Link and Zelda's Infinite Replaylist

I'm not much of a videogame nerd, since they take up so damn much time, and I have a lot of other, seemingly more legitimate time-sinks. Studying film is certainly one of them, and writing these little entries here helps me with that. But when a certain game comes along, and it is rare, since I own no game systems made after, say, 2003, I find that I am obsessed with it. It owns me, this game. Our fates are inexorably mingled and the game seems unhappy when I'm away. Or... maybe that's just projection, I don't know. What is clear is that lately, I got all nostalgic about a game I played back in said aught three: The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. This game came out right after Nintendo's under-rated system the Game Cube came out, and I played the heck out of it way back then. It was a lazy fun summer, filled with magic brownie-eating, festival attending, amazing girlfriend-having, and of course, the Zelda. I was immediately enamored with the visuals of the game--how cartoony and yet classy it felt. Friends were annoyed ("this just looks like a Homestar Runner cartoon!") both by the game and the asymmetrical Game Cube controller, but I loved it. It felt like a toy, int he classic kid's sense of the word. It was colorful, musical, fun, and slick. There was so much to do, and it was all so rewarding. I was all about it. I can recall being at work and seeing products that we sell that were representations of treasure chests (coin banks, pinatas, what have you), and just having the deepest need, in the base of my gut, like seeing a beautiful woman, to open those treasure chests and find out what was inside. I was in love with the game.

Well, the summer ended, my girlfriend got sick of me and moved to the midwest, and the Game Cube was returned to the guy who lent it to me. The full reality of life set in, and Wind Waker became a memory, more faded with each moment. Until recently. My friend Leslie and I were talking about how great the game was, and she said "I own it, do you want to borrow it?" and it was good. I said "hell yes, please!" and dove into it again. I was amazed by how much I didn't remember. Maybe it was all those magic brownies, but each new moment of the game was truly new. There were a few "ohhhhhh yeahhhhhh...." moments, the way a memory buried deep beneath piles of brain feels when it's tugged, and we feel almost humbled by the realization that we knew all along. But not as many as I expected. The game was somehow as distant as elementary school, and just as perfect.

What I love so much about Zelda games (they comprise a great deal of my "must play" list) is the world, and it's object-interaction. That you can journey across a vivid and varied land is always fun, but it seems so alive! I know that these places continue to exist and thrive when I'm not there to see them. And there's something so exciting and fun about the very-Zelda motif of a once-great civilization, now in ruins, grown over by weeds and indifferent creatures. The Metroid games do the same thing, but in a spookier way. Stumbling across a dead race that flourished before Human history began is pretty eerie. But in Zelda, the land of Hyrule, and it's people, the long-dead-though-still-watching-as-gods, the Hylians, are benevolent and ancestral. The hero of the games, Link, isn't discovering secrets so much as reuniting with his people. It's intriguing and mysterious in a much more fun and virtuous way. Just that image of a stone structure, half-buried, peeking out through tall wild grass, beneath the sun and winds of a beautiful day... it evokes more than a good story: that is childhood. That is exploration and curiosity and potential. That is humanity.

And the items Link collects! The boomerang, the bow, the bomb, the mirror, the ocarina, the grappling hook--these are the tools of true adventurers. There's a kind of high that comes over me when I've traveled half of Hyrule, and then am rewarded with some cool weird tool, like the Hook Shot, and I realize that I have seen, in my travels, lots of little places where I could have used that Hook Shot. Unlike the linear progression of most games, the Zelda world grows ever-outward, and with each new item or ability gained, comes dozens or hundreds of figurative doors that just opened.: "Wait, any wall with a big crack down it, can be bombed? ...I've seen hundreds of those! I have to go back! There's explorin' to do!"

And in the Wind Waker episode of this series, there are all kids of really bright combinations and tweaks on the by-now-expected ways of interacting with the objects of the world. At one point, an enemy attacks you that can only be harmed by a beam of intense light, but no such thing seems to present... You look up to see tapestries hanging on the walls, one of which has sunlight slipping through. The player must run to a good vantage point, equip the arrows, set one of them alight, and fire at the window-covering tapestry. Then watch in awe as it catches fire, falls from the wall, and gently floats, flaming, down into the room. Now the player can stand in the beam of light and use their Mirror Shield (how cool is that?!) to reflect the sunlight into the still-encroaching monster, and turn them to stone. How the player dispatches the stone-monster is another little puzzle.

And what of the aforementioned Hook Shot, and it's ability to latch on to distant targets and pull Link up to them? How much more complicated it becomes when a player realized that if Link puts on the heavy Stone Boots, that when the Hook Shot latches onto the targets, those targets will actually be pulled down to Link, as he's now too heavy to get brought up. When this dawns on a player, a host of opportunities throughout the many dungeons arise, and there's that high again.

Ya know when you watch a film and the characters do one crazy, cool thing, and they say "we went on a little adventure today"? One event is certainly a little adventure. But not so with the Zelda series. Link journeys through every conceivable landscape, fights a vast array of enemies, some recognizable, but others very alien, and finds all these hidden tricks, traps and puzzles. By the end of the game, so much has happened, that you feel in your bones that the term "adventure" has absolutely been earned. Exhausting but rewarding. Like that summer relationship back in '03.

Zelda means a lot of things to me. Implies, represents, insists on a lot of things. To have finally reached the end of The Wind Waker closed a chapter in my life that had been left open, and was now covered in dust. Oh, and the last boss fight was pretty bad-ass, too.