#596: The Legend of Zelda
The birth of a legacy
Initial release: February 21, 1986 (Japan)
Platform: Nintendo Famicom, NES
Developer: Nintendo
Super Mario Bros. might be Nintendo’s flagship series, a diminutive little Italian-American plumber(?) and his brother running across a weird fantasy setting out of a children’s book; but as ubiquitous as the franchise is, I don’t consider it to be Nintendo’s most important. No, that title goes to The Legend of Zelda, their long-running fantasy series with a famously convoluted timeline. After all these years of Super Mario being the face of Nintendo, The Legend of Zelda arguably is the true standard-bearer for what Nintendo can offer.
And why not? Super Mario might be a mascot series, but it lacks narrative weight. Over the years it’s proven itself unable — outside of the odd RPG — to expand beyond the core conceit of princess rescuing. In part, this is because it never needed to — it’s Mario, and you know what you’re getting with a Mario game. The Legend of Zelda on the other hand was built on a very different design ethos, combining a somewhat conventional fantasy setting with a sense of childlike wonder at the world — no surprise, considering that Shigeru Miyamoto based the original game (and the series as a whole) on his own experiences exploring the wilderness outside of Kyoto as a child.
(You might be asking by now, since what I choose to review is largely based on what could conceivably fit in the “real world” as opposed to a constructed fantasy world a la Final Fantasy, why The Legend of Zelda somehow rates, and the answer is simple: Earth drift. It’s a common thing among certain long-running franchises, mostly in the realm of video games but it happens in other mediums too — an early installment has a very sketched-out canon, which doesn’t begin to solidify until later entries, and the author relies on a real-world frame of reference to hang her story on. In the case of The Legend of Zelda and its immediate sequel, Christian iconography features throughout, with the hero’s shield sporting a cross on the front, a “magic book” is rather obviously a Bible, and a crucifix is an important item in the second game. There’s no reason, given how the setting is still relatively shapeless, that the first two games couldn’t theoretically be set in a more fantastical version of the real world, so as long as we’re using our imaginations as Miyamoto and crew wanted us to, I figure I might as well headcanon the whole thing as being set in Byzantine Greece sometime after the collapse of the western Roman empire but before the Norman conquest of England and the beginning of the Crusades — so, let’s say sometime in the 8th century. (And yes, I checked, and the etymology of Zelda and Link both fit in this timeline.) The only things that definitively don’t fit are bombs and the stopwatch and I think we can make concessions for both. Feel free to ignore this whole paragraph if you don’t give a shit about my nerd ramblings, but if that’s the case why are you here?)
Of course, every legend has to start somewhere, and Zelda’s started with, what else? — The Legend of Zelda, released for the Japan-only Famicom Disk System (a magnetic disk reader for the otherwise cartridge-based Famicom) in 1986 and the following year for the Nintendo Entertainment System in all markets. Developed at the same time as Super Mario Bros. by the same staff, it was intended to be the opposite: rather than a linear, sidescrolling platformer, The Legend of Zelda was a top-down, open-world game with little guidance for the player. (A cheekier, arguably more hackish writer would call it the Dark Souls of its day.) The lack of guidance, of logical hints or really any sort of signposting, was more than just a factor of wanting to make the game hard (though it certainly is that at times) or a matter of space concerns (something which plagued many ambitious games of the era) but a deliberate attempt to encourage collaboration among players. Years before wikis, years before walkthroughs, years before gamefaqs dot com, kids had the schoolyard. You’d play all weekend and then come to school to compare notes. Perhaps it’s this phenomenon that most makes NES games such a powerful cultural touchstone among North American and Japanese millennials — we all remember talking about these games at school, the same way our dads discussed the game at the water cooler or our moms talked about Twin Peaks over coffee. (Well, not my mom, she was a fundie weirdo who didn’t go in for anything but Murder, She Wrote, but you get the drift.)
The Legend of Zelda is deceptively simple. Most of the backstory is relegated to the manual, something about an evil warlord named Ganon attacking the peaceful small kingdom of Hyrule to seize the Triforce, a series of three mystical artifacts representing power, wisdom and courage, with the titular Princess Zelda splitting the Triforce of Wisdom into eight pieces to keep it out of Ganon’s clutches, and sending her nursemaid out in search of a hero who could defeat Ganon. That’s pretty much it. The game proper elaborates even less on this, and once you’re thrown into the game’s starting screen — a small clearing in the wilderness, with three paths leading north, west and east, and a cave nearby — you’re left on your own to figure things out. You play this hero, a cute l’il dude in a green tunic named Link, who isn’t even properly armed — you need to seek out a weapon in the nearby cave. From there you’ve got pretty much the whole map to yourself, though there are parts that you won’t be able to reach without the proper equipment. There are eight dungeons you must find and explore, retrieving a piece of the Triforce at the end of each. Once you have the complete Triforce you can then go to Ganon’s lair (assuming you know where it is — and yes, you can actually go there almost from the start, but without the Triforce you’re not getting far.)
If this all sounds like a top-down Metroid to you, that’s because it kind of is. Like Metroid, Legend of Zelda as a series has built itself on an item-gate structure. You have an open world, but there are certain parts you just can’t reach until you find the appropriate item. This is more true for later games in the series than in the original; in the original game you have a lot more free reign. You can access five of the eight dungeons right off the bat, though you might find them much easier to tackle in sequence. (These days I actually spend a good hour or so just gathering as many items on the overworld as I can before I ever set foot in the first dungeon — it makes the first few dungeons trivial, but leaves me well prepared for the brutal fifth dungeon.)
Your gear is pretty simple: you have a sword, you have a shield that blocks (some) projectiles, and you have a collection of items that you can swap between as needed, such as a bow and arrow, bombs, or more situational items like a flute. You also have items that serve as permanent upgrades, from rings that make you tougher somehow (and also alter your clothing colors) to a ladder that lets you cross narrow waterways. Combat involves stabbing things with your sword, or hitting them with a boomerang, magic wand, or whatever, until they die. That’s pretty much it. It sounds reductive but it really is that simple — this is a game made in 1986, after all. Sometimes they’ll drop things, like more bombs (which you can use offensively or to blow open new passages) or rupees, large gems which serve as both money and ammunition for your arrows (no I don’t know how that works.) Enemies range from giant octopi to weird bulldog-like humanoids who lurk the forests and shoot arrows at you, to more standard RPG fare like wizards, evil knights, two kinds of slime (one of which eats your upgraded shield) and skeletons and mummies. There’s also boss enemies, ranging from dragons to dinosaurs (?) to giant one-eyed crabs, and so on.
Compared to later games in the series, The Legend of Zelda is weirdly very simple. Its open world is truly open, but there’s very little to see here — what NPCs there are, are hiding in caves (some of which aren’t even visible unless you know exactly what rock wall to bomb) and they don’t have a whole lot to offer beyond cryptic hints and the occasional item shop. Outside of the manual and a brief blurb at the title screen, there’s zero story, just Link, the open wilderness, and a thousand monsters. There’s a loneliness to it that later games don’t always bring across; if you’re coming at Zelda 1 from one of the recent games, you may be shocked at how spartan and uncompromising it is.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, there are a lot of ways to play Zelda 1 these days. Aside from perennial ports (beginning with the Game Boy Advance back in the early 2000s), there’s always emulation, which has its own advantages with the advent of ROM hacking. This most recent playthrough I did, I used the Redux romhack, intended to help bring the first game more in line with its younger brethren, and while I’ll gladly play the game raw as I know it pretty well at this point, playing it with Redux takes a lot of the old-game sting out of it while keeping faithful to the look and feel of the game. Or you could play BS The Legend of Zelda, a super-rare, Japan-only semi-remake of the game in the Link to the Past style for the Satelliview, a short-lived satellite TV receiver that only existed in Japan, which you plugged into the Super Famicom to play games broadcasted down from satellites for an hour every Sunday. (The 1990s were weird.)
However you decide to play The Legend of Zelda, there’s no denying that in spite of its age, it holds a special place in video game history, embodying a sort of platonic ideal, at least in the pop culture consciousness of the mid to late 80s, of what video games might be like. It’s the game that laid the groundwork for everything else. It’s nothing short of legendary.
