The Orb of Zot is the item you are seeking in Wizard’s Castle. I think it’s Zot’s castle that you are venturing into. I’m not sure if the orb/name derive from older (mainframe?) programs, or if the use in ff4 is coincidental.
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i watched that whole thing (on the clock) the other day. i like the part where they reference some scrap of “canon” “lore” about twilight princess in that zelda timeline book as evidence that ocarina of time is a masterclass in subtext
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technically, because it’s called “Legend of Zelda” but the games are actually about Link, it’s all subtext. This is unparalleled literary genius
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The subtext of The Wind Waker is “get over Ocarina of Time already”
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always have been 
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to be fair i think a lot about how the link in Ocarina of Time has all of his accomplishments forgotten or erased, then does the same thing in the very next game, then the entire kingdom gets drowned anyway, then he shows up as a ghost that nobody knows in some later game. i don’t think any of this was on purpose, but the theme of a forgotten hero whose accomplishments are only meaningful to themselves and a very small group of people is pretty cool.
but honestly i think MM does a better job at “subtext” i.e. practically shouting from the rooftops “this is a game about death and grieving and living through suffering!!” which is basically subtlety for gamers.
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I think you can give them intentionality. It’s no accident that the game after Link’s Awakening continues to dwell on identity and personal connection across time and memory loss. That the game ends by returning back to the fantasy world but leaving it in a state of ambiguity, held until the player cuts power. That they continued on this theme into Majora’s Mask.
It struggles under the burden of also being a sequel to Link to the Past, being a system seller, being epic. And in the same way all thematic aspiration seems to have fled the team as they increased production values and focused more on the surface of storytelling. Past Wind Waker, the games say…nothing.
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i don’t know if I would say that they say nothing
to me they say HUUU HYEAAAH YAAAA
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great now I’m getting mad at Breath of the Wild again because despite how good it is and how it even set up one of these stories, every time they explicated it in conversation with another fossil or artifact, they made it worse, they refocused it on reductive, mechanistic lore and a ‘will they hold hands’ tease. Someone teed it up for them and the modern team had no idea what to do with it.
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Breath of the Wild says to me that someone wanted to tell a story about Zelda the person and it got sanded down into nothing
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Yeah, I think with Zelda they found themselves trapped in the valley between ‘visual icon as character’ and ‘interesting, written character’. There’s nothing in how they’ve used her or the world around her or the role she has in the game that can give them purchase to make her interesting so it ends up being a lot of spinning the wheels or referencing stock character types.
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yeah I’d love to play a zelda game where link and zelda have even half as much personality as they do in the cheesy 90’s zelda cartoon
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zelda being sad that she’s been told to be one thing, is good at something else entirely, but forced to focus on the thing she’s not good at is such a strong like, opener I guess? Like, from a writing perspective there are so many ways to go with it, and then
like, what
link is nobody
treat link like max in fury road: a vehicle for more interesting characters
anyway yeah that made me mad, BotW is a Vibes Only game
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Well excUUUUuuuUUUse ME, princess.
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can you explain what you mean by this? I’m having hard time thinking of how either of those themes are dwelled on in oot, or any other subsequent zelda game. they seem like incidental themes at best – like, link’s identity is relevant in kokiri woods, but as soon as link learns that he’s not a kokiri but a hylian destined to be the hero of time, the question is settled and never revisited. the ending acknowledges that link will be cut off from the future timeline, but again after this the ending is just all the characters from the game partying and then child link visiting child zelda’s courtyard again.
like the themes are present but imo they’re incidental and never returned to once glancingly introduced.
They exist in the music, context cues, body language and incredibly reccurant themes of the things you knew and valued and understood in childhood being irrevocably changed when you get back to them, underscored by how whenever you reconnect with one of the major figures from the first part of the game they almost always leave after one final conversation.
It’s…actually got a lot of subtext hilariously enough
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outside of original hardware, what’s the best way to play code veronica right now? my pc is very capable of emulation, if that’s the best route.
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Sure
So in Link’s Awakening, the player visits a fantasy land and forms relationships with a cast of static characters. The characters seem to have been on this island forever, unchanging, and express varying levels of fear over what will happen as a result of the player’s arrival and departure. Are these characters real? Are the relationships real, even if they disappear later? It’s eventually resolved on a semi-ambiguous note; Link, drifting in the ocean, hears the call of a seagull –
Is it Marin? Does she remember you? Do you remember her? What’s the value of literature?
Ocarina of Time’s first act has a similar story. The player journeys through a fantasy world and meets characters anxious about their world changing. When the quest is fulfilled – they vanish. In this case, the player gets to return to the fantasy world after it has dissipated.
Almost all the character stories in the adult world are about how they cope with their own problems. Many of their stories no longer revolve around the player; the player’s world is no longer the center of their world. It’s fantastically heightened because the player saw them in a different context only a few hours ago; the player hasn’t changed much so they can contrast an adult’s perspective against a child’s fantastical understanding more clearly.
The character stories play with the ways people change outside our view, in ways that may not seem fair or understandable. Childhood friend Saria might seem to be easiest relationship to rekindle but your physical differences underline the separation your roles enforce. The heroic Goron leader sees the player as an equal but won’t acknowledge your past. Zelda has adopted a new role and can’t and won’t bring the player into confidence until the very end. Like Tigress says, every character is kept at a distance.
I don’t view the end as happy but as a continuation of the same beat as Link’s Awakening. Sure, there’s a party for other people – and you did this for them – but if the future was erased, does that mean they don’t care for your anymore? Does your work matter if it’s not acknowledged? When the player meets Zelda again, the question it doesn’t answer is, does she know who you are, or care about you, or know anything about what you did? And it leads directly into the starting frame of Majora’s Mask - the player, lost in the foggy woods, alone but for a faithful animal companion.
I’ve always been into stories about being forgotten and the change that happens to other people outside my sight. There’s a scene at the beginning of the alien spaceship joyride movie, Flight of the Navigator, where the main character gets lost in the woods. As I remember it, his parents, his friends go out to look for him, but they don’t find him and the eventually give up. Years later, he climbs out of the woods and goes up to his house – but his family isn’t there, these people don’t know him and don’t care about him. He’s been forgotten. The only place to go is forward and one has to hold that memory inside, assign its own value. It happened to you and it matters.
I think the game is at cross-purposes with its epic role. It spends too long dwelling on magical tokens and destiny and requirements. This was present in Link’s Awakening but the technical limitations kept the focus on the smart dialogue boxes. At its height, Nintendo was well-suited to stack these little stories up but ill-suited to go into detail. They worked best when they could leave it as little character representations. Dragon Quest is the closest comparison to the type of storytelling Nintendo could pull off. Somehow they’ve managed to preserve their indirection through voice acting and cutscene direction; they studiously keep the camera from looking too closely at the intended beat.
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the legend of zelda: the inner light
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Was thinking it had been a long time since a Zelda thrrad happened.
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