Rather than complain about how tired and sad I am, or about how rough work has been this week, I figured I might as well turn my attention toward my favorite gaming franchise and not only avoid my blog becoming a dour place full of only my sourest feelings but also maybe even lift my own spirits. After all, there’s a new Legend of Zelda game coming out soon (Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom) and you get to play as Zelda in this one! Which is a pretty big deal, considering the only other protagonist we’ve even seen in a Legend of Zelda game is Link. Link’s been our only player character this whole time. Sure, the Hyrule Warriors games muddied the waters a bit, but those aren’t really the same thing since they’re even further from “canon” than even the handful of Capcom handheld games. Even if you moved to include them in this accounting of Legend of Zelda protagonists, Link is still the primary protagonist and all the other characters show up to support and fight alongside him, so that argument is iffy at best. All of which is to say that this is a pretty big deal. I know a lot of people are nervous about what looks like a departure from the norm (dungeons and puzzles and relatively clear progression) as the game touts its world being as open to exploration as your imagination allows and shows Zelda committing mostly indirect violence rather than ever truly dirtying her hands like Link does, but I think it’s almost always worth taking a relatively wild swing. Wild swings got us Breath of the Wild and, sure, they also got us Tears of the Kingdom (which was an enjoyable foul ball, but a foul ball all the same and I could probably make a good argument it for being less of a wild swing and more of an attempt to hit a home run again, which doesn’t really make sense in this metaphor but feels like an accurate description of what the game did), but I’m all for trying new things and desperate to play as Zelda, especially after they took the very gender-neutral Link of Breath of the Wild and solidly masculinized him in Tears of the Kingdom. Let’s move the men aside for a bit and let someone else have a turn at the game, you know?

I don’t really have anything else to say about the gender politics of the Legend of Zelda games (beyond adding that making Link an incredibly blank canvas on which you might project your desired gender interpretation in Breath of the Wild was my favorite version of the character and losing that in Tears of the Kingdom is one of the things that has prevented me from becoming as invested in it as I was in its predecessor), but I think it’s still very significant that Zelda is the hero in this game. “Playing as Zelda” has been one of the longest running rumors about Legend of Zelda games since I first got on the internet. Until recently, when Nintendo started emphasizing the player character from the get-go, there was always at least a little room for ambiguity in who the star of the game would be in each initial game announcement. This wiggle room gave players, writers, and artists (and all fans, to be honest) tons of room to create interesting alternate games where Zelda saved Link or where the two of them teamed up (for multiplayer or “character swapping” gameplay) that never bore fruit beyond being widely acclaimed ideas in whatever communities they appeared in. This fervor for literally any woman to appear as a LoZ game protagonist is what got us Linkle, the female version of Link who showed up in concept art for Hyrule Warriors (originally intended as Link’s younger sister and then abandoned so she wouldn’t get mixed up with Aryll from Wind Waker) in the subsequent version of that game for the Switch. Everyone wanted a female protagonist so badly that their cries for this conceptual character moved Nintendo to actually release Linkle.

Now, though, they finally bear fruit as we get to play as Zelda. A Zelda that does magic, explores, and apparently is on a quest to protect her kingdom and save Link (I saw the trailer and then immediately ignored every other scrap of news about the game, as is my wont, to avoid getting too hyped up about it, so I’m a bit foggy on the details at best). I mean, I’d have loved to play as the cool armored Twilight Princess version of Zelda that has been more or less showing up in the Hyrule Warriors games, but I do love puzzles and sandbox exploration games. I certainly won’t be disappointed by this game, especially because it graphically matches the Link’s Awakening rerelease graphics, which I enjoyed and apparently never wrote about since it came out in 2019, while I wasn’t updating my blog (I could sworn that was a post-COVID-19 game). I mean, I still prefer the art of Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom over the Link’s Awakening update art, but I still enjoy the more cartoony stuff as well. I’m very interested to see how this new Legend of Zelda game measures up to the relative it is clearly evoking.

Any reservations I have about it can be attributed to the choice in title, “Echoes of Wisdom,” which evokes a near-and-dear piece of Legend of Zelda lore. See, Zelda is the holder of the Triforce of Wisdom, nominally because she is associated with the judicious use of power and the long view on saving the world. I’ve always appreciated that about her and, prompted by many similar “what power would you get” type discussions from my teenage and college years, always identified with that power more than any other. I’ve always answered, when asked which piece of the Triforce I’d wind up getting, that I’d get the Triforce of Wisdom, something I believe so firmly that the one tattoo I’ve got is a Triforce outline with the one piece representing the Triforce of Wisdom filled in (not in gold, of course, since that fades really horrible in high-exposure areas of your body, but in blue). So anything evoking the Triforce of Wisdom at all is going to get a lot of attention from me and the only way I can pump the brakes on my excitement is to invite a little bit of healthy skepticism into the room with me.

That said, nothing I’ve seen has given me any cause to doubt or worry. I’m sure plenty of people will find something to be upset about and I’m sure some of those people will be right to be upset about it. I’m sure I’ll also enjoy myself. It’s not like there’s a Legend of Zelda game I haven’t enjoyed so far. I even enjoyed (and still enjoy) Tears of the Kingdom even if it is sometimes a bloated mess that needs a podcast or audio book playing in the background to really hold my attention. I mean, I still love the way it looks and when that game is firing on all cylinders, it’s a ton of fun to play. It just misses more than I hoped it would. Anyway, I doubt this game will be any worse than slogging through the original Legend of Zelda 1 and 2 games, which was a chore the single time I played them since I was so out of practice with that type of older game that I just got my butt handed to me constantly, until I’d figured out the optimal path for myself through trial and error. This will probably be much more fun than that, if nothing else. And it has so much potential to be fun and good that I’m allowing myself a rare bit of optimism about it. Enough that I might even let myself take a day off (or a long weekend) to play it when it releases at the end of September. I dunno if I’ll actually do that because of work and how much overtime I’ll still be doing at that point of the year, but it’s fun to think about!