This episode, the latest in the “I’m Tired And Sad” series, is brought to you by escitalopram and it’s horrible withdrawal symptoms! Everything I do is exhausting and I now know what it is like for your brain to skip a beat the same way your heart can, so I’m going to take it easy today and talk about one of the first video game accomplishments I ever felt proud of: getting to 1000 hits in Orca’s Sword Training without ever once using my shield, no forward jump attacks, and only dodging via the counterattack system or, as my friends and I called it, “Sword Master Mode.” Prior to the game’s release, I didn’t have a lot of local friends since all the kids my age had moved away with their families some years prior, but when a kid moved in down the block who was my age and shared my interest in video games, I started to actually feel competitive about video games and my accomplishments. Before then, I’d only ever played against my siblings with any regularity and I was hopelessly worse than my brother at everything and untouchably better than my younger siblings at everything, so there was no real competition for me to engage in. This new friend was at my skill level (largely determined by our age and coordination) and I got my first taste of competitive gaming. I didn’t much appreciate it, though, since it didn’t really feel fun to win and always felt bad to lose and have other people so visibily (and often vocally) enjoy having beaten me. When the latest Legend of Zelda game dropped, though, it gave me something I could compete in that actually provided me with something when I did well (a sense of personal accomplishment) and avoided the whole competitive nastiness thing I dislike so much about directly competitive gaming.

The first time you return to Link’s home island after leaving for your adventures, you can revisit the elderly man who taught you how to use a sword and he will challenge you to an open-ended training session. Rather than just doing the series of attacks he called out like in the initial training session, you had a relatively free-form fight with him to see just how many times you could hit him before he hit you three times. Ostensibly, the goal of this activity was to help improve your skill in the game’s combat system because it forced you to figure out how far you could push a foe before they’d interrupt you and how to use the counterattack system the game had introduced. What it really did, though, was create a forum for creating your own little competitions (and eventually break apart my family’s 30-minute video game turn system since it was demonstrable proof that sometimes playing a game meant needing more than thirty minutes at a time). Sure, it was cool to get 1000 hits and get the “Sword Master” title, but that stopped being enough pretty quickly for my friend and I (and my eventual high school friends, when we came back around to playing this game) since you could just use the shield to protect yourself from any hit and play super cautiously.

So, once we got to 1000 hits each, we started adding rules to make the challenge more difficult. Since I was first to 1000 (I had patience and discipline even then, more so than most other kids my age, and that meant I accidentally skipped most of the rewards you could get for other hit amounts by getting almost to 1000 on my first try that wasn’t ruined by needing to quit so a sibling could play and then 1000 on my second try of the same type), I was the one to suggest trying to do the whole thing without using the shield. That immediately made the fight more difficult because now you had to either dodge out of the way of the attack or use the right counter attack and doing the wrong dodge or counter would instantly get you hit while just running away was sometimes fast enough to not get hit. Sure, it still wound up being rather formulaic since you could still bait out attacks by hitting Orca enough times, but it took a great amount of coordination. I was the first to hit that one as well, though I had to hit it a second time witnessed by my friend since he didn’t believe I’d done it without the shield on my own since we’d spent so long stuck in the 300 to 500 hit range, but I was eventually able to do it (it took a few more weeks to get it a second time, but I got there).

Since my friend’s parents were divorced and he only stayed with his dad, my neighbor, every-other-weekend and on Tuesday and Thursday nights (I think? It’s been two decades and my memory currently isn’t great due to the brain fog), we never got much further than this before moving on to other games. When I got to high school though, and my friends and I would spend entire days hanging out on someone’s couch (usually my friend Kevin’s since he was the most centrally located), we eventually bored of our competitive staples (which I was fine with at the time since the other top-tier player and I felt the same way about winning and both of us losing to other people was a funny enough circumstance that there wasn’t ever any gloating) and I suggested taking turns with single-player games, which is how we landed on Wind Waker. I didn’t set out to make it competitive, but my friends got to the Sword Training activity and were struggling to get even the 500 hit-reward (it’s a heart container piece, so it was essential to our attempt to 100% beat the game), so I offered to step in and cleared it in a single attempt. Their awe and admiration felt great, so I tried to get more by proving that I could do just as well without using the shield but my first couple attempts reminded me how out of practice I was.

This turned it into a competition. We all had the game and console at home, so we would practice and reunite on occasional saturdays or after school to see how far any of us had gotten. It was a lot of fun that I deliberately extended by being the first to hit each tier but never actually got to the end until someone else had gotten to the 700 range. Once I got there and helped coach my friends, we started adding additional rules, just to see if we could. Since one of the strategies we’d figured out was using jump-attacks to interrupt Orca’s attacks, we banned those. From there, it was a natural evolution to require using only counterattacks to avoid hits. This was a real struggle because, depending on positioning that wasn’t entirely within your control, it was possible to wind up needing to use a counterattack that you just wouldn’t be able to pull off due to the wall or your distance from the target. It required not just the skill to hit the right buttons at the right time, but completely awareness of your position in the room and knowledge of where Orca would wind up as a result of your attacks and counter attacks. After all, dodging an attack with anything other than a counterattack (including moving to reposition and accidentally getting out of range of an attack) meant you had to take a penalty hit immediately. I don’t remember if any of my friends ever completed that particular goal, but I distinctly remember the day I was there, within the last fifty hits, my friends cheering on the couch beside me, and only one hit left before I’d lose and have to restart. Getting that win felt like nothing else I’d ever accomplished in a video game and I’ve been chasing that high ever since.