In the world of videogames, Link is simultaneously the best and worst of protagonists. As far as personality goes, he doesn’t have one (he’s brave and… that’s it) but Nintendo have always been able to turn this into a virtue. Link, as has been said countless times including by me, is so named because he’s the player’s link into the gameworld. When you play Zelda games, the intention is that you feel not that you’re telling Link where to go but that you are Link.
This is why, from the leap into the 3D era onwards, Link has deliberately been given a somewhat gender ambiguous design. Even in the games where he’s an adult, he’s not only never given the stereotypically ripped, muscular MCU-style physique of a superhero, he’s actually visibly shorter and slighter than the games other male characters (especially the revitalised ‘Wet’ Ganondorf, who Link, as usual, defeats shortly before the credits roll). Even though the game is pretty unambiguous in stating that Link is a young man, his design is deliberately one that women can project on to, Nintendo having belatedly realised that girls also play games (people criticised this ad at the time, by the way; opposition to sexism was in fact invented some time before 1998).
The ‘Link is a link’ concept worked well enough back on the NES, but in an era where people increasingly expect games to have an intrinsic emotional resonance, including at least as much plot and character arc as a blockbuster movie (that is: not much, but also: not none), Link’s blankness and silence represent a challenge, which Nintendo have attempted to overcome in quite an interesting way.
Before I go any further, I’m just going to say that I don’t care at all about the supposed ‘timelines’ of the Zelda games. There is no timeline. The clue is in the name of the series: The Legend of Zelda. There’s no way of reconciling what happens in each game with the rest of the series (even the direct sequels don’t make much sense), for the same reason that there’s no way of reconciling all the different myths of Troy or of King Arthur. They are all versions of or expansions upon a legend. This is, apart from anything else, a far more interesting interpretation of the plots of the games than trying to tie them altogether, aiming for a chimera of ‘consistency’ in a series that is not and cannot be consistent.
Now, let’s get on with it.
Two leads, two plots
Essentially, both Breath of the Wild and its sequel have two plots each. The first plot is of the kind I’ve written about before. It’s essentially player-constructed and player-led. You develop an emotional relationship to the game as you get better at it. Simultaneously, you’re given more powers, more health, better weapons, so that your intrinsic sense of mastery is complemented by the extrinsic rewards system of the game’s learning curve. It’s not a coincidence that we use similar language when we describe character development and the process of getting better at a game: characters have a ‘character arc‘, gamers experience a ‘learning curve‘. All video games possess this form of character development to some extent and Zelda has historically been very good at it, partly because, as discussed in the intro, Link is a perfect videogame protagonist. The properly open-world format of BotW and its sequel Tears of the Kingdom mean that, when you get bored of something, or realise you can’t beat a Lynel or a Gleeok yet, you (and therefore Link) are allowed to run away and do something else, instead. Part of the reason, then, that these games are so good is that Link’s empty-shell of a protagonist is perfectly suited to an open-world game. I got TotK the day it came out and it took me weeks to take down a Gleeok. Those dudes are scary.
But both games also have that second plot. Appropriately enough for a game called the Legend of Zelda, they focus on the Princess herself.
In both games, this B-plot is presented in the form of cutscenes which are unlocked via exploring the right bits of the map. If you decided to take the time to watch all the cutscenes from these games back to back (and if you’re reading this, I bet you have), you see an almost entirely separate plot in which Zelda is the protagonist and Link is a minor character – indeed he’s almost entirely offscreen in Zelda’s plot in TotK. Link’s own journey rarely impinges on the action as shown in these cutscenes, except that, right at the end, in both cases, Link appears as almost a deus ex machina, wielding the appropriate weapon(s) to allow Zelda to finish off Ganon(/dorf). This is a precise inversion of the player’s experience, where Link is the hero and it’s Zelda who puts in a helpful last-second appearance to help you/Link vanquish the baddie.
Now, perhaps inevitably, these secondary plots aren’t entirely satisfying as far as Zelda’s character arc is concerned. Nintendo have always been quite open about the fact that they design the mechanics of the game first, then come up with a plot after the fact to justify the mechanics. As they see it, Zelda has to go missing somehow or other to give Link something to do, otherwise there would be no game at all. The corollary of this is that whatever she gets up to before or during the time she’s missing is always secondary to what Link is doing. Hence the fandom’s recurring jokes about Zelda desperately holding Ganon at bay for a century or more while Link builds crazy machines or just wanders around picking up rocks in case there’s a Korok underneath. This leaves Zelda with an unsastisfying arc in every game. And it’s unsastisfying not just politically but also in terms of plot.
The nature of the open world means that main ‘player’ plot has to be able to happen in any order. This works reasonably well because, as discussed, Link’s arc is really the player’s learning curve. But, in order for the open world dynamic to work, the B-plot also has to be presented to the player in a random order, even when, as in TotK, it clearly has a specific order. The ‘Memories’ tab on the menu lists the Zelda-focused cutscenes in order even before you’ve unlocked them all. This puts the B plot in an odd bind: there’s clearly an intended order of events but there’s no way of knowing what the order is until you’ve played the game (or unless you, for presumably tragic reasons of your own, decided to play with a walkthrough). Indeed, it’s literally impossible to discover all the Memories in the intended order as the opening cutscene comes second on the Memories tab. Ordinarily, we might call the first memory a flashback, insofar as it clearly happens before the game per se begins, except that its placement first means that’s impossible.
So this is another problem with Zelda’s plot. It has a clear logic and coherence. Briefly, WITH SPOILERS, STOP READING IF YOU DON’T WANT ANY: Zelda falls backwards through time, tries to understand what has happened, witnesses the rise of Ganondorf, the defeat of Hyrule’s sages and the self-sacrifice of Hylian king Rauru, then realises the only way to finally defeat Ganondorf is to also sacrifice herself. Simple enough. But it’s presented in a totally random order. The worst example of this chronological incoherence is the two memories that are clearly, but inexplicably, split mid-scene, so that all the dramatic tension is lost. The second half is strange and confusing if you happen to find it first, while this of course also ruins any tension you might have felt if you’d watched the first half first. Even writing about it is confusing.
The gambit therefore doesn’t quite work. This I think is partly because Zelda is too passive in her plot, which mostly involves her witnessing things happening to other people or being told things by other people, till she makes her grand sacrifice. The odd thing is that Nintendo could quite easily have presented a more straightforward plot by just having the memories appear in the ‘correct’ order regardless of when Link finds them. The downside of this is that the geoglyphs’ meanings would’ve been lost but, again, this could’ve been fixed easily (by having them just be abstracted geometric symbols rather than also being pictograms of a sort). An alternative, albeit more complicated, approach would’ve been to write the ‘memories’ differently, so that viewing them disjointedly still worked for the viewer/player. I feel this aspect of the plot worked better in BotW, where it was quite clear what Zelda wanted both throughout the B-plot and within each sequence: she wanted to unlock her power as a sage, to stop Ganon. We already knew she ended up trapped with him in the castle, so there was nothing significant to ‘spoil’ (except the unsurprising revelation that it was while trying to protect a stricken Link that she finally unlocked her power — and even this was kept back deliberately, so that you couldn’t see it till you’d seen the other memory cutscenes). In TotK, there is a surprise – it’s signalled quite heavily, but nevertheless — and the decision to include that surprise or twist is probably what trapped Nintendo into the slightly puzzling choices they made with the B plot.
While the weakness of the plot is partly a result of the constraints of the game design, Nintendo really haven’t helped themselves by getting so much of the basic stuff so badly wrong. We might not notice the flaws in the plot so much if they’d gotten these basics right. As it is, the voice acting is appalling throughout and, most unfortunately, Zelda herself is probably the worst actor of all. There was no need to hire someone who couldn’t do a passable British accent and then insist that she perform with a British accent, for starters. The script, likewise, is very bad. Consider the ending, where the Sages pledge allegiance to Zelda (for some reason). The wording of the pledge is ‘Those of us gathered here, swear on our lives to support Princess Zelda and safeguard the land of Hyrule’. Really? This doesn’t sound like any oath I’ve ever heard. They could’ve just ripped off a real coronation oath and it would have rung true. The one we’ve ended up with reads like someone wrote a note to the scriptwriter which then got accidentally incorporated into the final draft.
Nevertheless, it’s possible to imagine a fix of this plot by having the finale of the game not be a return to the status quo ante. Essentially, everything Link and Zelda go through – including significant trauma to their bodies – is completely erased by the end of the game. Link’s arm grows back, for God/Hylia’s sake! It would be far more interesting to have Link fail at his job of protecting Zelda. If, in the end, she remained a dragon and Link retained his prosthetic arm, it would give us some more information about both of the main characters. Zelda’s sacrifice would be meaningful. Our impression of Link’s courage and sense of duty would be strengthened by seeing him fight on when he’s already lost. It would also give us a Hyrule bereft of its leader, which would again give us a deeper feeling for the games’ setting: what is Hyrule without Zelda? What could it become?
Even an alternative wherein Zelda is actually crowned would have been better than her resuming her apparent role as eternal princess (presumably, since the King died in the Calamity over a century prior to TotK, Zelda has been de facto queen ever since then). Since Nintendo intend this to be the last of the ‘Wild’ Zeldas, they could have provided us with a more satisfying ending and then simply returned to the status quo with a new game, which is what they always do anyway. As it is, nothing feels settled. The major characters are even wearing the same clothes at the end of the game as at the start! What, did they have them remade? Did they go to Cece in Hateno Village and say, ‘I was wearing these clothes during the most traumatic moment of my entire life, even including the time I actually died, so could you please make an exact replica of them so I can be constantly reminded of the time my arm melted and the princess/queen/love of my life vanished into an interminable pit, and also there was this hideous ancient zombie that told me it had spent millennia dreaming of killing me…’? And while we’re talking of Hateno, did Zelda really steal Link’s house? There’s only a single bed, there. She even took down the sign describing it as ‘Link’s House’ and replaced it with ‘Zelda’s House’. What’s going on there? Does he move to his country retreat outside Tarrey Town permanently at the end?
So, there’s a failure of closure here. To extend a metaphor, plot threads are cut rather than tied up at the end of the game. As a game, Tears of the Kingdom is another excellent entry in the series. As a story, it’s a low point.
Frank Podmore 