As the last few late blog posts have probably indicated, I am still struggling. Turns out trying to find a good maintenance dose of a medication is actually a lot of putting up with changing and potentially miserable side effects. And sleepiness. Lots and lots of sleepiness. All of which means I’m just barely keeping up with the stuff I NEED to do every day, much less the stuff I don’t need to do but would like to do (such as this blog since it’s not like I’ll die if I miss a post or whatever). I’d get over it eventually, but I’m doing my best to avoid missing a post or being forced to take days off, even if it means posting in the evening and going back to edit it eventually (exact times TBD). So, to lessen the burden, and because I’m also definitely tired and sad, I’ve decided to write a little bit about the the statements Legend of Zelda games make with their stories. Or the lack thereof, since sometimes leaving something out can also be making a statement, just one that’s up to the reader/player to insert. Which, if you’ve read any of my Final Fantasy 14 posts recently, you know is a topic that’s been on my mind a lot. In my opinion, it’s better to say nothing at all than to present ideas but never say or ask anything about them, and the Legend of Zelda spent most of it’s franchise history saying very little at all. You can even go through the history of the console games and see this silence develop from a sort of incidental-to-early-video games to something masterfully orchestrated to eventually something entirely abandoned for a senseless cacophony.
In the game that started it all, The Legend of Zelda, there’s very little storytelling to be had. Most of it comes in the title or the credits, or in the scattered words of the various old men you run into. All of it is very functional and concise, focused on establishing the premise or providing information about the game such as offering items, providing hints, or something that impacts your wallet. The entirety of the game’s story exists within the framing narrative of the title and credits and then whatever you can infer along the way. Which, it turns out, can be alot since all of the text lines the old man says tend toward the evocative. “It’s dangerous to go alone. Take this.” is one of the most famous video game lines out there, endlessly parodied and adopted into other mediums because the odd word choice, “to go alone,” has a lot of implications about your character’s mindset or the mindset of the old man or even about the world at large. Using the phrase “out there” would use fewer characters and convey much the same meaning, but the text says “to go alone” and implies that taking a sword means you’re not alone anymore, which feels like quite the value statement. All of which is reading implication into text that isn’t necessarily there, given that this is just an economical way of establishing your need for a weapon of some kind to make it through the game.
In The Legend of Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, there’s a lot more text in the game. You can talk to NPCs, get an entire story told to you about what is going on in the world, and actually get a full story from the game itself rather than just from the title and end credits. The story, though, doesn’t really try to make any kind of statement. It tells a tale of rescuing a princess trapped by a horrible, long-lasting sleep spell while avoiding the minions of the guy you beat in the last game (who want to use your blood to resurrect their boss) and very little else. The dialogue in game features very little implication about the world at large or your place in it, but still fills the air as much as possible, almost as if they’re trying to make up for the lack of text in the previous game without any concern about what they’re trying to say. It is a misstep the series will eventually repeat, but one that is fixed with the release of A Link to the Past, which has the most text of the first three games. ALttP establishes the idea of Link carrying on some legacy of the past that he must rise to meet as we see a primary world warped by the hostile takeover of its government and a reflection world warped almost beyond recognition by the corrupting influence of the heedless desire for power. Most of this information is conveyed in one-off dialogues, simple statements by NPCs about how the world works, who you are, and what is going on around you. The game isn’t trying to convey via direct storytelling that seeking power for its own sake will warp and correct everyone around, but it will first corrupt those who blindly follow while those who think for themselves will be able to resist for a while, if not indefinitely (as shown by all the royal guards falling in line with the bad guy despite their literal princess being kidnapped and their king killed and many of the nameless villages falling for the propaganda, while those who know Link or who take the time to stop and think for themselves quickly realize that there’s no way that the story coming out of the castle holds true in the fact of everything going on in the world).
In Ocarina of Time, the franchise takes another stab at telling the story it wants to directly, rather than relying on subtext and supposition, but it does so in a rather roundabout manner. You get the story of childhood Link being overlooked and not taken seriously by most of the people who meet him, but he’s clearly forging connections and establishing bonds that will carry into his adult life, building friendships and making allies that will be foundational for any kind of future he’d like to have in the kingdom. Then, as an adult, we get a glimpse into the weight of time and its ability to both amplify and degrade, often through Sheik’s dialogue before teaching you a new teleportation song, that sets up the somewhat wistful and sad tone of the adult portion of the game. Sure, most people are living alright lives despite it all, but you missed years of your life, you missed years of other people’s lives, and all you can do is hope that the passage of time has served to strengthen your bonds rather than weaken them. The game tells the story of growing up, of a world warped by war, and then lets you find the story about lost childhoods, burdens on those too young to bear them, and the weight of knowledge on those too young to be taken seriously (as epitomized by the ambiguous ending where Link is sent back in time one final time to meet Zelda and do who knows what).
Majora’s Mask takes it a step further, telling a focused tale about the pain of isolation and how pain can make someone lash out or act in a way that doesn’t reflect the person we knew. It weaves in small, repeated tales about healing, about carrying on the missions of those who fell along the road, about love and acceptance and the importance of relying on our support networks, and leaves the story of Link, a lost child wandering through a strange forest in search of an unnamed companion, up to the player to read. Why does this child take on all these adult responsibilities? Where is Termina? How did Link get here? Where did Navi go? So much of what the story of Majora’s Mask is built on is left vague and up to interpretation, which necessarily changes how you read everything else. The game turns out completely different if Link is trapped somewhere in his mind and all the familiar faces he is aiding in Termina are actually pieces of his own psyche that he’s trying to put back together after losing himself in the magical forests that were once his home than if Link is has actually left Hyrule and is just roving through the broader world in search of the sense of heroism and care he had back when he was saving Hyrule in Ocarina of Time as a child and as an adult. Which one you believe matters in how you read the final game and how you come to understand the Happy Mask Salesman’s famous line: “You’ve met with a terrible fate, haven’t you?”
In Wind Waker, we get a lot of explicit details about Link and the world we experience, along with what is happening as we play the game, but what is left largely to our interpretation is what exactly happened in the world that caused the whole thing to be flooded. How horrible must have things been for that to see like the reasonable response? We get some details, but they’re scattered and largely incomplete, leaving us to put together what we can of the distant past in what remnants of it linger in our ocean-centric present. Then we have Twilight Princess and perhaps the most complete story told in the game series to date. We’ve got Link’s home life, the pain his village faces as Hyrule is largely conquered, Link’s attempts to do something about the curse slowly claiming the world, and the insidious way that one hero alone can’t actually save an entire country from every evil that plagues it, no matter how strong he is. Mixed through all that are the details of Zelda’s distant position as local ruler, the story of Midna’s rise back to power, and all the people Link gets help from along the way. It tells a story of heroics, but masterfully weaves in the subtext that even heroes can’t stand on their own and no matter what you do, you will always just be the neighbor kid to the people you grew up with, for better or for worse. This is the peak of explicit storytelling, but it has perhaps the weakest subtextual storytelling since the beginning of the the 3D games.
Until Skyward Sword shows up, anyway. This one is a fairly basic story, meant to focus on the beginning of the entire franchise and to focus on the “original” story of good versus evil that would eventually inform all the games that came after it in the weird timeline Nintendo officially put forward. There is some subtext, about responsibility, the scope of villainy, what it means to be antagonistic versus truly evil, but most of the story is focused on the grand, cosmic battle of good versus evil and most of the subtext tends to bend around to that end as well (the purpose of bravery, the power of faith, and the value of trust). Then Breath of the Wild hits the scene and explicit storytelling is now just another framing narrative and all of the juicy, heavy story details are there in the world, waiting for you to find them as you wander the world, listen to the people you meet, and learn about the world you failed to protect once upon a time. Outside of maybe a few hours of the whole game, everything in Breath of the Wild is subtextual, making no statements about the world but presenting you with enough information and ideas to make up your mind for yourself. It brings the limited information of the very first game full circle, from stylized and cryptic information because the game can’t handle anything to stylized and cryptic information because the world is built to let you make up your own mind about it. It takes the explicit storytelling skills the franchise has developed and masterfully layers those in there for you if you want them, but then advances leaps and bounds in terms of what ideas the game presents without comment, what questions it suggests you consider, and what statements you, the player, might make about it. Truly a masterpiece of found storytelling.
Which is then all thrown away by the surprisingly rigid story of Tears of the Kingdom. There is no room for skipping there. Everything must get done just so or else there will be holes that will linger until you manage to find the missing pieces. All of the lovely subtext is gone and all that remains is the chunks of explicit storytelling you find around the world as if the game doesn’t trust you to read and interpret the game on your own. It spells everything out for you and doesn’t even do that with any particular skill as it endlessly repeats phrases, tells the same story from a few different perspectives, and then never actually does anything interesting with all the tools it has accumulate or ideas it has developed. You’re there to destroy the evil, save the princess, and live happily ever after with no room for any kind of doubt, any ambiguity, or even one lingering question.
All of which makes me a little nervous about the future of the franchise. Sure, we’ve seem a few stumbling missteps in the franchise’s history, but nothing quite so egregious as this. There’s no telling what might come next, unfortunately, but the odds suggest that it’ll be another great example of subtextual storytelling. Perhaps the most interesting part of all of this, to bring it back to my original thoughts about how Final Fantasy 14 presents all of these interesting ideas but then never actually does anything with them, is that The Legend of Zelda franchise winds up getting very good at leaving room for you to make your own statements or ask your own questions, all without needing any ideas that are as interesting (or potentially interesting) as the questions asked in Final Fantasy 14. Which just goes to show you that having a decent idea matters incredibly little if you lack the skills or strength to actually do something with it, whatever that might be.