The Hyrule Fantasy

video games nintendo
21

The first entry I played was Zelda II. My parents gifted me and my sister both a GBA for Christmas with the NES Classics ports of the two original games. When my parents had first moved in together they had bought an NES. My mom didn't play much besides Mario and Duck Hunt, but she would watch my father play Zelda and suggest solutions.

The games were too obtuse for my sister and I, who were raised on Crash Bandicoot and the skateboarding minigame in Spyro 3. Still, I found the first Zelda fun to poke around in. That's how best to experience these games: by being a stumped child who chips away at each puzzle until something gives way, and by exploring the overworld when too stuck in a dungeon. Literacy in game design and Zelda-isms demystify the experience.

A few years later, again as a Christmas gift, my parents bought us a Wii. I downloaded Ocarina of Time and started chipping away. It was the first 3D game that I played that wasn't a platformer, so concepts like Z-targeting flew over my head. Inside the Deku Tree was where my game would end before deciding I was too stuck and needed to start over. On a rare night that my father was home (usually gone on long-distance plumbing jobs) I pestered him to play, saying it was just like the games he had enjoyed. So he named the character "Dad", claimed to be sleepy, and passed the controller back to me. I poked around in the Deku Tree again as my father reclined with a bag of chips and a car magazine. Something clicked and I cleared the dungeon. This save would be the one I finished the game with, so yeah, the Hero of Time is canonically named Dad.

I fell off after Skyward Sword. I had just entered high school and my father Left For A Pack Of Cigarettes. Swinging the Wiimote in the living room as Mom watched me stab the flamboyant anime man ~ yeah. I felt I had outgrown it. (And bless my mom. She still suggests solutions to puzzles, imitates sound effects - Link's grunts being a favorite - and she crafted a Skull Kid costume for me one Halloween using dried corn leaves for the hat's brim.) I hopped aboard the Zelda train again with BotW during a summer break in undergrad. My mom watched a good chunk of the playthrough, even asking one morning what time I'd start playing that evening. We had a fun time.

22

-I don't know which game is most Insert Credit, but the most IC puzzle is in Phantom Hourglass, when you close the DS to transfer markings between two maps.
-The first Zelda through Wind Waker tell an evolving story about growing up and, at the end, letting the past go. I think they're a stellar run of games. After Wind Waker is when I feel major stagnation starts. I wish Twilight Princess had taken place in "new Hyrule". They should get away from using the same landmarks and races. A Link Between Worlds and BotW are refreshing in how they bust up some of the formula.
-The most hangoutable place is Windfall Island. I love the guy who stares through his telescope at night and tells you about the constellations.
-What's up with the ReDeads and torture chamber stuff in OoT? Those scarred me as bad as Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island.

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>

@“Gaagaagiins”#p84819 Someone has to say it but Tears of the Kingdom is a bad subtitle.

"breath of the wild" is pretty bad too

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@“rootfifthoctave”#p84832 @Gaagaagiins

They’re kind of ALL awful when you think about it.

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@“QuenchGrust”#p84828 your mom sounds awesome

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@“billy “#p84833 i don't mind any that are ”legend of zelda:[main maguffin or major character]”

“link's awakening” gets a pass for being so damn literal

honestly botw should have been called “age of calamity” or something more like that. that's a good title.

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@“rootfifthoctave”#p84836 “The blank of blank: blank of blank” makes me feel like I'm going to have to do maths.

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They should take a page from Majora‘s Mask and Link’s Awakening:

  • -

    The Kingdom's Tears

  • -

    The Wild's Breath

  • -

    Time's Ocarina

    • 29

    I‘ve been with this series from the beginning. My parents had an NES and a handful of popular games, one of them The Legend of Zelda whose internal battery died before I could ever complete it. It’s probably easier to list the ones I haven't finished.

  • - I still don‘t think I’ve ever finished the first one and definitely not Zelda II but I mean to, honest

  • - (Only ever played *Link's Awakening* ***DX***, but I just got a copy of the grey cart version and am nearly halfway through. My impression so far is: I don't think this game ever needed to be colorized. It was perfect as released.)
  • - I've only pecked at *Oracle of Seasons*, the one they say is the good *Oracle* game. Haven't played the other "bad" one at all. I should probably start with *Ages* if it's supposed to suck, now that I'm thinking about it.)
  • - This hurts to admit, but I made it all the way to the final boss of *Minish Cap* and then got distracted by homework and something happened to my save, so I've never actually finished the game. I loved it a lot at the time, but don't remember in detail why, so I owe it a second proper playthrough—this time on real hardware and not in the PPC Mac port of VisualBoy Advance.
  • - I thought *Phantom Hourglass* was just fine, I don't get the hate. *Spirit Tracks* has been on my backlog since it came out, and I've started halfhearted playthroughs of it on both DSi and Wii U VC.
  • - The *Four Swords* games are a complete blind spot to me and they've grown to a series of about what five games by now? Please don't tell me they're good because I want to keep ignoring them.
  • - I am told that the first *Hyrule Warriors* game is a blast and I've got it raring to go on my Wii U

    • I wish I could pretend I was always cool, but it just ain't so: I sold my SNES and games—among them *A Link to the Past*—for an N64 in anticipation of Zelda 64, which I got a little too into. I knew every room in the game like the back of my hand. I got pretty sick of the game for many years, put it out of my mind. It can actually surprise me now on occasions when I return to it.

    I wished I could live in Termina and cried that it couldn't be so. (Also I secretly fantasized about there being a Gerudo mask—this is what trans people now refer to as an egg moment.)

    I've talked before about having a shitty home life as a kid from which I would escape into video games, but also into the conservation area across the street from my family's house. I've found bones and fossils in those woods, and live things too. I would wander off path into walls of orb-weaver webs, swing maple sapling switches like a sword at beds of ostrich ferns to watch their heads fall in a wave, squat down by the creek to spy what streamed by under the water's surface or disturb the clay and watch mini pyroclastic flows form.

    Miyamoto famously has talked about his childhood wanderings around his hometown of [Sonobe](https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/spelunking-in-sonobe)—a town of nearly the same population as my hometown's. I suspect you don't need to have grown up in a green belt to get it: we're all drawn back to nature wherever we can find it.

    My experiences in game and out imprint on and enhance each other. I feed my imagination and take it with me. I thought I posted about this in [that one thread](https://forums.insertcredit.com/d/182-physical-spaces-and-their-impact-on-gaming/9) on the subject but it must be festering in my drafts.

    *Link's Awakening* is a game that can't convince you until it lands. You can play right up to the final dungeon and drop it there, you'll have probably had yourself a fun time, but the only reason people feel the way they feel about that game is because of how it ends. Play either the original or DX, but I don't think the Switch version should be anyone's first encounter with it, straight up. Compare [this early scene on GB](https://youtu.be/oPme8LZj2PQ?t=238) to [the same on Switch](https://youtu.be/O6RbCCKZiaU?t=274) and note the timing of Link's slash with the overworld theme's intro. I'm horrified that Grezzo could be handed this work to be rebuilt and just completely ignore the pacing of a cutscene like that. I don't think I'm making a mountain out of a molehill here, that's just an obvious blindness to artistic intent.

    Incidentally I'm grateful every day that I can spout off intense opinions like the above here and not fear ostracisation.

    **Confession time!!!** I was one of the reactionary dummies who lashed out about "*Celda*"'s cel-shaded art direction when it was first teased (in my defence, I was young and miserable), but musta had a change of heart at some point because I preordered the thing and still have it and *Master Quest* both CIB up on my shelf. WW was for a very long time my professed **favourite Zelda**… but in the end I always return to MM.

    I had high hopes for *Twilight Princess* from the outset, in contrast, and I'll be the first to admit it's maybe the clunkiest of the old school 3D Zeldas, but there's a lot to appreciate here if you hang out in its Hyrule for a while. It's got a moodiness that gets brushed off as edgy but which I think draws heavily from *Majora*. The strangeness of the characters makes motions toward realism but embraces an uncanniness instead and I think their designs are stronger for it. One of wolf Link's abilities is to let you inside the heads of despairing villagers trapped in the twilight realm, and that's the meat of your world-building in every new province you discover. This game's Link, a brawny ranch hand whose body takes the twilight form of a [wolf](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A60mDhxHw5Q)—starkly contrasting ALttP's dark world [bunny](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDAyz6nRdcY)—snarls like an animal when unleashing his fully upgraded fire spin. (Now that's how you develop a silent protagonist.) It's hard to argue Midna isn't the series' best sidekick, and her competition is pretty stiff (Linebeck, Fi, Groose, I've heard so much praise for *Spirit Tracks*' Zelda).

    The growth of her bond with Link is so organic and, and, fresh!! Sometimes in a series that plays it safe so much of the time it can make you feel starved for risk and new ideas, and maybe you are. Maybe you just see potential in a good thing and it's only natural to cheer when it gets realized. The Hero of Twilight & Midna are one of my most beloved video game duos. They speak to the shipper that must reside in me (if I were to ever ship, it'd be right here). They meet at their nadirs and come to rely so heavily on each other that a real respect grows and when they part it's devastating. This goes way beyond tagging along or asking for enemy intel or following directions: Link and Midna need each other. They're fringe weirdos in a world of weirdos in a game that is itself a dark horse—and I'm sorry I've devoted two entire paragraphs now to everyone's second least favourite Zelda but I believe in *Twilight Princess*. It's dark and it's goofy and it's beautiful.

    (I think we could have if not an entire thread then at least a lengthy discussion here in this one about the Zelda series' side characters. Gimme yer top 5s!! The scope could be stretched past companions to the supporting cast if we wanted. We only ever see *Breath of the Wild*'s nerd!Zelda in flashbacks for most of the game but she's with you in spirit!!?)

    I played *Skyward Sword* for the second time in my life [last year](https://forums.insertcredit.com/d/506-the-thread-in-which-we-talk-about-the-videogames-we-are-currently-playing/681) and I gotta say it again here: the game's good. It's worth playing to see what we've left behind and what ought to return in the future.

    *Link Between Worlds* moves so ***fast***. That's what it's all about. This is how you nail the feel of an old classic.

    Then there's *Breath of the Wild*. I played BotW while catsitting in a Parkdale apartment at the ass-end of winter. My refurbished Wii U arrived and I spent a couple of weeks just digging into the game and not much else. I played FFXV around the same time and I did mostly have a great time with those guys but if I wanted to you know have fun then I returned to *Wild* (not *the* wild). It's too late and I've spent too much time on this post, so just be assured that there's shit about the game I hate. But coming in blind and for at least the portion of your playthrough that's spent simply surviving, it is a great game.

    I hope the next one has dungeons!!!! >!AND TINGLE.!<

    30

    >

    @“connrrr”#p85001 It’s probably easier to list the ones I haven’t finished.

    Listing the _Zeldas_ one has **not** played to completion feels like an insert credit vibe... I'll use [this list. ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Legend_of_Zelda_media#Main_series)

  • - The Legend of Zelda

    • Too archaic for my tastes. I don't have much of an appetite for anything too analogue--the idea of it being fun to draw a map is quite foreign to me, a mechanical redundancy when a computer is so much better at drawing maps than I ever could be. Also, I don't like to have my hand be held, but I don't necessarily like to have no structure or sense of urgency either, at least not when the information you can intuit is limited and the stakes for trying to go and do something you're not resourced for is more just needing to walk across the map again. I was born in 1989, so, sue me.

  • - Zelda II: The Adventure of Link*

    • I have rolled credits on _Zelda II_, but my Epic Gamer E-Pride compels me to mention I used a cheese strategy to beat ||Dark Link because they kept killing me over and over again and the lack of checkpoints before that is brutal.|| That also made the whole end sequence feel very frustrating and then very anticlimactic. I did NOT enjoy myself when playing the game pretty much in general, probably for reasons that are at least adjacent if not overlapping with the above.

  • - The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords

    • I'm pretty sure I had 3 friends in 2002, but I didn't have 3 friends with a Gameboy Advance _and_ a Link Cable in 2002.

  • - The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures

    • Same.

  • - The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap

    • Pretty sure I played this for 2 or 3 hours once while at one of those aforementioned friends' houses at least, or perhaps over a weekend as a rental at most. It didn't captivate me, I very, _very_ vaguely remember feeling like the beginning was slow and/or handhold-y. In any case I didn't retain nor have I felt much of a desire to play it.

  • - The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass

    • Like many, what games I was able to play tended to be limited to what was available for rental at the local Blockbuster or other rental places, or what was borrow-able off of friends, 'cause I sure didn't have much disposable money to buy full priced games with. Also limited to local availability, which was not always great back then in a smaller city. At any rate, I don't know if the rental places I had the most reliable access to even retained mobile rentals consistently. I remember renting GBA games, but not DS games. By the time I had a flash cart and had the ability to play any DS game I could dream of, I might have poked at it for an hour or two or at a friend's place once, but I don't really remember. Might have just not hooked me enough for me to get over the control scheme.

  • - The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks

    • See above entry for _The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass._

  • - The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

    • With my sincerest apologies to @"connrrr"#502 , I just straight up hate this game. I think by the time it was being released, I no longer had a Wii. I think I might have sold it, or traded it in to get some game or other newer console later on. I essentially didn't get a chance to play it until I had a Wii U (remember the Wii U) but then also had the extra money to afford a cheap copy of _Skyward Sword,_ a Wiimote with Motion Plus, _and_ the spare time to play it. I was able to do that, played for a few hours, tried to pretend the motion controls weren't making me extremely pissed off... and then _got stuck_ in thefirst dungeon. _Me,_ a _Zelda_ vet, getting _stuck_ in the intro dungeon. It was as frustrating as it was humiliating. I don't remember what it even was that I got stuck on. But it was such a frustrating experience that I put it down and didn't go back to it, despite thinking a lot of things about the game were neat.

    Anyway, a few more years pass, and the stars finally align again, and I go back to play it again. I'm pretty sure I _got stuck again in the same spot_ so I just looked it up, figuring whatever the issue was it was me and not the dungeon. I did remain interested in a lot of the game, and look forward to discovering more. And, well, visual design and area design I could never spatially make sense of, ugly ass HD looking assets shoved into puke-worthy SD, eternally aggravating and terrible feeling motion controls, and just what felt like tortuous backtracking and monotony and all sorts of shit that was just not fun to do in a straightforward way just wore me down until I couldn't take it anymore. I know I got pretty far, I think I was maybe 3 dungeons from the end. It was just aggravating and tedious in a way that I could not sustain attention on.

    Anyway, maybe I'd like the Switch version.

  • - The Legend of Zelda: Tri Force Heroes

    • Literally forgot this existed.

    31

    wow man, I'm sorry I got so rambly last night

    >

    @“Gaagaagiins”#p85004 sincerest apologies

    Don't you apologize, though!!

    32

  • 1.

    When I was a kid, life was mainly about video games. Or, that's how it felt. It was serious news, then, when one of my best friends told me that his older brother, now a teenager, no longer played video games. “He still plays Zelda, though.”

  • 2.

    Most of my friends these days are not into video games. I was talking to one of them this evening, though, and he told me he got a Switch a few years ago just to play Breath of the Wild. He's going to break it out again next year just for the new Zelda. I said, "Playing only Zeldas might just be the right way to do it."

  • 3.

    I love video games and yet I wonder almost every day if I should care about them as much as I do. They eat my time, my attention. And there's so much else to get done in this life. Zelda games seem outside of all that to me somehow, though. Like all entertainment, they burn time... and yet they always feel to me like time well spent.

  • 4.

    What is the best video game series? I don't know the right answer. But Zelda isn't the wrong answer.

  • 5.

    I love the Zelda games, but they are missing something. They seem to have no center, no heart. One of my friends always used to insist they should make a Zelda movie, but I disagreed every time. I get where he was coming from. You can almost see it being right. Zelda has a world and a story...but when I tried to imagine the movie in my head, it was dumb, ugly, empty. You have the games, but there's just nothing underneath.

  • 6.

    I wonder if that absence (I hope I'm not alone in sensing it) is the real secret to the series. Is that the reason why even people who normally don't like video games can be enchanted by Zelda? Is that the reason why we remember them so personally? Is that the reason they feel so free even though these games more or less prescribe a similar experience for everyone? Is there just enough of a lack that you, as a player, have to fill in the gaps with yourself?

  • 7.

    All games have to deal with this somehow. They have to leave room for the player. I don't know of many that do that the way Zelda games do. I think that is why they are always among the most magical games to play. I think that is why, though, when we step back and look at them from the outside, we are confronted with stories and actions that are so much less than what we remember.

    • Appendix. We all know that Link was designed to connect the player to the game. He does that. But is there a less charming silent protagonist than Link? He seems off compared to, say Crono or Ness. Speaking personally, Link only "works" when I'm playing as him. The moment I turn the game off, he's less than a trope, not even a cipher. I want nothing to do with him; he is not me.

    And then the namesake, Princess Zelda. She has almost nothing to do with her kingdom, her series, or herself.

    33

    @“rearnakedwindow”#p85098 One of my favorite things to hear students say is, “I don‘t know what Adam Smith is talking about, but here’s what I was thinking about while I was reading…” As often as not they then go on to give an extremely good reading of the text. Strong “headache with pictures” energy.

    Maybe books really are just tricking us into saying things to ourselves, and games too? Zelda doesn't appeal to the refined palate because the trick is too obvious.

    34

    >

    @“connrrr”#p85001 The Four Swords games are a complete blind spot to me and they’ve grown to a series of about what five games by now? Please don’t tell me they’re good because I want to keep ignoring them.

    Just two, one of which is multiplayer-only and the other is only really fun in multiplayer but requires so much extra junk to play with other people that you'll never be able to just casually play it with a full party.

    There's also Tri Force Heroes on 3DS, which isn't a Four Swords game but is a multiplayer-centric Zelda game that most people lump together with Four Swords—of all of these games, this is the one you're probably most likely to play with a full party, given that a) it's a game you can still buy for relatively modern hardware, b) online multiplayer and full single-cart multiplayer makes it relatively painless to play with other people, with the caveat that you specifically need a three-member party.

    Four Swords is fun in that NSMB-esque fucking-with-people-is-half-the-game way. Tri Force Heroes is a little more serious about expecting players to genuinely cooperate, which can work with friends and quite often does not work playing with randoms online.

    The Four Swords games are part of the same continuity as Minish Cap, for whatever that's worth. Tri Force Heroes is nominally connected to A Link Between Worlds, in a we-devs-clearly-don't-care-so-neither-should-you way.

    35

    >

    @“baftaboo”#p85118 Maybe books really are just tricking us into saying things to ourselves, and games too? Zelda doesn’t appeal to the refined palate because the trick is too obvious.

    I don't think it's a matter of having a refined palate: it's that the games are almost always repetitive visually, structurally, thematically, and repetitive to a high degree of specificity: it's literally the same characters, the same character types, the same story beats, the same tasks, and it's all presented in a way that this repetition is meant to satiate the audience rather than (imo) prompt any imagination or introspection in the player. Like a lot of latter day nintendo games, they're corporate products for children and adolescents. I don't see a meaningful distinction between zelda and mario and marvel movies. It's the same stuff.

    Obviously other games and other devs and publishers are attempting serve the same market to the same effect, but nintendo is the most successful + it's maybe a little more annoying to see so much care, talent, and thought, put in service of marvel movie junk + the mostly uncritical reception these games get as "meaningful"

    Earlier games in the series like II and LA benefit from having 8 bit weirdness and atmosphere, and similar games like _Ys_ for example have enough eccentricities genuine cool stuff to at least be something other than 'expectation-meeting'

    36

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    @“gsk”#p85122 in a we-devs-clearly-don’t-care-so-neither-should-you way.

    If only the timeline people specifically would get this message.

    37

    >

    @“yeso”#p85125 it’s all presented in a way that this repetition is meant to satiate the audience rather than (imo) prompt any imagination or introspection in the player.

    I guess I would just question whether or not intention is more important than effect here. Even if Nintendo just makes Zelda games to satiate people's desire for entertainment (which I don't entirely agree with but I see where you're coming from), these games clearly mean something to some thoughtful people.

    We could disagree about what is good art or what is truly meaningful. Maybe in the grand scheme of things, Zelda doesn't really matter. I do think it's interesting how well they work in their own medium while you play them (imo) even though the story/mythos is mostly generic and pretty predictable. And I get what you're saying, too, about it being annoying that so many people try to wring meaning out of this series of possibly overrated games. I just wouldn't agree that everyone is doing it uncritically. Some of us are trying to be thoughtful about it (though maybe we're not always very successful).

    38

    >

    @“rearnakedwindow”#p85098 Princess Zelda. She has almost nothing to do with her kingdom, her series, or herself.

    this one of my favourite aspects of BOTW, how ([slightly dodgy voice aside](https://forums.insertcredit.com/d/967-best-british-redubs-for-games-with-american-voice-acting/9#:~:text=treefroggyJul-,21,-%2C%202021) ) they filled out zelda's role in the backstory of the game, the history of the world we're zeldering in. although now i think of it, that's also sort of true of OOT as well! she's all over that game as an active character.

    39

    @“rootfifthoctave”#p85132 Zelda's French VA Adeline Chetail (Amalia from Wakfu) does a really great job in the game and she made that my favourite dub between it, English and Japanese.

    >

    as an active character.

    In OoT's and WW's case this is true until it's revealed who she is and then she takes on a really trite damsel in distress role until the end. I guess in BotW's case she's fighting off-screen for the entire game and in flashbacks.

    Will be really swell to see how Nintendo shits the bed with respect to her character in the sequel, because a Zelda who is more interested in boning up on her nerd lessons than fulfilling her monarch's duty or whatever is my kind of Zelda.

    40

    >

    @“rearnakedwindow”#p85131 these games clearly mean something to some thoughtful people.

    Sure they can be personally meaningful, though I suspect said person is meeting these games much farther than half way in making any sort of meaning

    But where are the meaningful qualities of these games articulated rather than just asserted? Sort of a rhetorical question and I’m not trying to prompt anyone itt to try to justify the games.