or beat a difficult enemy until you find a key item. Story
advancement was directly dependent on this successful gameplay. In
academic terms, narratology (the study of narrative structure) must have
coffee with ludology (the study of gaming). For early arcade games where
playing round after round to fend off space invaders or eat pellets,
simplicity in both story and gameplay was key (story: ‘fend off space
invaders’, gameplay: ‘move left and right with joystick and fire with the
button’). There wasn’t much difference in how to play. You either had the
reflexes and muscle memory to move the joystick and buttons faster and
faster as the levels got harder, or you didn’t.
Early RPG games certainly gave the player options (even if it was simply
‘use sword’ or ‘use spell’ to defeat an enemy), but the Zelda series
evolved alongside the gaming technology that allowed for more and more
opportunities to play the game as you saw fit, even if it was keeping you
on a slowly uncoiling chain.
Is player A using slightly different mechanics to advance the story than
player B mean it’s a different story? The story might be told only one
way, but their experiences are different.
There is the game’s story (narratology), and then there is the player’s
story (ludology).
It is the slightly paradoxical notion of ‘endlessly unique repetition’,
which can require a study of the ludic interface to track patterns and
deviations from the mean.
These discussions can get pretty analytic and semantic-laden, so just to
keep it simple: remember that between the player on the couch and the
interact-able events on-screen there is a constant connection.
Also known as a link.
Chapter Five: You Can Take It With You - The Legend of Zelda on the
Gameboy Handhelds
There are currently twenty canonical Zelda titles, and almost half of them
were released to be enjoyed not on your television, but on tiny little
screens in funny shaped boxes you hold in your hands (yes, the
home/portable Switch console has now blurred the lines between these two).
For the nineties and early 2000s, it was the Gameboy, and after that (and
until 2020) it was the DS line.
We are grouping the nine titles into two separate chapters, each one for
the respective handheld console. Why?
Well, it's a great way to not have to figure out
to say something wholly unique about so many games that are intentionally
similar to each other in many ways. Compared to the home console games,
the handhelds really are cut from a much more similar cloth, with the
chief inspirational piece being A Link to the Past. All portable titles have heavily borrowed from
it, starting in 1993 with Link’s
Awakening, all the way up to 2015’s
TriForce Heroes.
Surprisingly, Nintendo was in the handheld
gaming market even before the release of the Gameboy and the Famicom/NES.
In 1980, the Game and Watch device debuted, and it looked like a bit like
a Famicom/NES controller with an LCD screen in the middle. Its very
limited animations offered a simplistic challenge of one game per console
(the first one was called…Ball, and yeah, it involved juggling endlessly).
It was designed by Gunpei Yokoi, who went on to develop its follow up,
1989’s Gameboy (which looks like an Famicom/NES controller with an LCD
screen above it).
Now you (or your kid) don’t have to use the
television to ‘play nintendo’. Now they can play it absolutely anywhere,
as long as they are knee deep in double-A batteries. Its 8-bit processor
was the same power as the Famicom/NES, but the dot-matrix display limited
graphic fidelity and a lack of colour (you got four shades of ‘gray’, from
light to olive green) were considered drawbacks. Despite this, the console
was a monster. It sold 118 million units over its fourteen year life span
(add another 80 million if you include its spiritual successor, the
Gameboy Advance). A lot of credit went to
Tetris, which it was initially
bundled with and went on to become the best selling game of all time
(counting all its many iterations), and to
Pokemon Red and Blue,
which came out late in the console’s development cycle (1996 in Japan) and
went on to take over the earth.
In between those
benchmarks was a Zelda game, 1993’s
Link’s Awakening.
But was it?
No Princess Zelda, no triforce, no Ganon, no
Hyrule.
Instead of a kingdom in peril, Link is caught up in a terrible storm at
sea. He is a shipwrecked on a mysterious tropical island named Koholint,
and nursed back to health by a kind young woman named Marin (and her
father Tarin). She has a lovely singing voice and wonders what sort of
life there is beyond the island.
This setting was smaller than Hyrule, but it was still overflowing with
creative gameplay, exciting quests, and nine dungeons (with Eagle Tower
and Turtle Rock being all-time classics). Parts of the island were lush
and tropical. You could play a game that features plenty of beach while
actually relaxing on beach (with an umbrella, since there’s not much
backlight on the Gameboy).
But while Link explores the island to find a
way off it and does the typical Link thing of massacring plenty of
monsters above and below ground, Koholint itself is not in any danger.
People are asking our hero to help them find their ‘dog’, bring snacks to
their husband, or meet them in the animal village, but none of them are
asking to be saved from any ultimate evil.
At
one point a talking goat gives you a letter to give to a man, and when he
excitedly opens it in front of you...it's a picture of Princess Peach.
From
the Mario series.
Uh...
Yeah, it's a fourth-wall breaker that carries a lot more weight than
stomping on goombas and avoiding piranha plants (which you can do in this
game).
And you can win a Yoshi doll that actually plays a small but essential
role in completing a trading sequence. Even the text of the game cracks
jokes, asking if you're going to have a 'big chance' with Marin.
[note: while Link has ranged from the age of nine to approximately
seventeen, and the female characters are quite interested in him (it gets
humourously out of hand in Breath of
the Wild) it's all strictly business when it comes to Zelda except for
the odd peck on the cheek for saving the world at the true end of Oracles
games]
Instead, Link plays the role of detective
(one of the inspirations for this game was the bizarro, dream-heavy
nineties drama, Twin Peaks) and
finds the truth: there is no such thing as Koholint Island, it’s all the
dream of a mystical creature, and to escape it you have to
wake it (the Windfish) up by breaking into a giant
egg atop the tallest mountain (there are no errors in that very trippy
sentence).
If
the game didn't do such a good job at creating such a loveable island full
of fun and personable characters, you wouldn't feel so bad when you
effectively 'wipe them from existence'.
And
it's not a last minute thing where you find this out. As you progress
through the game there are more ominous warnings in dungeons and from
enemies that if you succeed everyone and everything is going to disappear.
So
much for saving everyone.
You
start to have a bit of an existential crisis in the last third of the
game, wondering if ‘succeeding’ will destroy everything on the island,
yourself included. Do you take the risk? You aren’t really given a choice
(other than no longer playing the game), but the simple ending is
certainly satisfying, both from narrative and gameplay standpoints.
Link’s Awakening is the first
game with more depth for story and characters, and is also the first with
Miyamoto in a diminished role in its production. The game started as an
experiment with a Gameboy development kit between low(er) level employees.
What’s admirable is the way they try to shoehorn so many features from
SNES' A Link to the Past into a
game on a much less powerful system (no colour, an itty-bitty screen
compared to your television).
All this was meant to escape the (admittedly
successful) bonds to the formula that
A Link to the Past perfected. While releasing a sequel on the same
system might be daunting, the handheld Zelda games were a way for the
developers to turn away from their own established norms of what
constitutes a Zelda game. Throw in a lengthy trading sequence, try a tool
that lets you jump, add fishing as a mini-game, and have a moment where
you just sit on the beach with Marin and…talk.
Link’s Awakening was the first
game in the series that had no problem with going between cute moments and
existential terror, and it wouldn’t be the last.
Coming just two years after
ALttP, it was a sequel that
didn’t have any expectations because it was different world and a
different console.
It was as if there was less at stake when
Hyrule or a television wasn’t involved.
Another reason why 2D handheld
TLoZ titles doesn’t get the same
level of attention is that after
Link’s Awakening, Nintendo themselves stopped making them.
Rather than be made in-house in the
department known as Nintendo Entertainment Analysis and Development (EAD)
which was managed by Miyamoto, subsequent Gameboy Zelda games were
outsourced to the game-developer in the next town over, Flagship
(headquarters in Osaka, a thirty minute train ride from Nintendo’s
hometown of Kyoto).
In the late nineties, big plans were made
for the Link’s Awakening
follow-up (including possibly remaking the first Zelda game), and then
scaled back. It was going to be a trilogy of games (conveniently revolving
around manipulating the past, present and future), but ended up just being
two, Oracles of Ages and
Oracle of Seasons, coming out in early 2001 on the same day.
Both of them once again are very
ALttP in their gameplay and
Link’s Awakening in their
graphics, but they are two parts of a slightly greater whole.
Ages leans heavier towards solving puzzles while
Seasons focus on combat. Only
when you complete both games is the true ending mission finally revealed
(by entering a password when starting the second which you learned upon
finishing the first) and available to play.
Following the strangeness of
Link’s Awakening means you’re
not in Hyrule and are regularly travelling back in time hundreds of years
to stop the building a massive tower in
Ages, and hundreds of days to
take advantages of different seasonal environments in
Seasons. While the plots still
involve saving a magical maiden from a one dimensional wizard or knight,
there is still bales of weirdness. You almost marry a tree (which is a
step down from Ocarina when you
almost marry a Zora princess), get a ‘stink bag’ from a man (or at least a
hand) that lives in a toilet, and trade to someone who has a stuffed up
nose and needs to get their smell back (really), and go on a date with a
creature that’s just a pair of eyes and a robe because they can get you
past a locked door.
Some enemies are straight out of the
original Zelda on the Famicom/NES. The first boss in Ages is graphical
blowup of the first boss in that game. Another connection to the first few
games of the series: Once again, you’ll be asking where the hell you’re
supposed to go next. They tripled down on trading sequences in
Ages and Seasons, and they
have that old school ‘I-have-no-idea-who-to-talk-to-so-I-can-advance’ set
up where one person you may have met days ago and had a one-dialogue-box
conversation is the exact person you have to give this item to. Knowing that the medicine jabu-jabu needs is the
magic potion? Talk to the skeleton pirate in a kitchen to know the order
of opening drawers to figure out the combination of a gate on the flip
side of the map?
Oof.
But the dungeons are still great, like
Moonlit Grotto and Skull Dungeon from
Oracles of Ages, and the Sword
and Shield Maze from Oracle of Seasons. That last one is definitely a highlight not only
of 2D Zelda games, but the entire series.
One of the unique features of these two
games is that their connection goes beyond having very similar world,
mechanics, and items. With some Nintendo-designed cables, you can connect
your Gameboy Colour to other ones, and trade items you’ve found with
friends. The fact that you needed to complete both games to get the true
ending was Zelda’s spin on how gamers wouldn’t be satisfied with
Pokemon Blue or Pokemon Red,
and demanded both.
It worked pretty well for the
Oracle games, as each title sold
nearly four million copies.
It was released on the Gameboy Color, which had twice the processing power
as its predecessor, in addition to the capability of displaying 56
colours. More importantly, it offered something that would make Nintendo
handheld consoles very appealing: backwards compatibility. You could play
regular old Gameboy games on Gameboy Color, and you could play all of
those games on the Gameboy Advance.
This third iteration’s
first Zelda game was… a port of A
Link to the Past! But it came with an unusual bonus: The first
multiplayer Zelda game,
Four Swords.
As the number suggests you can play with up to four players by connecting
the consoles with cables. It offers a unique multiplayer experience (that
we will look into in greater detail later), but can be completed in three
or four hours. That’s about 20% to 25% of the length of an average Zelda
game at this time. Its gameplay and graphics is sensibly similar to
ALttP, and the main novelty is enjoying running around with three
other Links on the same screen (and opens up some interesting
puzzle-solving opportunities).
Gameboy Advance’s
fully original Zelda game was another Flagship production (with Nintendo
overseeing). The Minish Cap is
the twelfth Zelda title, and it looked great. That’s because the Advance
was practically as powerful as the Nintendo 64, which ran
Ocarina of Time.
Despite its step up in tech, the gimmick was
that Link himself would take a massive step down, becoming teeny-tiny to
interact with the mysterious race named the Minish (mini-sh…well played),
who can help Link finds the proper magical elements to forge a powerful
enough sword to kick ass (no shit!). Your companion is a talking hat with
little patience named Ezlo, another example of trying to give Link a guide
that is less annoying and has a more interesting personality than
Ocarina of Time’s Navi.
Once again, no Ganon. This time it's the
wizard Vaati, who has turned Zelda to stone and bewitched the king, all in
an attempt to find the Light Force (a lot of which ends up being inside
Zelda herself, so time’s a tickin’).
Different Mario baddies (Bob-ombs and
Spinies) are here, and while there are the usual bombs, boomerangs, and
mirror shields, Minish Cap adds
the gust jar and mole mitts (both of which will return in Skyward Sword).
The game’s epic fifth dungeon – Palace of Winds (not to be confused with
the imposing 18th century building in Jaipur, India) – deserves
mention for having some amazing heart stopping leaps of faith throughout.
Its boss – the pair of flying Gyorgs – is a fine thematic capper.
But it bears acknowledging that by this game
– the seventh 2D title by 2004 – many of the dungeons were getting
slightly repetitive. Even with better tech under the Gameboy’s hood, there
are only so many ways to design challenges in a 2D space. So credit goes
to Minish Cap to offer at least
one standout dungeon, but it does start to beg the question:
Are portable games
lesser than console games?
First off, they’re cheaper than console titles, and while that’s great for
the wallet, it certainly gives an initial impression that they won’t
provide the same experience.
There are much more technical limitations based simply on hardware space.
While graphics have improved greatly over the decades on handheld
consoles, these games are made with the knowledge that the screen size is
about the same as a coffee lid. Their design means buttons cannot be as
plentiful or as ergonomically comfortable as on home console controllers,
so there is a trade off between what you can do during gameplay without
having to go into a menu to change the items immediately at your disposal.
All the games here are 2D top-down games
that most resemble A Link to the
Past, the last 2D top-down game on a home console. This is another
reason why this title casts such a long shadow not only over the Zelda
series as a whole, but gaming as a whole.
While eight years had passed between
Link’s Awakening and the Oracle
games, their success began a trend where in between the waits for home
console games, Nintendo would release smaller, 2D adventures for Link on
every new handheld with much more frequency.
The handheld Zelda games were typically big
name, bestseller titles for their respective consoles, so the series was
able to manage expectations by shrinking them, physically and
thematically.
[For starters, it’s 1993. We are still in the throes of the console wars
between Nintendo and Sega, but the SNES would stay ahead of their
competition, thanks in part to the late-console releases like
Donkey Kong Country and
Chrono Trigger (the first a
side-scroller of Mario-like quality, and the latter one of the finest
old-school RPGs of all time).
As mentioned above, 1989’s Gameboy was not the first handheld gaming
device, it was just so wildly successful that many other familiar industry
faces tried to do the same, and many didn’t waste much time. There was the
Atari Lynx, the TurboExpress (for the TurboGrafx-16, in case the name
didn’t click for you) and the NeoGeo Pocket.
Of course because of the times, Nintendo’s true competition was obviously
Sega, and once again, while the Game Gear had better tech specs than the
Gameboy, the latter reached stratospheric sales heights, thanks to
Tetris in the initial years and
Pokemon on the back end.
In fact, what constantly set Nintendo apart was that they would make a
point of developing wholly different games for their handheld consoles.
Other companies mostly just ported their home console games over, so you
could now play them on the go. Nintendo made Gameboy a unique experience
because if you wanted to play these particular games, there was no other
way to do it. You might choose to own a Genesis
or a Game Gear, but you would
want to own an SNES and a
Gameboy to play every Mario and Zelda title.
The Gameboy Color and the Gameboy Advances were late
nineties and early 2000s upgrades, and they didn’t have much competition,
since Sega was quickly fading and Sony hadn’t yet jumped into the handheld
console market.
But back in 1993, something important happens on another type of
electronic device, one that definitely couldn’t fit in your pocket (yet).
Doom comes out on the personal computer.
Yes, computers. They have video games on them beyond solitaire and
minesweeper, apparently. This should not so be surprising, since gaming
consoles are nothing more than less-powerful computers that do one thing.
So it makes sense that with contemporary PCs being much more powerful than
the SNES and Genesis, the games that can be developed on them should at
least be able to compete in terms of bang for your buck. And to try
Doom required no bucks at all,
with the first episode of nine levels being available for free (aka,
shareware). It was a landmark decision by id software that changed how
games on PC were distributed and marketed.
A bloody stomp through Mars and hell with pistols, chainsaws, nailguns,
and the Big Fucking Gun 9000, Doom
was absolutely not the first PC game, but it was the first that blew
everyone’s minds, including people who usually separated consoles for fun
and computers for work. Hell, Doom
creators promoted their game as the ultimate time waster for the
ever-expanding cubicle class. While describing a Mario game sounds like a
psychedelic experience, Doom sounds and plays like an action movie wet
dream. The first person perspective meant ‘you’ were going on this wild,
demon-exploding adventure, and taking a page from Zelda playbook, you
aren’t given a name.
But it’s not just about you. It also had
multiplayer, so instead of demons in a level, it can be your friends, all
of whom have to be similarly mowed down ruthlessly so you can be winner of
the first of many, many, many deathmatches.
Also like Zelda, the term ‘Doom-clone’ was
applied only to the plethora of similar games that initially came in its
wake, but every first person shooter that came later – from
Call of Duty to Bioshock –
owes this title dinner and drinks.
And while Nintendo would never appear on a PC unless it was via an illegal
rom on an emulator program, PC video game companies still wanted in on
that sweet console money, and that why you ultimately ended with id
software's Doom 64 on the
Nintendo 64 console.
Speaking that very console, Nintendo was hard at work at perfecting it
when the company it burned over five years ago would release there own bit
of revenge that would change the landscape of video games forever: The
Sony PlayStation.]
Perception and context aren’t everything, but they can both be a hell of a
thing. A video game console was mostly considered a toy that sat below
your television, so the same sort of thing you could hold in your hand was
initially considered an inferior version of that.
But playing these handheld games today (perhaps with a touch of reduced
expectation because of their format) means it is easy to appreciate the
idea that video games were no longer chained to the television or arcade
cabinet. For many whose first console was a portable one made by Nintendo
is clear that many of these titles can have huge nostalgic value, but
their value does not solely rest on that.
Extended riffs on A Link to the Past
to the point where are they rapidly diminished returns? It’s not exactly
fair, especially when one considers how much that game brought to the
table, and how expanding on its possibilities would never be a bad idea.
The departures they did take, either through new stories or new mechanics,
mean they should never be seen as afterthoughts, and if you were thirsty
for more Zelda magic after playing through plenty of home console titles,
these are all manna from Kyoto (and Osaka).
Now, actually being able to play these games today is another matter
entirely. Getting your hands
on any of the Gameboy family members means buying secondhand retro (or uh,
something mentioned above), and this is now equally true for the portable
console series that followed it, the Nintendo DS, which is (mostly)
backwards compatible. Acknowledging the difficulty of playing these games
for contemporary audiences, Nintendo remade
Link’s Awakening in 2019 (more
on remakes in general later on) for the Switch, which is the company’s
hybrid home-handheld console.
Until the other portable titles are brought onto it, tracking down these
rewarding games is part of the adventure.
[Playable On:
Link’s Awakening: Gameboy (all lines), Nintendo 3DS, Nintendo Switch
(2019 re-make)
Oracles of Seasons/Ages:
Gameboy Color, Gameboy Advance, Nintendo 3DS
The Minish Cap: Gameboy Advance, Nintendo 3DS, Wii/Wii U Virtual
Console]
Interlude: The Timeline
[We’ve already said ‘SPOILERS’, but in this segment it will be
particularly heavy on the ‘end of game’ story segment of
Ocarina of Time and how it
relates to the overall chronology]
They don't use 'Legend' in the title of this series loosely. Many games
(and books and movies, for that matter) begin the story acknowledging that
something happened in the usually distant past that has ultimately created
the problem of right now. In the eighties and nineties, it might just be
some text on the screen, and nowadays you can get a full (animated)
movie-quality cut-scene. For the Zelda series, these introductions might
be referring to a different game, or events that happened in between
games. That it is not exactly clear is exactly the point.
Sometimes thousands of years have passed between titles, and previous
events have been remembered through myths and songs. The exact history is
uncertain, which is why tales of goddesses and wishes and magic swords
fill in the places where there might have been cold hard facts. When
untold amounts of devastation has left a civilization in ruins, trying to
cobble together what happened many years later is going to have plenty of
unanswered questions.
In some games, the point is to discover what happened all those years ago.
In Wind Waker, you discover the
mystery beneath the sea. In Breath
of the Wild, Link searches for his own memories from a century ago.
Sometimes you discover the antagonist’s motivations as you criss-cross
Hyrule, talking to various characters and finding artifacts and items. And
occasionally it will be the typical wise old man or woman who will
conveniently explain to you this semi-cursed land’s problematic past, why
it matters in the present, and what you can do to save the future.
Outside the land of Hyrule, there is the multibillion dollar video games
industry, and the answer to every question of why is this happening again
and again, is ‘to make more money…and have a bit of fun’ (depending on
your level of cynicism, you can flip those two explanations around in
order of importance).
While having the second game in the series
that have a ‘2’ in the title suggests that there is sequence, the third
game (A Link to the Past) was
announced in its promotional push as being a prequel, which meant the
release order was not the storyline order. So that had fans starting to
cobble together their own theories of which game came when, which got
daunting in the early 2000s, as nine games alone were released between
2000 and 2010. For the longest time Nintendo acknowledged there was an
official timeline, but kept quiet about it until the series’ 25th
anniversary.
In 2011 the impressive
Hyrule Historia was published (the English translation came out two
years later). While largely a Zelda art book that focused on the newest
entry into the series (that year’s
Skyward Sword), it also includes the first official timeline of events
(read: games), and it is a true dozy. Especially considering the
Zelda Encyclopedia came out six
years later and re-jiggered it a touch, to create the current timeline.
1986’s The Legend of Zelda was
the first game released, but games released after it included many
adventures that took place long before and after the events of that title.
Skyward Sword was released in 2011 and it is the sixteenth entry in the
series, but in the Zelda timeline it is the first one, and explains the
birth of Hyrule (although it is clear right from the start that there were
people upon the land prior to its named inception).
While it would now be very helpful to write out the games in order of the
timeline right now, well, to make it even more complicated, it's not one
straight shot, either, so we break down some branches as well. For
clarity, the years relate to the Japan release date.
ONE - Skyward Sword (2011, Wii)
After the events of this game, the kingdom of Hyrule was created, as well
as the Temple of Time, the one access point to the Sacred Realm, where the
Triforce was kept. Peace didn’t last long, and darkness covered the land,
with the people being bailed out by the tiny race of creatures called the
Picori.
When
an evil wizard (get used to that) named Vaati turns Zelda to stone, it’s
up to Link to find the Picori once again to strengthen his sword to defeat
them, which is:
TWO - Minish
Cap (2004, Game Boy Advance)
After hundreds of years, Vaati came back, which is:
THREE - Four Swords (2002, Gameboy Advance)
After these three games, everything gets extra bizarre, and
(FOUR) Ocarina of Time (1998,
Nintendo 64) is the flashpoint. The timeline splits into three
separate paths because of three possible developments at the end of the
game. However, it should be noted that if you play
Ocarina of Time to completion,
there is only one ending. You defeat Ganondorf as an adult (so the seven
sages can seal him away), Zelda sends you back in time so you become a
child again, and then you run out of the Temple of Time and up to the
castle to visit Zelda when she is also a child. There is no moment where
you can chose to do one action or another that will give you a different
ending. No, these three different developments are within the larger Zelda
narrative, having nothing to do with the actions of you the player in this
one game. Each of these possibilities have several further events (games)
occurring in that timeline, completely separate from the others.
The first possible timeline is the most non-game
like…because Link loses. Ocarina of
Time acknowledges Link's failure with
the ’Hero is
Defeated’ Timeline, and like it sounds, Link dies (!), but he has
wounded Ganondorf enough that the seven sages are able to seal him away.
Eons later, he is revived by evil wizard Agahnim in:
FIVE (DEFEAT) –
A Link to the Past (1991, Super Famicom/SNES)
But Link is able to rescue the seven maidens who are descendents of the
seven sages, who seal Ganon once again.
After all this work, Link goes sailing and getting caught in a storm,
washing up on Koholint Island for:
SIX (DEFEAT) –
Link’s Awakening (1993, Gameboy)
Which even by the standards of Zelda title is a wholly contained
adventure, in the sense that it is all big dream, either of Link, or the
giant windfish, and the island and everything on it disappears when they
wake up.
When Link gets back to land, things all start to go wrong, which is:
SEVEN/EIGHT (DEFEAT) – Oracle of Ages/Oracles of
Seasons (2001, Game Boy Colour)
Hundreds of years later:
NINE (DEFEAT) – A Link Between Worlds (2013, Nintendo
3DS)
Link saves Lorule (ha!) in this title, and it’s the same iteration, who, a
few later, takes part in:
TEN (DEFEAT) – Tri Force Heroes (2015, Nintendo 3DS)
After this adventure, many hundreds of years pass, and Hyrule falls into
near ruin, shrinking in size and becoming more vulnerable to evil, which
leads to:
ELEVEN (DEFEAT) – The Legend of Zelda (1986,
Famicom/NES)
Yes, the first game that was made is buried down here at the tail end of
the most depressing timeline. A
few years after Link defeated Ganon in that game, some followers who don’t
know when to quit tried to fight Link again, while was trying to rescue
Zelda from a sleeping spell, which is:
TWELVE (DEFEAT) – Zelda II: The Adventure of Link
(1987, Famicom/NES)
And that’s it for the ‘Hero is Defeated’
Timeline.
In the other two timelines, Link defeats
Ganondorf at the end of Ocarina of
Time (huzzah) and survives (double huzzah). In the first we’ll look
at, he returns to the past as a child and he tells the child princess
Zelda all that transpired and she tells her father (the King) in time to
capture Ganondorf before he is able to depose the monarchy and take over.
Because Link returns to being a child, this
is called ‘The Child Timeline’, and the first new adventure occurs
not long after, with the same Link as in
Ocarina of Time, which is:
FIVE (CHILD) – Majora’s Mask
(2000, Nintendo 64)
But there is a gap of centuries until the
events of:
SIX (CHILD) – Twilight Princess (2006, Gamecube/Wii)
In this title, the ‘Hero of Time’ is
actually referred to, as is the failed attempt to kill Ganondorf at the
end of Ocarina of Time, which is
why he is banished instead to the Twilight Realm (not the same as the
Sacred Realm, dummy), which is where that game begins.
But Link kicks his ass so bad it takes
hundreds of years for Ganondorf to reincarnate in:
SEVEN (CHILD) – Four Swords Adventures (2004, Gamecube)
Which ends the child timeline.
Finally, ‘The Adult Timeline’ exists
if Link defeats Ganondorf in Ocarina
but Zelda does not send him back in time and so he remains an adult.
What happens to adult Link? That’s never explored or explained, but
centuries or thousands of years later, Ganondorf returns and there is no
hero to fight him. Consequently, the goddesses flood Hyrule to cleanse it
of this evil, and centuries after that, we get these three games:
FIVE (ADULT) – Wind Waker (2002, Gamecube)
SIX (ADULT) – Phantom Hourglass (2007, Nintendo 3DS)
SEVEN (ADULT) – Spirit Tracks (2009, Nintendo 3DS)
There is something
slightly ironic that this is called the adult timeline, as all three games
here focus on a very youthful Link, and are essentially part of a cartoony
cell-shaded trilogy where all the titles are graphically and stylistically
consistent. While Phantom Hourglass
takes place weeks or months after
Wind Waker, Spirit Tracks
takes places 100 years after Phantom
Hourglass.
With
Breath of the Wild releasing in 2017, Nintendo once again announced
its placement, and it somehow takes place after all three timelines,
suggesting that in some way that no matter what happened during the end of
Ocarina of Time, all destinies lead to this game. And in some
symbolic ways this feels true. The Hyrule of
Breath of the Wild is full of place names that come from characters
and locations from previous games. There is a litany of ruins (and easter
eggs) throughout like The Temple of Time, Lon Lon Ranch (from
Ocarina), the Arbiter’s Grounds (from
Twilight Princess), and even Lurelin Village has the design of
Outset Island from Wind Waker.
All this is meant to suggest that such a long time has passed before this
incarnation of Hyrule that ‘everything’ happened, that all the legends are
true.
So now there’s:
ONE* (POST) – Age of the Calamity* (2020, Switch)
While this takes place a century before
BOTW’s setting, that’s still far enough away from previous titles that
it’s grouped together in the POST timeline. Although there are definitely
asterisks for this one, as it takes place in an alternative timeline
(yes…sigh… another) where through some time travel (yes, another) and
plenty of hacking and slashing by the myriad of characters you play as,
the destruction of Hyrule that is alluded to in the next game is avoided. TWO (POST) – Breath of the Wild (2017, Wii U/Switch)
It's
a built in re-boot that Zelda fans are so comfortable with that it doesn't
even feel like a re-boot.
THREE (POST) – Breath of the Wild Sequel (2021 (projected [June 2021
note: ugh, make it 2022]), Switch)
At the moment of this writing, all that’s
known for sure is that in the teaser trailer revealed at E3 2019, the same
Link and Zelda (WITH SHORT HAIR) from
Breath of the Wild are exploring
some spooky stuff underneath Hyrule castle, and it all goes wrong.
It would make sense if there were some
questions after this lengthy explanation.
Why is it set up this way?
No idea.
Could it have been a singular timeline,
without any splits?
Maybe.
If when Link returns to the past as a child
at the end of OoT to tell Zelda
all about what will happen, and they make changes to avoid this future,
does this mean that Link’s journey in that game as an adult never
happened?
Depends on your views of time travel.
How important is all this before you play your first, second, or tenth
Legend of Zelda game?
Not
very.
Chapter Six: 'The
Ocarina of Time' or 'Skip the Fishing Game'
Hey,
listen.
You
don't make the greatest game of all time by accident. You put in the work.
Five years, actually.
Ocarina of Time was the first 3D Zelda game and it took its damn
sweet time. A Link to the Past
came out in 1991, and 1993's Link
Awakening on the Gameboy was a pocket-sized adventure that recycled
some of the previous title’s basic gameplay and added in plenty of
quirkiness.
So
for sticklers who put home console experiences above what you can play
absolutely anywhere (on limited hardware), it was a seven years before
Link, Zelda, and those awful, awful octoroks graced a television screen
again.
It would be released throughout the world in
between the 21st of November and the 18th of
December, 1998, (how about that. Releases used to differ by years between
regions, and now it’s within a month). Almost two and half years after the
console – Nintendo 64 – was originally released in Japan.
Like the first game in the series,
Ocarina was also made in tandem
with a Mario game. It and Super
Mario 64 were worked on with the same game engine concurrently, with
Miyamoto balancing his time between the two. But
Super Mario 64 was a launch
title in mid-1996, and with all the time they worked on
Ocarina afterwards, so much was
changed in it that by the end of its development, Miyamoto said the game
engine was radically different and much more powerful.
Both games are easily among the most
important and influential titles of all time.
The line in the sand for then and now when it comes
to video games are the twin suns that are
Super Mario 64 and
Ocarina of Time. Games before
them played liked 'that', and games after played like 'this'. Not to focus
too much praise on only one man since we’ve already stressed the important
of a development team, but these
two titles are Miyamoto's masterpieces. While there are plenty of games
before these two that showed elements of 3D gameplay (like
Starfox (which is another Miyamoto title) and
Crash Bandicoot), thanks to the possibility of more complex
interactivity between in-game physical systems (along with state of the
art graphics and in-depth story in the case of Zelda), no two games have
best encapsulated this step up than
Super Mario 64 and Ocarina of
Time. And it was generally accepted at the time of both releases –
even two years apart – that these were monumental achievements in the
video game industry and its impact on the wider culture.
But in retrospect the additional time
working on Ocarina (and delaying
it a full year, since it was at one point expected to drop for holiday
1997) meant that it has aged much better than
Mario 64. Both games offer a
third person perspective of their protagonist, but
Ocarina’s camera angles are more
intuitive, smoother and self-correcting. This game was not the first to
offer it, but the first to do it so well you forget you it was happening
and it soon became ‘what-to-expect’ in a 3D video game experience.
More so than any other
jump - and for obvious reasons - learning how to play
Ocarina of Time and using the
mechanics like they were second nature took some getting used to (and why
Ocarina's tutorial seems to never end, considering the fairy Navi (-gator,
most likely) never stops giving you advice you don’t really need).
But once you did get comfortable with the controls, you were
good...right up to today.
The dedicated target
button is so integral to almost every single game which has any sort of
combat in it, that it is nicknamed Z-targeting even though the N64
controller was the only one with a button labelled 'Z'
(thanks largely in part
to Yoshiaki Koizumi).
And all these ways of interacting with a
plethora of items and spaces in a 3D environment wouldn’t matter a single
iota if everything else about the game stunk.
But it doesn’t.
Hyrule feels alive, and so do the people that populate it.
Starting with Link.
Usually there would be a massive disconnect between how a
character might look in cover art or the instruction manual and how they
would look in the game, but with better graphics that gap was shrinking.
Our hero was no longer a flat sprite who went up and down, left or right.
Longtime Zelda artist Yusuke Nakano made a point of having
child Link seem cute and adult Link seem cool this time around.
The physical appearances of non-playable
characters he meets can be tall, short, fat, thin, old, young. Just take
the daughter-father duo of Malon and Talon (similar to
Link’s Awakening’s Marin and Tarin, and intentionally so). Their
personalities radiate forth, as do so many other people you meet on your
adventure (from the egotistical marathon runner to the eerily grinning
Happy Mask Salesman). It’s not limited to human/Hylian characters, either.
Ocarina of Time introduces
different races like the spherical, earthy, rock-eating Gorons, the
Amazonian Gerudo tribe, and the fish-like Zora (one of whom we admittedly
saw briefly in A Link to the Past).
If the sprites and animations come off
quant/old-fashioned now, they were practically popping out of the screen
compared to what came prior to 1998.
What doesn’t require the latest technology
to be impressive and essential is the story, which changed frequently
throughout the long-development cycle.
This necessity led to NPCs telling Link bits and pieces of information
regarding the goings-on in Hyrule (before this, NPCs would mostly dispense
hints). It was still telling, but done in a much more casual and
exploratory way. You discover what is happening not through one big
exposition dump (although the series has its fair share of them), but
weaving several strands together.
Instead of the light world/dark world dichotomy of
ALttP, Link’s adventures across
Hyrule as a child all gear up to him being able to pull the Master Sword
from its pedestal in the Temple of Time (an amazing moment, as his
footsteps echo across the floor as ethereal tones fill the air).
But there’s a cruel twist, and seven
years pass in the blink of an eye. When Link leaves the Temple, the change
to the world is palpable. Dark clouds, ruins, Kaepora
Gaebora (the watchful owl) is gone, the marketplace in Castle Town is full
of ear-piercing re-dead’s, Dampe the Kakariko village gravedigger has
proverbially dug his own (but can still cause trouble as a ghost), and
most troubling of all is that Ingo has taken over Lon-Lon ranch!
You can see your failure, your folly, and it just makes you
want to fix these mistakes as soon as possible. Which means beating back
monsters large and small, and eventually facing the lead villain who
conquered the entire kingdom.
Ganon was a powerful
pig-looking creature in the first three games, but he is different here.
An actual man. And when Ganon is portrayed as such (as he
will be in several games after this one), he will be known as Ganondorf.
Typically his backstory is one of being mistreated or ostracized, and this
drives his thirst for power and revenge.
In
Ocarina he is a member of the
Gerudo tribe, the desert people, although many of them distant themselves
from his, y’know, evil-ness.
He lies, he threatens,
he gloats, he plays piano.
Defeating him will not be easy, there is plenty to do.
The nine full dungeons (and three half-dungeons) take
advantage of the series’ foray into 3D, and ramping up the challenge
perfectly can be credited to dungeon director/designer Eiji Aonuma, doing
his first (and very much not last) work on a Zelda title.
As a child, the dungeons are part of the environment. An ancient tree, a
whale’s belly, a monster’s cave. They are excellent tutorials, with plenty
of basic mechanics that will come into play in more complicated ways once
you become an adult (the symbolism of aging is particularly potent in this
title).
In the initial dungeons it’s mostly enemies that will slow you down,
through the latter six, it’s the limits of your own goddamn brain. With a
3D space, hallways can twist upside down, malevolent ceilings can crash
upon you repeatedly, and looking upon a puzzle from a second or third
floor can reveal its solution.
Each dungeon has a unique design, theme, and sometimes a deep backstory.
The Forest Temple can be the quintessential 3D Zelda dungeon, a decaying
castle full of mazes, ghosts, giant hands and ominous paintings in the
basement.
You’ll be going for a surprise boat ride in the Shadow Temple, taking
seven years to solve the secrets of the Spirit Temple, and the torture
chamber which barely contains the almost ‘M for mature’ creatures at the
bottom of the Kakariko Village well will haunt your nightmares.
And then there is the Water Temple.
For some, this section alone is enough to
keep Ocarina from being given
the ‘greatest of all time’ label. A massive, multi-leveled monstrosity
below the surface of Lake Hylia, changing the water levels is how you
advance, but doing that requires memorizing the content of the rooms you
visited (much) earlier and figuring out the proper route to go up and down
at specific times and to which height. You’ll be doing plenty of swimming,
and your level of health will determine how long you can survive
underwater before you drown (but helping some thematically connected
friends can get you some useful gear) or get sucked into a whirlpool. This
is your likely cause of death, as enemies in this dungeon are relatively
sparse and more annoying than deadly (although the midway-boss is one of
the best surprises in the series).
Over its history, video games have gotten
easier, so the Water Temple standing as an imposing obstacle to completing
the title frequently called the best can be frustrating, but also a
reminder that a big game should not simply be an autopilot straight shot
to the final boss. It’s more impressive
because you have to earn it, and
it’s a credit to the developers that they are willing to present this in a
way that’s beyond button mashing an annoyingly tough enemy.
It is a sprawling game, but sprawling sounds
a bit unfocused and it is never that.
Ocarina of Time feels like
an adventure that unfolds effortlessly and majestically, everything coming
together in ways you might not even realize in your first or fourth
playthroughs. The Hyrule Field music has twelve different subtle
variations so you never tire of it, because you’ll be crisscrossing this
hub area often.
Even though your journey is more or less on
a laid-out narrative path (you do this and then this and then this), it is
possible to explore many different areas at your own pace once you gain
access to them, and rewards abound (from money to heart pieces to mask
trading). By not always having to just play the story, the adventure is
much more one of personal choice.
Zipping back and forth in time is always
exciting (and a great excuse to walk through the awe-inspiring Temple of
Time again), although it should be noted that
Ocarina takes the odd approach
where only Link’s consciousness travels across the temporal plane, as he
exists in whatever body (child or adult) exists when he arrives at his new
destination. The ocarina itself plays several songs (including turning day
to night), and while you are guided in ‘good game design’ ways to learn
new tunes, figuring out when to best use a certain melody makes you feel
like the hero of time everyone expects you to be.
While it can be chalked up to
close-mindedness when a gamer dismisses
Ocarina with the single words
‘old’ or ‘overrated’ (even if many nitpicks today have been ‘corrected’
with the 3DS remake), the only lousy thing about this game is completely
optional. With the reward for completion definitely not worth the time and
effort, you can completely ignore the fishing mini-game.
On Lake Hylia there is a shack on a bit of
land which you can swim to, and there you’ll find a mostly friendly guy
who is worried about his hair, and will let you fish in the gated off pond
for twenty rupees.
Don’t.
All you’ll get for your plodding, inaccurate
effort is a piece of heart.
[It's 1998, and revenge is a bitch, because the Sony PlayStation made a
stunning debut four years earlier in Japan, with something called… (wait
for it)… CDs. Nintendo flirted with the idea, but instead stuck with
cartridges for the Nintendo 64 console, a moved that frustrated some third
party developers, who felt they could do more with CDs and their larger
storage space. In fact, companies like Capcom severed ties with Nintendo
and went on to make games almost exclusively for PlayStation because of
the discs versus cartridge debate. Consequently, Nintendo 64’s game
library is the smallest of all its main consoles.
Globally Sony’s ‘Fuck Me? No Fuck You’ sold over three times as many units
as the 64 (102 million to 33 million), and that’s a big enough number that
you can’t say it’s just because Sony’s console got a head start. After
all, Sega Saturn debuted in Japan in 1994 (the rest of the world the
following year), and it got absolutely demolished when you tallied up the
result of the fifth generation console war.
Despite classic entries to familiar series like Mario, Zelda and Mario
Kart (along with Goldeneye 007
and the first entry in the Smash Bros. franchise) on the Nintendo 64, the
PlayStation offered a cooler and mature video game experience, and unlike
Sega’s attempt at this promotional angle, it worked this time around.
Tekken offered a more complex
fighting game, Tomb Raider
offered chesty Indiana Jones, but apparently the most adult experience of
them all is realistic auto-racing. Of the top three bestselling games on
the console, first was Gran Turismo,
and third was Grand Turismo 2.
Sandwiched between them was Final
Fantasy VII. That title might sound familiar, and that’s because we
mentioned how it was a popular series developed by Square for Nintendo
consoles. And their switch to PlayStation was a big deal. So…Final Fantasy
is a turn based RPG series whose numbers are all screwed up because some
of them have only been released in Japan, and then were later released
across the world in a different order. Just Nintendo’s luck that
Final Fantasy VII came out in
1997 and kicked the whole video game world up a notch. The whole thing
'felt' epic right from the start because it originally came on three CDs,
and as you progressed you had to swap them out.
In-depth storytelling, plot twists and characters with emotional depth were already par for the
course when it comes to RPGs, and one must acknowledge how much a game
like this was inspired and shaped by its own six predecessors, as well as
other standout titles like
Chrono-Trigger and the very quirky
Earthbound (both being released
on the Famicom/SNES).
FF VII was a video game version of a really well done corny
blockbuster, and while that sounds like an insult now, it was a real
mind-blower in the nineties. All the
characters still
looked like playmobile figurines, but they were moving around in a 3D(ish)
space, falling into random, turn-based encounters against gun-totting
guards or two-wheeled triceratops, sometimes snowboarding or taking a
rocket into space. Its heartbreaking-yet-triumphant ending made deep
impressions on those that played it, and is why the remake got so much
attention.
On the other hand,
if you wanted something similarly epic but more grounded and realistic,
there’s the game about having a bad day at the lab plus inter-dimensional
aliens, better known as Half-Life.
A com-pew-ter game that was released within a week of
Ocarina of Time, it’s a thinking
man's Doom with quite possibly
the best pacing in any video game. No other game amps up the intensity of
storytelling merged with clever level design like
Half-Life.
Ocarina has a great story and the world and the challenges are
really engaging and fun, with the flow of the game going back and forth
from these intense, heart pounding moments (like dungeons) followed by
something a bit more relaxed (travelling across Hyrule, getting supplies,
talking to NPCs), and then it will return to challenging. Meanwhile
Half-Life just floors it, grabbing your face and never letting go
until the credits. Everything just builds and builds, and even after you
finally escape one section after another of the sprawling Black Mesa
complex, you're only one hallway or air duct away from it all going to
shit again.
In fact, it wasn't for hit-and-miss-and-miss physics system (since the
damn ladders were covered in grease and enemies were either bulletproof or
made of tissue paper) and some immersion breaking graphics (repeating the
same three scientist sprites ad infinitum), it would definitely be one of
the other serious contenders for greatest game of all time.
The nineties undoubtedly had the biggest leap in technological achievement
in the gaming industry to date. The difference between what popular, first
party games looked like and how they played in 1991 and in 1999 was huge,
regardless of how many dimensions were involved.
Gaming on PC saw
similar improvements, and the arrival of the internet not only changing
multiplayer experiences on desktops, but began to change how people talk
about and to each other about this rapidly expanding culture.
This decade began with a console war that
Nintendo won, and then ended with another, which it clearly lost to Sony
(meanwhile, Sega rolled snake eyes for both).
But the real winners were everyone
who played video games.]
As noted in part one, Ocarina’s
constant praise can easily start to work against it if a modern player
picks it up and expects contemporary transcendence. At the very least,
getting over what will come off as slight limitations of its time (and
‘shut up, Navi’) will reveal an impeccably crafted adventure, with an
excellent (if well-trodden) story to boot.
To forget that you are playing a game, to have the controller feel like an
extension of yourself. Each button press resulting in fluid and exact
movement on the screen, with a hint of satisfaction when you achieve goals
large and small. All this is really just ones and zeroes in electronic
boxes.
This fooling of your senses is truly sublime, and if it were easy to do
from beginning to end, all games would be as great as this one. Miyamoto
and his entire development team put in the work, and near perfection was
the result.
Its sales of nine million might look a touch unimpressive for all its
accolades (although the 2011 remake version for the Nintendo 3DS would
sell another 4 million copies), but its importance goes beyond numbers.
Ocarina of Time played like no game before it, and almost every 3D
game after plays a bit like it.
Link, Zelda, Ganondorf and all the denizens of Hyrule were given a third
dimension, and their stories and character development deepened like the
z-axis itself. Even if it was just 32mb’s worth of polygons, that they
looked and acted more like us than their previous 2D incarnation made
everything seem closer to our own lives.
We are still waiting for a new video game to encapsulate the excitement
and potential of the medium like
Ocarina of Time did and still does. While every individual player can
certainly find one in their own personal playing history, there hasn’t
been a title that the larger gaming community has come to continually
support and embrace like this one.
[Playable on: Nintendo 64, Nintendo
Gamecube, Wii and Wii U Virtual Console, Nintendo 3DS (Remake)]
Interlude: You are the Hero
Link
isn’t even.
In
most of the games, he's not necessarily called Link, he's whatever name
you give him to start, and throughout the adventure all the characters
will then address him as Bob, Helen, Ratface or DINK.
By having a timeline that rarely connects
games with the same protagonist, there is not much back story to imbue
Link with, other than some basic positive traits.
He is an empty vessel so you can fill him
up.
Link's family tree is rarely referred and we've never met his mother and
father. His dying mother brought him as an infant to the Kokiri Forest to
escape a war in Ocarina of Time,
and it’s mentioned that his father was in the royal guard in
Breath of the Wild. The closest
we've got to living relative is an Uncle in
A Link to the Past and a younger
sister and a loving grandmother in
Wind Waker, but no information is given about anyone else in the
family. He seems to be an orphan in both
Twilight Princess and
Skyward Sword, with adult and
child friends acting like his adopted family (as they are meant to be for
you, the player).
Link is a hero in the most traditional way,
almost to the point of him being boring. He is overflowing with good
qualities – brave, strong, noble, clever, humble – and no amount of pot
smashing or blindly slicing your sword at friendly NPCs will really change
that.
In fact, it’s a damn good thing he doesn’t
speak, otherwise it would be the most clichéd and soppy sort dialogue. Let
the other people prattle on to and around him. Being a good listener is
another positive trait, after all.
Until
Breath of the Wild, all ‘dialogue’ was subtitled below the character
who was speaking to you, and the interaction happened ‘in game’. With
BotW, cut scenes meant voice
actors, and that meant the main characters were even more fleshed out than
before. And they all had to do double duty when interacting with Link,
because he had nothing to say at all.
But this is not exactly true. Link ‘talks’
in most of the games, but most of his dialogue is inferred. An NPC will
ask a question to Link, and the player will be given a choice (something
like ‘yes’ or ‘no’, and ‘I’m on it!’ or ‘not right now’), and the NPC will
react differently depending on what Link ‘said’. This is even more
pronounced in BOTW, where there is a short of bit of in-game animation of
our hero explaining himself (with no dialogue shown) based on the answer
he gives to a question.
But he does not have a voice. By choosing
brief (and admittedly limited) dialogue options it reinforces the idea
that you and your voice is responding.
You can choose to not give an NPC their
coveted item when they ask for it, and the negative response usually has
them say something like ‘that’s unfortunate’, ending the conversation.
There is no real permanent penalty, though, as Link could go right back up
to them and they will react as if he is coming up to them with item for
the first time again. Link is always turning a new leaf with every person
he meets, even if he’s meeting them for sixth time.
By being no one, Link could be anyone. Even
you.
It’s anti-storytelling 101. Usually you want
to add details about the protagonist’s life, so the reader or viewer can
relate to them or imagine what their life might be outside of the exact
moments being described in the book or shown in the movie.
But because you are controlling a video game
protagonist’s every moment, you quickly become the storyteller and central
subject all rolled into one.
In almost all video games the main character
is your avatar (sometimes main character(s), hopping from one perspective
and their story to the next), and as tech improved this protagonist was
given a graphical blowup, plus more specific traits, attributes and
complicated backstories.
Mario’s exaggerated features and bright
clothes made him iconic right from the start, and they still decided to
give him a voice (‘so long, gay Bowser!’).
Uncharted’s Nathan Drake
practically autocorrects to Indiana Jones, and
The Last of Us is as much a movie with a diverse cast of real people
as it is a post-apocalyptic survival game. Rockstar Games lets us step
into the shoes of unique and quirky individuals in a gangster heist film
or a wild Western epic.
But Zelda’s developers have resisted, this,
with Link character design being intentionally minimalist and his clothes
an earthy green. Even as graphics improved, his physical features are
overtly simple and angular compared to all the other people he would
interact with.
In development
Ocarina of Time
even toyed with a first person perspective for the whole game (in the
finished product, it only occurs when firing arrows), but it was concluded
that this would make people identify
too little with the character of Link. It should be little surprise
that id software ran with this all the way to hell with
Doom, where your FPS avatar has
no name at all, and is basically a pair of hands holding guns.
It is an important balance to maintain. In
video games high fantasy tropes means stories and dialogue can be corny
and predictable, but gameplay must be fresh, creative, and exciting.
Everyone is talking to
Link, but the game is talking to you, the player. You can't save Hyrule
without Link, and he cannot do it without you.
The tool/weapon for Link is the controller for you. Training and
practice is essential to triumph, because your learned button mashing is
the hero’s mastering of his sword, hookshot, or bow.
While there are currently twenty Zelda 'stories', your journey of playing
all or some of them is a legend in itself. For some older fans, it may be
chronological from the very beginning. But being around for over three
decades meant there are plenty of gamers who hopped on this wagon at
various titles throughout the years. Which means it's more likely that
people are going back and forth through the games.
Starting with, say, 2006’s Twilight
Princess and then trying the first or second game from the
mid-eighties is a huge change in format and style. You might not
appreciate its simple appearance or crushing difficulty, and a part you
loved about one of the games may be gone in the next, or is drastically
altered. It's nice to see familiar faces (even if they are the monsters
that you were hoping you wouldn’t have to see again) and tropes, but this
unequal recurrence is why trying different Zelda games can mean so much
more than trying more perfunctory sequels in other popular franchises.
This is your own hero’s journey of the Zelda series. Some setbacks, some
complete abandonments (lookin’ at you,
Adventures of Link), and without
a doubt you may fuse the memories of playing these games for weeks or
months with other events in your life.
Video games makes escapism easier than ever, and with a main character
full of overeager goodness and a silent tongue, he wouldn’t fit in well
with dystopic, technocratic cityscapes and morally compromised directives.
Considering this could describe a popular video game or plenty of people’s
daily lives, Hyrule – even when in grave peril – is a welcome respite
where chivalry, clarity and single-mindedness will point you in the right
direction (plus some friendly spirits).
Link is always ready, so in the end it’s up to you, hero.
Chapter Seven: Timing Was Everything - 'Majora’s
Mask'
Three days to save the world.
Wearing people’s faces to acquire their
power.
Helping reunite a lost couple so they can
get married before they die.
Stopping cow-abducting aliens.
There aren’t many
games out there that are as twisted, panic-inducing and exhausting as
The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask.
For
many game developers, the challenge for a worthwhile follow-up to critical
and commercial success is a daunting one (see:
The Legend of Zelda and
A Link to the Past).
It
was clear that after Ocarina of Time,
everyone wanted both 'more of the same' and 'something a bit different',
which sounds nice but can be a hell of a lot of gibberish when balancing
all the components of a video game. But the Zelda team - led by
co-directors Eiji Aonuma and Yoshiaki Koizumi, and overseen by Miyamoto as
producer - threaded the needle perfectly with
Majora’s Mask.
Because of how long it took to create
Ocarina of Time, its successor
was initially
supposed to be a remixed version of it. After all, since you pretty much
created a whole new engine for the game, Nintendo brass figured may as
well get its money’s worth and have another title come out using it, and
quickly too, because money. At this time expansion packs were becoming
more and more popular in PC gaming, which was the practice of re-releasing
a popular game with a few more levels and maybe some graphical
enhancements. This version of Ocarina of Time was planned to have additional dungeons (or previous
dungeons designed in a new way) and new quests, but the team figured if
they’re already creating new stuff for Link to do, why not make a whole
new game? Executives and Miyamoto agreed, if Aonuma and Koizumi promised
they could get it done in one year. Using the same graphics and game
engine helped with that, although there were other sacrifices due to
development time restraints (foreshadowing!).
There are now only four dungeons instead of the nine in
Ocarina, but there are more
challenges and quests that lead up to the dungeons themselves, and solving
the villagers' problems and receiving different masks for your troubles
can keep you busy even before you set out north, south, east and west from
Clock-Town.
In terms of controls, Majora’s Mask
plays almost exactly the same as its predecessor, so initially there is
great familiarity to how you move and what abilities you can use, and even
though it takes place in a land called Termina, it looks quite Hyrule-ish.
But the surface familiarity is intentionally
loose fitting wallpaper, not really covering up the fact that right from
the start, everything
in this game is disorienting.
Before you can even control Link, you’re mugged in a forest and lose your
sword, ocarina, and horse.
Since it’s assumed you played the previous
game, they throw you into a short mini-dungeon to start, and instead of
getting your stuff back, it all goes hellishly wrong.
Your mugger is Skull Kid, a humanoid
creature wearing a horrifying mask that grants him immense and terrible
powers. He transforms Link into a deku scrub (a plant-like enemy in
Ocarina) and leaves him to die
in the underground cavern.
While there is no Zelda (save for a quick
flashback) or Ganondorf here, the Happy Mask Salesman from
Ocarina of Time returns, but this time he is nomadic, with his wares
inside of and atop a very large backpack he carries (including one that
looks a lot like an Italian plumber). He tells Link that the mischievous
imp who attacked our hero earlier stole that mask from him, and that if
it’s not retrieved in exactly three days, something terrible will happen.
The Salesman’s gestures and actions are erratic, going from pleased to
angry in a moment, and this is exacerbated by sharp (and intentional)
animation cuts. A theory that doesn’t really go anywhere is that The Happy
Mask Salesman is some sort of god (who happens to own a Mario mask to
boot). A benign one, but has complete confidence in Link to get the job
done and instead sits on the sidelines (with a very Miyamoto-esque smile,
so goes the theory).
Sure, enough, after talking to this
narrative instigator, you step into Clock Town and see a massive moon
above with a hideous leer, looking down ready to destroy you and everyone
else.
Right in the bottom centre of your screen is a nicely designed clock that
runs down the 72 game hours (which - at least at first - equals fifty-four
real-life minutes).
The
idea of a timer in Zelda was antithetical to the entire point of exploring
at your own pace. Yes, in other games NPCs tell Link he has to hurry and
complete his missions, but there’s no penalty or problem if you run around
the map cutting grass to farm rupees for hours. While certain switches,
puzzles and races were on a countdown (with an actual clock or frantic
music telling you just how much time you have during the challenge), in
Majora’s Mask the timer is
always there, for everything you do.
When
it really comes down to the wire and the six minute countdown begins (with
some of the most bleak and brooding music ever to be heard in a video
game), you see if it's at all possible to complete whatever task is
currently in front of you (or at least deposit some rupees at the bank),
and then bid farewell to all the NPCs, enemies and entire world, because
you just toot on the ol' ocarina you retrieved and are back to the
beginning of your adventure, 72 hours earlier.
Try
again.
The
very notion of video games rests on trying again. In the arcades it meant
coughing up another quarter, but with consoles, it meant a depletion of
available lives until the game over screen. And depending on how forgiving
the setup and save system, that could mean starting the level, world or
entire game all over again.
But
hopefully you learned something in your failure, and are better equipped
to set out and overcome whatever obstacle there was that stopped you
before.
The game over was for the rest of the virtual world inside
the guts of the computer chips, not the player.
The person sitting on the couch who learns how to play, beat and master
video games by repetition and familiarity becomes wholly connected to the
protagonist within the game, who is oblivious to what just happened to
them. In almost every video game situation, Link, Mario, Master Chief, or
Trevor Philips don’t know they just died, they just reappear again a few
moments before that fateful moment, ready to try again.
In
Majora’s Mask, though, Link
knows. Link understands the set up.
Everything in the game
'becomes a game'. Now Link himself - who can just exit out of this cycle
of destruction - can see the events in Termina that he interacts with as
'just as game'. If you miss meeting up with someone at a certain time, ah
well. You can just do it properly on the next go around.
While the characters are presented and written in a fairly pedestrian way
(that is, late nineties adventure-style video games, without the cutting
wit of Mamet or Sorkin), you become much more connected to them than in
many other games (Zelda or otherwise) because you have to interact with
them over and over again, and know what happens to them when you bail with
minutes or seconds until the moon does its thing. And while they act in
the same way until you get involved, the change you are able to make in
their life (and earn another helpful mask that you keep throughout the
cycles) is genuinely exciting.
Some masks have useful abilities, others will cause
characters to react to Link much differently.
You're tasked with
finding a missing townsperson, and by asking around you learn more and
more about affairs and goings-on. You learn about the pressure the mayor
is under to either evacuate the town or have the annual festival begin as
planned, the challenge of the postal worker to keep to his schedule
(fleeing is not on it), and how to help a pair of circus dancers.
Do
you have time to try the Snowhead Temple at the beginning of the third
day, or will you just have a heart attack as the timer runs down because
you still haven't figured out a way to reach the top floor even though you
found the boss key? Best to just reset to day one and...try again.
Go back to the beginning
and now you can move from interaction to interaction a little bit more
quickly.
Breaking small cycles inside a larger one is still a move in
the right direction.
It’s important to feel a sense of
accomplishment while doing all this, because as you explore you find there
are a lot of dark and deadly developments
beyond the moon (and its hideous face) about to destroy the
world.
Monkeys are about to be burned alive by a deku jungle tribe for crimes
they didn’t commit.
All
the Gorons are about to freeze to death.
Skeletons of soldiers are waiting in vain for their dead commander to give
them a final order.
In
the wilds of the desert a young girl is tending to her father who is
plagued with a terrible zombie-like disease, and the moment where Link is
able to cure him (if he knows the right song) is genuinely touching.
Even
when you are helping a band of fish people put together a concert, you are
still taking the identity of the recently deceased guitarist who died
after trying to fight pirates to retrieve the lead singer’s eggs (there
are no errors in that sentence).
And you have to help ghosts repeatedly, who beg you to avenge them, heal
their sorrows, and un-cloud their poisoned minds.
All
this while still trying to prevent death from above, which is being coaxed
down by the being wearing Majora’s Mask. There is no villain who wants to
rule the world or achieve true power. Here it’s all about staving off
complete destruction and chaos (which the game will not shy away from
showing you if you do not travel back in time before the timer runs out).
When the game’s not dark, it’s weird.
You have to keep cows from being abducted by
aliens.
You have to gain access to a milk bar to get
a mask which constantly cries from one of the customers.
You
have to help a mysterious hand that lives in a toilet (and how you do this
is both completely sensible and pretty disgusting).
Oh, and Ben drowned.
Even outside of narrative gameplay, there is
evidence of how this weighs on Link.
In other games, increasing one's skills or adding a buff or
power up might simply be reflected in hit points, or a different costume
or weapon you now carry.
But here, transformation into any of the three central masks
is extremely painful. Link screams up to the heavens in agony every time
he puts it on or removes it. The mirror shield returns in this game, but
rather than a pristine glass shine, it depicts a face crying out in
horror. Thanks to the third-person perspective, you will be constantly
staring at it for the last quarter of your adventure.
Outside of that, though, Link visage always remains
confident and resolute, but exhaustion sets in for the person doing the
controlling. Initially overwhelming, you feel the weight of necessary
repetition the more often it occurs.
This is true for its intense development cycle as well. With
only one year, it was a godsend that plenty of the foundational gameplay
was developed for the previous title, but that didn’t stop Aonuma from
having nightmares of dekus ganging up on him. During this time (1999)
North Korea threatened the entire region with nuclear missile launches,
and when many of the employees working on the game attended a wedding,
they wondered if this was the last sort of get together they might have.
This fatalistic feeling and its adjacent matrimonial event were
incorporated into Majora’s Mask as well.
While Link is meant to be an empty vessel that the player fills in, the
rest of the world he explores need to be built. Not just every graphic and
animation, but every word. Even if the personalities are broad strokes
that might be familiar to every movie or tv show, interacting with them
over and over again, you can’t help but care because they have become
familiar to you. We build attachments through repetition, even if we don’t
want certain things to repeat. You want to assist them, you want to make
things right, you want to free them from this cycle so they can be
unfamiliar and new again.
By completing the
arduous of task of earning twenty masks from the citizens gives you a
fierce perk for the final boss battle, which is great.
You definitely want to defeat Ganon in all the
other games, but in this one you reeeeally can’t wait to beat the shit of
Majora for forcing you to let all these people die again and again and
again.
As many have pointed out, if Ocarina
of Time is Star Wars: A New Hope,
then Majora’s Mask is certainly
The Empire Strikes Back. Darker,
twisted, fascinating, and containing a lot more emotional depth. (for Radiohead fans: If
OoT is Kid A, then MM is
Amnesiac (thanks to Youtuber Sonictrasher for that)).
[as
for time itself, it is Y2K. Nintendo is developing a new, sixth-generation
console, one that is actually going to use those compact disc things…but
mini-discs. Microsoft is making rumblings with a rumoured new console that
is supposed to debut soon.
Sega launched Dreamcast the same week as Ocarina of Time’s release in
November 1998 in Japan, but didn’t arrive anywhere else until the
following September. And while sales were decent at first, the arrival of
PlayStation 2 in early 2000 crushed all newcomers. Its sales will come to
dwarf those of the still current Nintendo 64 and the upcoming Nintendo
Game Cube. In fact, it will become the best selling home console of all
time by a wide margin, with 155 million units ultimately shipped. The
success of the first PlayStation console meant many more third-party
developers were eager to work with Sony again rather than Nintendo, and
the added 'bonus' of being able to play these new-fangled DVDs on the PS2
was actually a huge selling point for a lot of people who may not have
really cared that much about video games in the first place. For them it
was like buying a DVD player foremost with a gaming console on the side
(Sony would repeat this trick with future iterations, with PS4 being a
huge success (eventually) thanks in part to playing blue-ray discs).
Despite this, at
the turn of the millennium, video games in general were finally getting a
bit more respect than ever before in pop culture and even academic circles
(and not the typical (and inaccurate) hand-wringing about how it was bad
for kids). While the medium could always have been looked at with a novel
sort of curiosity in terms of what it could express aesthetically and
culturally, without a doubt the popularization of immersive 3D worlds
(instead of just running in a straight line and jumping) added literal and
symbolic depth to the experience.
Now video games imitated real life with more accuracy, including the
mundane aspects, and no series embodied that better at this time than
The Sims, where you build a virtual life by going to a virtual job
to make virtual money to furnish your virtual house with virtual stuff so
you could attract a virtual mate and eventually have a virtual argument
with them. Its first entry in the series (but not the first in the SimCity
lineup) was released in early 2000, and went on to sell over 200 million
copies total.
Likewise, if you were tired of kicking flips
and doing 360s on the half-pipe (or never could in the first place),
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 came
out this same year. A dark
horse title for ‘best game of all time’, it won rave reviews (and had a
killer soundtrack) for doing exactly what it set out to do: Be a really
good skateboarding video game.
These titles were for people who were
getting tired with the childish notion of just ‘saving the princess’ every
time they turned on their console, and wanted something different (even
with Majora’s Mask sinister overtones, it couldn’t escape the view by some
in the gaming community that it was another entry in an overly familiar
fantasy series).
People who grew up with a Nintendo or Sega console were now reaching
adulthood, and as games were becoming more mature, complex and technically
innovative, there was no reason to cast them aside for some other hobby.
And the Sony PlayStation clearly appealed to a lot more demographics than
other consoles.
In 2000 the internet and its multiplayer
element was still a feature for PC gaming alone, but no matter what you
were button mashing on, the information superhighway was changing how we
talked and learned about video games in general (and everything else for
that matter). Message boards
and unofficial fan pages brought people together to share tips, celebrate
all those ‘retro’ games from ten years earlier, and complain about
graphics, glitches, release dates and the ridiculously stupid opinion of
the person two posts above.
Video games were slowly being appreciated as
the future of entertainment, and there was finally a matrix-like community
where people can jack in and get jacked up and excited about the next wave
of titles when they weren’t currently running, gunning and slashing
through the latest releases.]
There are certainly many games that have
subverted expectations or taken wild experiments and risks, but in terms
of a major triple-A franchise releasing a follow up to the most critically
lauded games of all time, nothing comes close to what
Majora’s Mask strives for and achieves.
Few games mesh thematic elements of sadness
and despair with determination and hope so well, where the very essence of
gaming itself is addressed and explored through an extremely complex and
unique method of gameplay.
You
die, you start from the beginning of the level, and when you finally pass
it, then there's another level. Wash, rinse, repeat, roll credits, go buy
another game.
In
Majora’s Mask, you constantly
and voluntarily reset to the beginning, this time maybe with a few new
items that you can bring back with you, but definitely with a lot more
knowledge of strategies of how you will tackle the series of tasks on the
way to eventual and hard-earned success. This. Game. Is. Heavy.
Despite that, the story itself can be
heartbreakingly simple:
Skull Kid just wants a friend.
Preying on this emotional insecurity, the
evil mask does its work and transforms the imp into something horrifying.
It is an example of someone who is hurt lashing out with the needle pushed
into the red.
Compared to other Zelda titles, there is a
greater emphasis on moral ambiguity here (a mask is evil, the wearer might
not be), and that lends to the overall sense of unease and weirdness.
Ghosts and spirits are forlorn and aimless, living (after)lives full of
regret, but after helping them Link can go gamble on dog races and cheat
to win the town lottery.
It leans so heavy on
Ocarina of Time stylistically and gameplay-wise that it can barely
be called a standalone title. You almost have to play
Ocarina first to fully appreciate how different
Majora’s Mask is not only from
that title, but from so many other gaming experiences (since
Ocarina epitomizes them all so well). The recursive experiences of
the player and character they control have never been more aligned.
There is every single video game ever made.
And then there is
Majora’s Mask.
[Playable on: Nintendo 64, Nintendo
Gamecube, Wii and Wii U Virtual Console, Nintendo 3DS (Remake)]
End of part 2
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