INDICE DE FORMAS

It is unlikely but apt that the name of the damsel in distress, and by extension the name of the game series as a whole, should be inspired by the wife of an American novelist. Shigeru Miyamoto recalled that as he was developing the first game, a PR planner at Nintendo suggested the name Zelda – from Zelda Fitzgerald – for the princess; Miyamoto liked the name, and since he wanted to call the game “The Legend of something” it became The Legend of Zelda. (Miyamoto et al., 2) As for the hero, “We named the protagonist Link because he links people together,” Miyamoto would later write. (Miyamoto et al., 2) The Zelda series is peppered with such in-jokes and odd, cross-cultural borrowings, and in that way the games furnish evidence of those theories of postmodernism that see it as an aesthetic of de-historicized pastiche. The fact that the

narrative material which accrues in the Zelda series is fantasy-based, and mostly from previous Zelda games, shows that it, even more than works such as The Wire or Batman, is exemplary of what I have called the “bootstrapping” epic – an epic that, instead of taking “real” history or legend as its subject, creates that backstory as it goes along. And yet, as the example of Zelda Fitzgerald shows, this can never be absolutely divorced from real culture – the American cultural influence on post-war Japan, and vice-versa, is a deep undercurrent of Nintendo’s success.75 This section will begin by tracing some of these odd and accidental connections, before looking at the processes by which narrative elements are developed and built upon in each succeeding Zelda sequel. After that, I will examine efforts to reconcile the stories of all the Zelda games into one overarching narrative structure, and the ways in which this has been supplemented in media beyond video games.

From the very beginning, the Zelda series integrated elements from obscure popular culture references, Japanese and American alike, with a distinct preference for already- established Nintendo characters from other games. Nintendo’s marketing savvy since its entry into the US market in the mid-1980s is well-known, including the company’s deliberate use of Mario as a mascot, and the cynical promotion of Nintendo characters in cartoons and otherwise-forgettable films such as The Wizard (1989) or Super Mario Bros. (1993) But the accretion of narrative fragments into the games began earlier, and

continued parallel and autonomously from larger marketing directives: in other words, material from earlier Nintendo games often crept into Zelda games out of designers’ whimsy. For instance, examination of the Japanese instruction manual for The Legend of

Zelda reveals that some of the enemies Link fights in the game are from earlier Nintendo

releases, a fact obscured by translation errors in the English localization. The

“Digdogger” boss in Zelda is meant to be a giant version of the sea-urchin enemies in Clu

Clu Land, an early Nintendo arcade game which was later ported to the NES in 1985.

Likewise, the “Manhandla” boss was meant to be the same creature as the “piranha

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The works and corporate strategies of Walt Disney, for instance, were templates for Yamauchi and Miyamoto, especially in the creation of the wildly successful Mario franchise. (Kline et al., 125-126)

plants” which pop out of the pipes in Super Mario Bros. (Mandelin, “Instruction Manuals”) In the Japanese release of A Link to the Past, one item was originally called the “MC Hammer,” after the then-popular (c. 1991) American rap star; this in-joke was renamed the “magic hammer” in the US release, likely in order to avoid legal problems. (Mandelin, “MC Hammer”)

This trend reached its apogee in The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, the first handheld Zelda game, which was released for the Game Boy in 1993. Link’s Awakening began as an unauthorized side-project by some of the design team that had made A Link

to the Past.76 As designer Takashi Tezuka recalled in a panel discussion with fellow designers Toshihiko Nakago and Eiji Aonuma and current Nintendo President Satoru Iwata, “We'd do our regular work during normal work hours, and then work on it sort of like an afterschool club activity.” (“Iwata Asks”) The informality of the project, not to mention the crude monochrome graphics of the Game Boy, gave Tezuka and the others license to throw in all sorts of references that would not (for legal and bureaucratic

reasons) be possible in later games, certainly not within the contemporary complexities of game production. “Cameo” appearances of Nintendo characters continued, especially from the Mario franchise: in addition to a Mario doppelganger, there were enemies such as chomps, piranha plants, and goombas, and even a doll modeled after the dinosaur Yoshi from Super Mario World (1991). Another enemy was modeled after Kirby, the cute, voracious blob who would go on to be a popular character from third-party developer HAL Laboratories. Iwata recalled, “About that time, Kirby was still just a fledgling character, so I think people thought that it was an honor to have him appear in a

The Legend of Zelda game.” (“Iwata Asks”) The English-language localization added

more in-jokes, such as the line “burn, baby burn” from The Trammps’ song “Disco Inferno.” (Mandelin, “You Got Disco in My Zelda”)

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Takashi Tezuka and Toshihiko Nakago became known along with Shigeru Miyamoto “as the ‘Kansai Manzai,’ or Western Japan Comedy Trio” after having collaborated with Zelda’s creators on the earliest titles in the series. (Sloan, 54)

Nevertheless, the appropriation of a wide variety of narrative fragments in Link’s

Awakening proved to have more significance to the epic sweep of the Zelda series beyond

obscure fanboy allusions. The unlikely influence of Twin Peaks was one reason for this. Tezuka recalled that David Lynch’s groundbreaking television series, popular in Japan at the time, made him want to craft an environment not unlike the eponymous small town, which he felt was populated with “suspicious types” (“Iwata Asks”). The constraints of

Link’s Awakening’s topography – an island smaller than the Hyrule of earlier Zelda

games – forced him to reflect on the details of that space. “I wanted to make something that, while it would be small enough in scope to easily understand, it would have deep and distinctive characteristics,” Tezuka explained. During the same discussion Iwata mused that when “events occur at a well-known location … background elements come into clarity,” an approach to designing spaces that he felt could still be seen in much more different, and more recent, Nintendo gamespaces such as Wii Sports Resort’s Wuhu Island. (“Iwata Asks”) In retrospect, the Zelda designers came to see Link’s Awakening as a turning point in the series as far as developing a compelling story and a fully-fledged world; in the game, Link is shipwrecked on a mysterious island and must, through the by- then well-established Overworld-exploration and dungeon-conquest gameplay, awaken the “Wind Fish,” a kind of flying whale creature whose dreaming has created the island world. Link’s Awakening may not have represented an important technological or gameplay milestone after A Link to the Past, but it set the tone for the way in which the

Zelda series would accumulate and recombine narrative elements, and how these would

be deployed within a contained and consistent world.

While tone and whimsical details in the Zelda mythos came from a wide range of

sources, most of the narrative elements are developed within the series itself. In this way the later, landmark Zelda games such as Ocarina or Wind Waker constitute

“bootstrapping” epics; they primarily gather their mythos not from real history or unrelated fictional media, but from the interior fictional history of their own series. It would take far too much space, and be rather tedious, to trace all the ways in which this is accomplished in the Zelda series; instead, we can consider the development of one

particular class of characters that have appeared in many of the games: the Zora. In the original Legend of Zelda, Zoras (mis-transliterated in the game manual as “zolas”) were

the only aquatic enemies, who popped out of lakes to spit fireballs at Link, and they returned in somewhat different form in Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. Beginning with

A Link to the Past, Zoras are associated with specific regions, such as Zora’s Waterfall;

while they are still enemies to be avoided, there is a King Zora who sells Link an item, Zora’s Flippers, which allow him to swim in deep water. In Ocarina of Time, Zoras are presented as a fully-fledged society that live in Zora’s Domain; in addition to meeting their king, Link rescues his daughter, Princess Ruto, from inside the belly of the Zora’s patron deity, Lord Jabu-Jabu. In Oracle of Ages, it is revealed that there are two types of Zoras, the more aggressive River Zoras and the more peaceful Sea Zoras, explaining why the creatures had shifted from being foes to friends as the series had progressed to that point. In Majora’s Mask, Link can use a Zora Mask to assume the form of Mikua, a famous Sea Zora musician, and swim quickly through the water like a fish or dolphin. This ability is similarly acquired in Twilight Princess when Link encounters Zoras in that game who give him the Zora Tunic. In Wind Waker, which is set in the distant future after Ocarina of Time, the spirit of a long-dead Zora named Laruto appears to guide Link; the Zora people have in the meantime evolved into a race of anthropomorphic birds called the Ritos. What is also interesting is that the narrative elements here can be interpreted as fulfilling a formal function regarding Link’s relationship to the gamespace in each Zelda game: encountering or aiding the Zoras often rewards Link with the ability to traverse the gameworld more quickly, by means of waterways or similar devices such as whirlpool “warps”; ironically, the Zoras have evolved into birds in Wind Waker – the game in which the land of Hyrule has long since flooded, leaving only islands – precisely because Link now travels in his own sailboat. In that game it is control over the winds that delimits Link’s movement through space. The most recent Zelda console title,

Skyward Sword, was supposed to have a race that “closely resembled” the Zora, only was

more primitive, in keeping with the game’s setting in the distant past relative to the other

Zelda games, but this idea was ultimately dropped. (Miyamoto et al., 48)

Similarly, the music of the series, composed primarily by Koji Kondo, builds upon previous installments while maintaining continuity from game to game. Most famously, the theme for the Overworld in the original Legend of Zelda (also known as “Above Ground” or “Hyrule Field”) recurs in many of the sequels in some fashion, although

Kondo was careful not to repeat the same title theme for each game. Much in the same way that the “cultures” of characters like the Zoras developed with each new game, the musical cues take on deeper significance as they are repurposed throughout the series. For instance, the cue “Meeting the Maidens” in A Link to the Past, used for the maidens (of whom Zelda is one) whose power has sealed away Ganon, becomes “Zelda’s Theme” in Ocarina of Time; “Zelda’s Lullaby,” a simplified version of the melody, which Zelda teaches to Link, is used as a kind of musical shibboleth identifying members of the Royal Family of Hyrule or their most trusted messengers, and playing the lullaby allows Link access to secret areas and other benefits. “Zelda’s Theme” becomes a traditional leitmotif in many of the sequels, playing either when Zelda appears in some connection with the greater Legend of Zelda mythos (as when Zelda is revealed to be the reincarnation of the goddess Hylia in Skyward Sword), or when some character is associated with Zelda (such as when the pirate girl Tetra is revealed to be a descendant of Zelda in Wind Waker). Thus the techniques of Wagnerian opera or fantasy film scores (most notably those of John Williams or Howard Shore) give an added depth to the narrative world of Zelda that is rare in games; the Zelda scores are also properly bootstrapping in that, just like Star

Wars or The Lord of the Rings, they are composed exclusively for the series and are not

explicitly connotative of music from other unrelated works.77

In this way the Zelda series maintains a remarkable, and yet not quite iron-clad, continuity. The Zelda games are in many cases both remakes and sequels: they are remakes in the sense that they retell the same basic quest story, with innovations in gameplay design and technological sophistication; but they are also sequels in the sense that the storyworlds and the details of Link’s adventure are explicitly set in a different era of the distant past or far future (e.g., Skyward Sword or Wind Waker) or continue from the quest of an earlier game (e.g., Link’s Awakening or Majora’s Mask). In this way the mythos of the series is enormous, dwarfing such other best-selling and long-running video game franchises such as Final Fantasy or Grand Theft Auto, whose storyworlds are

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One counter-example of this might be Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, which, while developing the ideé fixe, a precursor to Wagner’s leitmotif technique, also contains motifs from Church music such as the Dies Irae.

generally discontinuous from game to game; but Zelda’s mythos is also not as intricately consistent as that of the Mass Effect franchise, whose releases plot action in extraordinary detail across the main trilogy and various spin-off games and related media. Attempts to reconcile all the legends of Zelda have kept fans busy for years, although the publication in 2012 of Hyrule Historia, a twenty-fifth anniversary retrospective and art book

chronicling the series, provides an attempt at retroactive continuity from official

Nintendo sources, including designers Shigeru Miyamoto and Eiji Aonuma. The book’s chronology, which includes all but a few of the more obscure spin-off games, begins with the following disclaimer:

This is an introduction to the history of Hyrule, told chronologically, which weaves together the numerous Legend of Zelda stories. Is it a legend? Is it an accurate history of a cycle of rebirth? There is evidence that the story of the

Legend of Zelda begins with Skyward Sword. Up to this point, the legends of Zelda have been surrounded by myth and mystery, but now, with the help of the

following information, you will be able to discover for yourself the real history of Hyrule. (68)

Hyrule Historia then posits a timeline that squares the sometimes-contradictory

backstories of the main Zelda games in a way that is more familiar from science fiction than fantasy – alternate realities that are the result of the paradoxes of time travel.

Ocarina of Time is the game that marks the split into three separate timelines, and in this

way it is once again valorized as one of the most important Zelda games in the mythos. In one reality, the hero Link is defeated, leading to a timeline that includes the events of the early Zelda games released for the NES, SNES, and Game Boy. In another reality, Link is triumphant and returns to the childhood era from which he first set off; this timeline includes Ocarina’s immediate sequel, Majora’s Mask, as well as Twilight Princess and

Four Swords Adventures. The last reality is spun off from the “adult era” of Ocarina,

which leads to the events of Wind Waker and its Nintendo DS sequels Phantom

Hourglass and Spirit Tracks. Just as within the Batman mythos there were many

different, seemingly contradictory Batmen, there are countless possible Links in the

Zelda mythos. The difference is that they are not mutually exclusive:

The heroes of these chronicles all share the name Link. These Links might have been the same person, a series of familial descendents [sic], or a number of heroes

with different names entirely. The Links of certain eras may also have been named after the legendary hero. Hylian princesses bearing the name Zelda have also appeared throughout the history of Hyrule. It is likely that the name was handed down through the generations. (Miyamoto et al., 68)

The Link of Ocarina is called the Hero of Time, a title that is quite apt considering the relationship between space and time that develops in the series, and which I will argue later on is emblematic of the kind of postmodern totalizing which is not uncommon in video game epics. For now, suffice it to say that the advantage of casting the games as both sequels and remakes marks a deliberate strategy in mythos-management on the part of Nintendo, which allows as much continuity as possible to give the series greater narratological depth, while at the same time leaving enough flexibility to leave openings for an indefinite number of sequels.

But there are deliberate exclusions as well, apocryphal parts of the mythos that Nintendo leaves out of the Zelda canon. For instance, many of the Zelda games have been adapted into manga in Japan, and these manga have eventually been translated into English and been made available in North America. One of the first of these was a serialized, full- color adaptation of A Link to the Past, which was written and illustrated by Shotaro Ishinomori and published in Nintendo Power magazine in 1992, before being reprinted in a single volume the following year. There had also been a black-and-white manga

adaptation of the game by Akira Himekawa78 in 1991, but this was not released in an English translation until 2005 to coincide with the re-release of the game on the Game Boy Advance. The clear subordination of these manga to the games, and their publication to coincide with game releases, indicates that their creation was driven foremost by commercial concerns; Nintendo Power, especially, was conceived primarily as a direct marketing tool (Kline et al. 120), and in the late 1980s and early 1990s the magazine often featured short comics as another way to promote Nintendo titles to children. The adaptations of A Link to the Past were followed by manga versions, also by Himekawa, of most of the Zelda games that succeeded them; in each case, some details were changed

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Akira Himekawa is the pen name of two female mangaka (manga writer-artists) who have collaborated on many notable, non-Nintendo manga such as a new version of Astro Boy and Gold Ring, an Arabic- language manga. (Neild)

from the source games’ stories and supporting characters were introduced who were never developed further in subsequent games or comics. These manga were released in Japan concurrently with the games, but were not translated officially into English until 2008, when editions began appearing the in United States and other Anglophone markets.79

The Legend of Zelda manga tie-ins, while not canonical, do represent a certain cultural