Tag: literature

Welcome to the eleventh installment of Piece of Heart, where we look at The Legend of Zelda series through the eyes of a literary professor and examine how its literary elements enhance the gaming experience. This week’s lesson is titled “…So Does Season.” Similar to geography, the season during which a game takes place has a profound affect on the overall theme of the adventure. For instance, Winter usually denotes death and hopelessness, so the despair surrounding Queen Rutela’s death…

Welcome to the tenth installment of Piece of Heart, where we look at The Legend of Zelda series through the eyes of a literary professor and examine how its literary elements enhance the gaming experience. This week’s lesson is titled “Geography Matters…” The gist of it is that certain environments breed certain types of people– culturally, psychologically, financially, historically, and otherwise. Aside from general settings, specific geographical monuments also have significance. The effect of geography is easy to see in…

Welcome to the ninth installment of Piece of Heart, where we look at The Legend of Zelda series through the eyes of a literary professor and examine how its literary elements enhance the gaming experience. This week’s lesson is titled “Flights of Fancy”. This chapter could be wholly devoted to Skyward Sword since the name itself implies a departure from land, but instead we’ll examine literal, figurative, and ironic instances of flight that occur throughout the Zelda series. The Legend…

Welcome to the eighth installment of Piece of Heart, where we look at The Legend of Zelda series through the eyes of a literary professor and examine how its literary elements enhance the gaming experience. This week’s lesson is titled “It’s All Politics”. While I don’t think that any Zelda game was created as an analogy for a real-world political situation, it does usually surround war and the dangers of a power-hungry government. This lesson argues that no piece of…

Welcome to the sixth installment of Piece of Heart, where we look at The Legend of Zelda series through the eyes of a literary professor and examine how its literary elements enhance the gaming experience. This week’s lesson is titled “Hanseldee and Greteldum” so we’ll scour the Zelda series in search of parallels to fairy tales (oddly enough I found none alluding to Hansel and Gretel, nor Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, so I changed the title rather than be…

Welcome to the fourth installment of Piece of Heart, where we look at The Legend of Zelda series through the eyes of a literary professor and examine how its literary elements enhance the gaming experience. This week’s lesson is titled “It’s Greek to Me” so we’ll be analyzing how the influence of Greek myths add depth and resonance to Zelda’s legend. It’s shocking the amount of Greek influence in the Zelda series; from temples, to goddesses, to greedy men turned…

When someone, most likely your English professor, asks you to give an example of a literary work, what do you tell them? Do you respond with any of Shakespeare’s masterpieces? Do you say that any fictional, written work can be defined as “literature”? While the latter definition gives us a good place to start, what defines literature, especially in this day and age, is not so black and white. Hit the jump to see why I include not only Zelda,…

There can be little doubt that there’s always more to Hyrule’s story than we’ll ever know. With each game’s release, the land of Hyrule–as well as Link and Zelda’s eternal struggle with the forces of evil–sees a more thorough history being written. But what about the untold stories unsuited to a game? One of the fondest memories from my childhood was picking up the trio of Myst books shortly after buying the first two Myst games, Myst and Riven. Myst:…