Rewriting Twilight Princess: Allies of the Hero

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess was a fantastic game, filled with epic battles, an enormous world, and a…horribly flawed storyline. Each week we’ll be looking at one of these flaws to determine what went wrong and why, as well as to discuss ideas of how the tale could have been rewritten to fix these problems and strengthen the story as a whole. …Preferably without drastically departing from the original storyline of the game, but I make no promises.

In the second half of the game, we meet a specific group of characters who each help Link locate the ancient dungeons that house the Mirror of Twilight Fragments. Referred to in Hyrule Historia as “The Resistance,” Auru, Ashei, Rusl, and Shad are all a great help to the Hero, and if people complain about them, it’s usually just because we didn’t see them more.

But although they’ve escaped the heavy criticism that our previous subjects have each been hounded by, that doesn’t mean that the developers finally got everything right. Even the story arc of the Resistance has a problem that I think needs some fixing up. Let’s see to that, shall we?

The Game We Got

After obtaining the Master Sword, Link is introduced by Telma to each of her four compatriots: Auru, Ashei, Rusl, and Shad. These new allies provide Link with key hints for locating the four dungeons tied to the Mirror Fragments. Do they help much? Eh, not really, but the aid they give is essential to Link finding the paths to the next few dungeons. For a while after their assignments are complete, they can be found again in Telma’s Bar, but they depart for Hyrule Castle at the end of the game to aid in Link’s assault on it. And by ‘aid’, I mean they take out five or six enemies before calling it a day and vanishing completely.

The Problem

While expanding their roles would have definitely been awesome, there isn’t much actually “wrong” with the Resistance members’ arcs. Their job is to guide Link to the various dungeons of the game’s second half; Auru, Ashei, and Shad all fulfill this task rather well, serving as interesting guideposts that point the way and help open up the paths that you need to follow. …Rusl was pretty pointless, and his role here actually kinda ticked me off, but I tend to think of that as more of a gameplay problem. We may come back to him later on in this series (read: we will absolutely come back to him later on in this series), but for now we’ll ignore how he actually hinders your return to the Sacred

Grove.

…but why on earth do I need that Golden Cucco jerk when I already Wolf-jumped across that gap earlier…

*ahem* Instead, what bothers me about the Resistance is their final role in the game.

Endings are, perhaps, the most crucial part of a story to get right and make satisfying. The finale is the last part of a tale you experience, which means it tends to be the thing you recall most clearly. It can make or break a story – maybe the tale was mediocre up until the finale, where it absolutely blew you away; you’ll be recommending that book / movie / game to your friends. On the other hand, an underwhelming ending makes all that good stuff before feel…kind of pointless, you know? You went through some great stuff, but it ended on a sour note and now you wish that you’d spent that time doing something else.

And this doesn’t just apply to overarching narratives – this principle is the same for story and character arcs. We want to see the effort our characters are going through actually pay off somehow, dangit!

The arcs of the Resistance members always rubbed me the wrong way for precisely that reason: we have three, maybe four (if you’re nice to Rusl) characters who have been helping you out a fair bit during your search for the Mirror Fragments. As the story reaches its climactic end, however, their last time to shine…involves killing a handful of baddies and then disappearing forever.

Not to mention that Link probably could have taken them all out himself with ease – and if he couldn’t have, then it would have been one of Twilight Princess‘s rare challenging moments. Which, let’s face it, the game certainly could’ve used more of.

Proposed Solution

I don’t think it’s bad that the group’s final appearance had them taking out enemies – even if they’re never called “The Resistance” in-game, these people are introduced as individuals striving to do what the Hylian Knights cannot. Fighting is assumed to be part of their repertoire, and their final scene is the perfect time for them to show off these combat skills. The time and place, likewise, are good – joining Link in clearing out the final dungeon emphasizes their importance all the more.

What would be nice is if the fight was actually worth having them join. Now, I don’t mean something like a horde of enemies charging them in a rage and them standing their ground while Link runs ahead to confront Ganondorf, but…um… Wait…

You know what? That’s exactly what I mean.

We’ve already remade Hyrule Castle Town into a base for Ganon’s forces – not to mention a part of the final dungeon experience. Link is charging into the heart of the enemy camp, but does he really have time to waste on every single monster? No, of course not. He needs to confront Ganondorf, that beast of a man who slaughtered most of the town and plunged it into Twilight once more, who has been commanding his monsters to attack Hyrulean cities all throughout the game.

It’s the perfect time for the Resistance to jump in. What if, as Link tears down the Twilight of Castle Town, the Resistance members ride up to help him out? The town is in a desolate state and overrun by monsters, right? Surely they can be of use, and not just in terms of combat.

What comes to my mind is obstacles that no one person could overcome on their own. A pathway could be blocked by rubble, and the Resistance members lift a giant slab so that Link can crawl underneath it to continue. They can boost him up to high ledges that he could never reach on his own. And yes, of course, they could help him fight off swarms of enemies as he struggles to reach the castle gates.

The real highlight comes upon their arrival at Hyrule Castle. When Midna destroys the barricade, monsters all across Hyrule take notice and charge in to defend their master’s keep. As more and more enemies arrive, the Resistance members find a fortified position and tell Link to let them deal with these beasts – he needs to focus on defeating Ganondorf, not mere minions.

He probably wouldn’t be too amicable to this idea; abandoning one’s allies isn’t exactly an action I’d expect of the Hero. In order to force his compliance, Auru could use that rocket launcher-esque thing of his to bring down the entrance to North Castle Town, blocking the path while Link is on one side and the Resistance on the other. We wouldn’t want to confine him to this area in case the player wants to do sidequests, so we could also have Ganondorf send forth a few Shadow Beasts with which we could form a portal right at the castle gates, providing easy access from then on.

Finally, at some point during the Hyrule Castle dungeon, we’d get some sign of the Resistance members being alright and having overcome the beasts, because they’re awesome and we don’t want any of them dying. Maybe they’d catch up to you late in the dungeon; maybe you’d just see a cutscene of them finishing their battle; it might even occur in the middle of the boss battle with Ganondorf. I can picture that last one the most vividly – after Link and Zelda are teleported to Hyrule Field by Midna, we could get a scene of the Resistance members facing off against their last remaining enemies, all of whom are crushed by falling debris from the explosion caused by Ganon and Midna’s clash.

And, of course, as the credits roll we’d see that they had all survived. They’d have some injuries that need to heal, of course – none of them are the Hero; they couldn’t come out of such a fight unscathed – but no one dies. That’d just be depressing.

The End Result

Upon destroying the Twilight of Castle Town, Link is met by the members of the Resistance, who help him get through the obstacles of the city portion of the final dungeon. Once they arrive at the gates of Hyrule Castle and Midna destroys the barrier, the Resistance acts as a shield for Link against the monsters that come to stop him from reaching Ganondorf. They blow up the entryway to the castle, leaving him with little choice but to press on while they fight the hordes; despite his fears, after the battle we see that they all survived, because they are awesome.

Just as much as the tales they are contained within, character arcs need to follow a progression. A character can’t just be shoved aside or relegated to a status that is below their station in the end – if they were depicted as important during the tale, that importance needs to be carried into the finale. Otherwise they either do nothing, in which case we wonder why they were included in the first place, or they are given a minor role that just feels forced – that feels like it was included only because the writer decided, “well, we have to have them do something.”

That’s how the final scene of the Resistance’s members’ always seemed to me: they were only given a scene at the end because the developers felt it necessary to include the group somewhere, not because it actually mattered that they be there. Given the importance that the Resistance held during the second half of Twilight Princess‘s storyline, they deserved more.

Of course, they aren’t the only characters who felt that way, and unfortunately next week’s subject was more like that for the entire game. Princess Zelda (yeah…not even going to bother being vague about this one) was there throughout, sure, but what exactly did she do besides serve as a guidepost? Well, that and give up her life to save Midna…I think. It’s hard to say; we really can’t explain what happened in that scene. Vanishing like that…and then somehow her body’s still in the Castle…and then… Argh, even now it makes my head hurt. Oh well, I’m getting ahead of myself anyway. We’ll talk through it next week.

Until then, this is Alpha, signing off to go do…stuff.

“Rewriting Twilight Princess” is a series focused on examining the many narrative issues of this epic Zelda game in an attempt to understand why it has garnered such negativity from the fanbase over the years. Join us each week as Tyler “Alpha” Meehan delves into each of these issues, explains what was wrong with it, and explores ideas for how the storyline could have been rewritten to salvage such problems.

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