Tag: Piece of Heart

The Legend of Zelda games are very complex creatures. Expansive overworlds, winding dungeons, and bustling cities and towns – all full of items and subquests ready for completion. Any Zelda fan who has tried to play a game to 100% completion could tell you that keeping track of items like heart pieces, even when looking at a walkthrough, can get confusing or even overwhelming at times…

Welcome to the twelfth and final 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 Never Just Heart Disease… And Rarely Just Illness.” We’re going to take a step away from the weather in setting, to look at the weather in one’s soul. A disease of the heart is almost always caused…

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 seventh 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 “If She Comes Up… It’s Baptism”. Basically, being submerged in water can represent a character’s rebirth. The Wind Waker in its entirety comes immediately to mind, leading into the lands that emerge to make up new Hyrule in Spirit Tracks….

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 fifth 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 weeks lesson is titled “Marked for Greatness” and we’ll be analyzing how distinctive markings, scars, deformities, and other oddities stand as indicators of a character’s importance. One of the most obvious indicators would be the appearance of the triforce on a character’s hand, but…

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…