“If the Wind Fish
wakes up, everything on this island will be gone forever! And I do mean
everything...!”
Your quest in The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening is to
wake the Wind Fish up.
Everything has to end, of course, of course. It’s an early
lesson we learned when we were children. A principle of nature. Nothing lasts
forever. Easy to say, even as a child, as you turn to your friend, whose toy
you just dropped, for reasons unknown even to yourself, into the reen behind
your house – but really, it’s hard to truly understand.
I hope that maybe after a certain amount of time; in fact I
would ask someone who has more years behind them: do endings become easier the
more they stack up? Can you sign them off with phrases such as “that was good
wasn’t it?”, “do you remember?”, “I miss the time when”. I worry that it’s not
easier. Or that the more frequently we use these phrases the more aware we are
that we’re just using them to make it easier – not that it actually is.
A little practice, however, is surely not to be passed up,
even when its forced upon you. Practice endings which creep up on you, I think,
would probably be preferred here: I remember waking up when I was a kid and
being stricken with grief that the dream I was having had ended. It was about
Pogs – these little round discs of cardboard – Pogs. I enjoyed playing with
them a lot when I was that age; in fact, sadly, and it seems that perhaps Pogs
were for me a formative experience of materialistic obsession; but sadly I broke
up with a friend because he’d claimed he’d won a Pog game against me, and we
were playing for keeps. He had won it, fair and square as far as I remember,
but of course it was my favourite Pog
and rather than hand it over in honest defeat, I called to my older brother. I lied to him and to urged
him to help me keep my Pog.
I didn’t speak to this friend again until I was much older. He’d
apparently forgotten all about the incident with the Pogs. Or at least neither
of us mentioned it. But in any case this dream about the Pogs, very simply: I
had been given, had won perhaps, a gargantuan pile of Pogs. I was so pleased
about it and had started sorting them
all out when abruptly, in the middle of all of this, I woke up and they were
gone. All those piles of Pogs which I’d sorted out were gone. It’s okay, I’m
okay with it. But, God forbid, if I was in that situation in real life (you
know how things just physically disappear like that) I might be able to deal
with it. I might say to myself, ‘It’s alright, life will return to normal.
Remember when that happened to me in my dream.’
I’m sure this isn’t a radically new thing to say, that these
fictional preparatory experiences are good for us, but the reason I bring it up
here is because the plot of Link’s Awakening does a good job of providing this
type of experience. That is, strangely, it pushes the idea by making the player
directly pursue just such an ending.
We know, as soon as we start, as soon as we pick up the
cartridge to play, that we’ve got to “rid the land of evil!” – surely that’s
what one would expect when picking up any fantasy role-play game – but soon
enough we’re told that ridding this evil will simultaneously rid the land itself! The island of
Koholint, where the action takes place, is the product of a dream dreamt by
some magical being called the Wind Fish. The Wind Fish is unable to wake up
because a corrupting force is stopping it, manifesting itself as evil monsters in
his dream which Link (the protagonist) - who has been drawn into the dream
during a storm at sea – must defeat.
However, Koholint isn’t simply populated with evil monsters.
There are also many innocent people who live there and, as is often the case
with dreams, these people have personalities, histories, lives of their own,
created out of thin air (or brain matter I suppose). These people seem entirely
unaware of their oneiric existences and only the bad guys – these evil monsters
– plead with Link to stop; telling him that pursuing their death will also
bring about the end of everyone else’s lives around him – people who you’ve got
to know and who you’ve helped throughout the game. Finally, the player finds
out that this is all true, he hasn’t been duped. The monsters are telling the
truth, all the people Link has met will disappear.
What I like about this ending, this trajectory for a videogame
aimed at children, is that there’s no
two ways about it. It’s a given. All we can do is come to terms with it. And
the ending itself is total. We’re shown scenes of the people that we’ve met and
then (ala Terminator 2 nuclear-whiteouts) they fade away and are gone – you say
goodbye and then that’s it. This is then counterpointed with a scene of the
whale flying once again through the sky. It’s bittersweet. You’ve done your
duty but it brought an end to something else.
Everything we do and strive to do, to achieve, leads towards
an end. What a beautiful thing for a game, and what is essentially an
electronic contraption for children, to say.
However, it seems to me ironic (again in a sort of
bittersweet way) that such a thing should be said by
a Legend of Zelda game. Given that, from it’s very conception, The Legend of Zelda was about creating something which recaptured childhood experiences, it would appear an appropriate place to also comment on changes, on endings, and moving on. However, the series has also come to represent just the opposite. The endless business of rolling out Zelda games to a blindly excited crowd, and the even greater business of rolling out their obligatory merchandise is all part of that eternally regressive Nintendo charm. And of course the business of nostalgia grows and grows, not least in the blossoming enthusiast press which returns again and again to the games of its childhood; not least The Legend of Zelda.
a Legend of Zelda game. Given that, from it’s very conception, The Legend of Zelda was about creating something which recaptured childhood experiences, it would appear an appropriate place to also comment on changes, on endings, and moving on. However, the series has also come to represent just the opposite. The endless business of rolling out Zelda games to a blindly excited crowd, and the even greater business of rolling out their obligatory merchandise is all part of that eternally regressive Nintendo charm. And of course the business of nostalgia grows and grows, not least in the blossoming enthusiast press which returns again and again to the games of its childhood; not least The Legend of Zelda.
Links Awakening is therefore a fitting Zelda game. It
essentially plays it safe, providing the usual standard of quality one would
expect in terms of gameplay; the structure also is extremely traditional. But,
dramatically for a Zelda game, it also promises an end to something, which, in
doing so, promises the beginning of something else!
We could even imagine what Link might do after the events of
the game. Something which might be informed or shaped by his experience. Maybe
he will be rescued at sea and come into a port town and look around with a
strange thought in his head. Maybe he will struggle to form close relationships
in the future... Maybe he will be more determined than ever to enjoy life, or to
vanquish evil wherever he goes. It could in the least make for a good
conversation piece in the next fantasy role-play tavern.
It’s a shame that the next game in the series is Ocarina of
Time, which essentially starts the whole narrative over from the start. Forget
all that, Link’s a child, he never had that informative experience. It’s just
the same with Breath of The Wild; evil always returns, evil is always
vanquished, the kingdom is built and rebuilt, and Link never has any adventures
other than vanquishing the same evil over and over again. He never grows up,
there’s nothing to say goodbye to.
