Why Zelda Doesn’t Need Zelda

Unnecessarily confusing headlines aside, here’s my thesis:

As we all know, the recent Zelda Versus tournament we hosted

over the last month got a little… out of hand. On the surface, getting more than

eight, maybe nine hundred comments on a lot of the matchups is excellent news,

seeing as how our biggest and even our most controversial editorials usually

get no more than seventy or eighty. A closer look at the comments will reveal

that the vast majority of them were strong hate, idiotic spamming, and heated

debates about why fans of certain games are “hipsters” or “nostalgia blind”.

These comments spawned about a thousand different ideas for responsive

editorials, a lot of which I plan to write someday, but one thing stuck with

me, more than anything else I read on the regrettably enormous comments

section.

In some of the later matchups, featuring Majora’s Mask, a lot of fans of the

opposition were making the argument that the game was not a real Zelda, on the grounds that it had very

few dungeons and didn’t actually have Zelda (the character) in it. One genius

even went so far as to suggest that Majora

was just a “generic dungeon game”.

That was when my heart really sunk. Not just because I hated seeing my absolute

favorite game of all time being diminished to that point, but because, well, The Legend of Zelda does not need Zelda.

It needs no Ganon, no Hyrule, and hell, maybe not even Link.

This is not exactly a new idea; ever since Link’s Awakening in 1993, the series has

been proving that it can do anything and everything with a game, without any

necessity of series staples like the three goddesses and the Master Sword. But

if The Legend of Zelda can encompass

every kind of game, what prevents the name from becoming nothing more than a

seal of quality? What actually defines game series as a single entity, if they

are not strictly bound together, in storyline and gameplay?

The truth is, there is no one specific thing that binds the games

together past the story, and their canonical existence in the same universe.

Even that can mean almost nothing, seeing as how Valve’s Portal and Half Life

coexist in the same world. Games don’t even have to be made by the same company

to count as part of the same series; The

Minish Cap and Oracle of Ages and

Seasons are all absolutely fantastic,

with Ages being easily my favorite 2D

title in the series, and they were all developed by Capcom. The series itself

is even divided by an impenetrable line, that which separates the 2D and 3D

games, both with completely different play styles and fan reception.

The greatest thing about the Zelda series, probably the reason I’ve been following since I was

four years old, is its enormous and beautiful capacity for diversity. The

series’ developers haven’t been afraid to try anything, and as a result, we’ve

received masterpieces like Majora’s Mask

and The Wind Waker. The Legend of Zelda, as a title, is so much more than a seal of

quality; it promises an epic, a legend, an experience that’ll remain

unparalleled, a story of heroism greater than that of any other. Surpassing a

good “series standard”, as is normal for series as old as The Legend of Zelda, Aonuma never fears an experiment, and no real

aspect really defined what we know as Zelda.

Hell, Spirit Tracks had trains.

Freaking trains.

These complaints, though not exactly something new, makes me

fear for the series in general; now, in a time where Zelda U is so important to Nintendo’s future, would it not make

sense to make another Ocarina of Time clone,

one that promises to sell millions and millions of copies? After all, isn’t The Legend of Zelda known for being one

of the most innovative franchises in video game history?

The absolute worst we’ve seen of this phenomenon was The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. My

biggest complaint with that game (and trust me, that’s a long list) was its

failure to innovate, its struggle to make a bigger, better Ocarina of Time. While, yes, the game is incredible, especially

when compared to about 99% of games on the market these days, it’s painful to

me seeing it strain itself to maintain fairly close to what has become the

common plotline of many games in the series. Although the game started out with

a genuinely original and, honestly, almost beautiful story, after the fourth

dungeon, it decides to spit out just about every cliché in the book. Twilight Princess would have been a

much, much better game had it not felt the need to force Ganondorf into the

mix, ruining the excellent story it already had, and destroying the

terrifyingly badass villain many had come to love in Zant. And it’s not just

the common Ganondorf/Zant problem, one that’s been criticized endlessly since

the game’s release; I’m a strong advocate for the idea that Twilight Princess didn’t even need to

have Zelda in it at all, as her contribution to the story is practically nil.

Of course, because of the standard realistic graphics and

generic story, Twilight Princess

ended up the highest-selling Zelda

game to date, leaving even the giant that is Ocarina of Time in its dust. And because of this, I’ve always

worried that the series would take a more “mainstream” path, making products

more apt for crass-consumerism than as qualitative as they should be. But that’s

a subject for another time.

Diversity and fearlessness has always, always come out on

top. Call of Duty will fall, the way Guitar Hero did before it. My favorite

games in the series, the games that I’ll always love and treasure above all

others, are the oddballs of the series, the games that decided to, basically,

screw all expectation and do their own thing. Link’s Awakening, The Wind Waker,

and, of course, Majora’s Mask are,

and always will be, the greatest games ever made in my eyes. Of course they

sold terribly. Majora’s Mask

shattered all expectations for Ocarina of

Time 2.0. Link’s Awakening didn’t

even seem to care it was on the exorcist-vomit-green screen of the Gameboy, and

set out to make an absurdly, stupidly great game. Wind Waker almost caused a nuclear war against Nintendo. But these

games are the reason Zelda Informer exists, the reason Zelda still has such a strong following, almost three decades after

the release of the original game. As cheesy as it sounds, they give us meaning.

I can only hope that Zelda

U follows in their footsteps. After all, the biggest project Nintendo’s

ever embarked on better be absolutely amazing. What do you expect from it?

Sound off in the comments!