Hyrule Will Always Be the Dream
More than thirty years later and The Legend of Zelda keeps pulling me back in.
A boy named Merlin gave me my first Zelda game. Looking back, it wasn’t lost on me that a person named after a wise old man would hand me the keys to a lifetime of adventure. He was a boy from my school and he tended to speak sparingly about the things he liked, except for this one game about a young adventurer washed ashore on a strange island. Somehow, Merlin convinced me to stop playing Pokemon Blue—the hottest game that everyone was playing in my grade four class—and pop Link’s Awakening DX into my atomic purple Game Boy Color.
Before I started playing, I would ask him what the game was about, but all he would say, over and over, was, “You’ll see.” I was an idiot at the age of 10 and couldn’t even find my way to the first dungeon in the game. I told Merlin about this pesky raccoon that kept blocking my path in the forest and asked him for a hint. “Keep exploring and you’ll see,” were his only words to me.
Eventually, I figured it out and made my way through Tail Cave. I somehow beat Moldorm by blindly hacking at it with my sword, all while locked in the bathroom in our house so my dad wouldn’t find me playing video games during the school season. That short cutscene of Link picking up the Full Moon Cello while an 8-bit celestial tune echoed all over the tile walls is burned happily into my memory—the first of many magical moments I’d experience in a Zelda game.
Unfortunately, I never finished Link’s Awakening. When the school year ended, I had to return the cartridge to Merlin. I was making way through Goponga Swamp when he asked for it back, which was odd because I knew he’d already finished playing it and shouldn’t have minded if I kept it over the summer. Our shared experience playing Zelda ended abruptly when, come the following semester, I’d found that Merlin had moved to a different school.
Whenever I look back at my personal history with The Legend of Zelda, I keep seeing this cycle of half-played games from the series, starting with my stunted initiation with Link’s Awakening back in 1998. As difficult as it is to admit, there are quite a few Zelda games that I’d failed to finish, and a few titles that have completely eluded me simply because I didn’t own the Nintendo hardware that could play them at the time. In recent years, I’ve slowly corrected my course and picked up the remasters, remakes, and digital versions of those games and pieced together the game’s long-running narrative firsthand.
This all comes to me now in hindsight, but I consider my relationship with Zelda to be shaped largely by these unfinished encounters. The next game I played after Link’s Awakening was Oracle of Seasons in 2001, exactly during freshman year in high school. This game’s central conceit—a rod that gave Link the power to change the seasons at will—left a lasting impression on me. The world of Holodrum was built like one huge environmental puzzle, which I could manipulate with each swing of the rod. I especially adored the atmosphere of autumn in the game and how the fallen leaves created new paths to explore in the overworld. My love of autumn eventually bled into my online persona, where I presented myself as @autumnedout for more than a decade.
Like my exploits in Koholint Island, I never reached the end of Oracle of Seasons. General Onox, the final boss in the game, proved too tough for the limited stash of knockoff batteries that powered my Game Boy. Eventually they ran out, as did my patience, and I moved on to newer and less taxing video games. Much, much later, I would download both Oracle games on my Nintendo 3DS and give Onox a beating decades in the making.
Despite the hand-me-down Game Boy Advance that I would own a few years later (thanks to my cousins from Japan), I ended up playing The Minish Cap on an emulator. I was a few months away from moving to Manila as a college freshman at UST, but in the meantime, I was hunched in front of the computer in our house in Bulacan, keeping my thumb on the space bar to speed up the Kinstones I was fusing with the villagers of Hyrule Town. The Minish Cap was a vibrant and quaint little game, the last true 2D Zelda game before the Nintendo DS introduced a new dimension to the handheld entries in the franchise. It’s my favorite top-down Zelda game because it applied a memorable visual charm over Hyrule that matched the world’s cheery sense of adventure.
In The Minish Cap, Link had the ability to shrink to the size of an ant and explore the world from a completely changed perspective. The time I spent playing the game also marked the last few moments of my life living small, before I was summarily made a wide-eyed city dweller exposed to new kinds of people with all sorts of personalities, upbringings, and beliefs. I started life in the big city as a small person, attending my Literature classes hidden behind a mop of hair that I grew out over the summer. I was firmly in the closet for about two semesters in college before I had my first boyfriend. By then, I’d long put The Minish Cap out of my mind, which remained unfinished in a folder with a bunch of other emulated games I collected in a previous life.
Later, I’d save enough money to spring for a Nintendo DS Lite and a copy of Phantom Hourglass. Along with Spirit Tracks, it was a severely underrated game because of its simplistic gameplay and invasive touch controls. I loved it and felt protective of the nostalgic feelings that it gave me. It was Link again, a few polygons more complex than when I originally met him, but it was the same promise of adventure, puzzle-solving, and lighthearted action tied with a different-colored bow. Unlike those other games, I’d play both of these DS titles to completion and keep them with me until I started working as a fresh-faced copywriter in Ortigas.
One day, I’d come home to the studio apartment I shared with a friend and find the hinges of our front door completely wrecked. Inside, I’d find every cabinet door in the house thrown wide open and our clothes splayed on the floor like bodies in a crime scene. Of the many valuables stolen from me by intruders we never managed to apprehend, I’d count my Nintendo DS and both Zelda cartridges as the greatest losses of my early adult working life.
Eventually, I’d find the time and the means to catch up on all the Zelda games I missed when I was younger. I’d replay and finish The Minish Cap on my Wii U, followed by back-to-back playthroughs of The Wind Waker and Twilight Princess. I’d play Ocarina of Time on my 3DS and come to terms with the tragedy of Link’s cyclical narrative, and then hate every single second of the time I played Majora’s Mask—by then, I’d acquired a distaste for the inability of roguelikes to respect people’s time, which was a pressure I had to endure while racing against the clock in my bid to save Termina from extinction.
The geography of Hyrule in most of these games always varied in gentle ways. You’ll find iconic locations like Gerudo Desert, Death Mountain, Lake Hylia, or the Lost Woods, but never in the exact spot and in the same condition as the last game you found them in. Nintendo’s openhanded approach to Zelda’s visual style also meant that going back to these locations would always be a fresh, but soothing experience, whether it’s Twilight Princess’ gritty palette, Wind Waker’s cel-shaded polygons, or the soft, painterly vistas of Breath of the Wild. The malleability of this world’s shapes and colors meant that I could play a hundred of these games as I continue to age and it’ll always have something new to show me.
It’s been thirty-five years since The Legend of Zelda came out on the NES. Every now and then I’d see people exclaim how a game like Twilight Princess, released when I was a college sophomore in 2006, was such a formative game for them as a kid, which would make me pause. Slowly, I’d comprehend the meaning behind these words and suddenly feel very old. Pick any of the 19 mainline Zelda games and you’ll find a subset of gamers obsessing over it for being their gateway drug into the franchise, whether it was two years or two decades ago. It encourages me to reconsider even contentious entries like Skyward Sword or Zelda II: The Adventure of Link and see how they contribute to the exalted reputation that this long-running series holds.
As for me, I keep thinking of my own fragmented initiation into these games. Twenty-one years after Merlin handed me his cartridge, Nintendo remade Link’s Awakening on the Switch for a new generation of players. It was, literally, a dream come true—a chance to resume my journey on an island that existed only in the mind of the slumbering Wind Fish. In many ways, my relationship with Zelda has always been that of an unfinished dream. Each time I re-enter Hyrule or any of its adjacent dimensions, I am revisiting a fantasy that I never fully woke up from when I was ten years old. All of them, from universally acclaimed reinventions like Breath of the Wild to clever spinoffs like Cadence of Hyrule, are opportunities for me to keep that dream alive in ways that never feel repetitive.
“Keep exploring and you’ll see,” were Merlin’s words to me in the beginning of this story. He probably didn’t know it at the time, but those words captured the overarching philosophy of the Zelda games: keep exploring and you’ll see. It was good advice, whether it was about getting stuck in a dungeon or seeing what’s ahead of me in real life. Today, that feels a little harder to embrace when you’re trapped with nowhere to go, but I’m glad there’s always the dream of Zelda and all its fantastic worlds to rediscover again and again. As long as I’m awake, Hyrule will always be the dream.
Hyrule will always be the dream.