A Master Sword-stroke of genius: The enduring Legend of Zelda

Even people who aren’t ‘gamers’ can probably name a few key franchises or video game characters. Mario and Luigi. Pikachu. And Zelda.

I’ve been a lifelong fan of The Legend of Zelda series — not hard when the series spans four decades. Beginning life in 1986 with The Legend of Zelda, this franchise now spans:

• 20 games across 10 different consoles
• 9 remakes or HD remasters
• Board games, comic books, a cartoon series, soundtrack CDs, books, and manga

My first experience with the series was with The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, a game widely regarded as one of the very best in the franchise and indeed ever produced by Nintendo. I have played five other games in the series, including The Wind Waker, Twilight Princess and Breath of the Wild.

The most recent release of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is being heralded as one of the greatest games of all time — and is well on its way to being the top selling Zelda top-selling game of all time.

So what makes the series so enduring? How does it market to different generations of gamers without alienating a loyal fan base?

Wake up, Link!

For those unfamiliar, there are three key characters in The Legend of Zelda series.

• Link: The protagonist. Link is often dressed in a green tunic with the Master Sword and Hylian Shield. Link is silent — he does not speak and has no lines of dialogue.
• Princess Zelda: Princess of Hyrule and protector of the realm. She has powerful magic and uses her skills to hold back or imprison any evil that threatens Hyrule.
• Ganon/Ganondorf: The main villain. He has aimed to take over, corrupt, or infect Hyrule with evil in various forms. Link and Zelda stand between him and Hyrule’s downfall.

Link is who players experience the game through. The games have always used a third-person approach so players can see Link as he moves through the world and interacts with it. You fight enemies, solve puzzles, explore Hyrule and save the day as Link.

It’s dangerous to go alone — take this!

Storytelling and puzzle-based gameplay has long been at the heart of the Zelda games. The games have never relied on graphics in the same way that Rockstar, Bethesda, or BioWare do, who primarily look at scaling up the graphic capabilities with each new release, rather than radical new gameplay.

Zelda games are all part of the same series, however, they are not typically sequels to each other. Some are loosely connected, such as Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask. Instead, the story of Link, Zelda, and Ganon is one destined to occur in any Hyrule universe — whether that’s on the high seas, in the sky, or across fields and forests.

This lack of connection between the games also allows anyone to pick up any game in the series to play without needing prior experience. Each game opens with a tutorial introduction, allowing players to start familiarising themselves with the mechanics of this exact Zelda game. In Breath of the Wild, one of the first things you have to do is explore the food health system. In Ocarina of Time, the first game to use the sidekick Navi, she shows you around Kokiri Forest.

Core elements of the story don’t change. Link is the hero, Ganon the villain, Zelda the princess, and you save Hyrule. But how that story is told and played out through the game mechanics changes with each installment. This allows each game to experiment with gameplay, settings and dungeon mechanics while offering a familiar tried and tested approach that gamers old and new can recognise.

Using a familiar storytelling pattern is nothing new — there’s plenty of evidence that shows good stories are comprised of the same beats or character tropes. Look at Save the Cat in screenwriting or Propp’s seven character types. What Nintendo does do is rather than relying on graphics or increased peril, they instead look at how to tell new iterations of the story. This method also lends itself to exploring with new types and styles of art direction, gameplay, and puzzle-solving which make the games so enduring.

Evolving Gameplay

By finding new ways to tell the story and not tying themselves to a set style, Nintendo has allowed the franchise to remain open, giving each generation of fans ‘their’ Zelda game. For me, it’s Ocarina of Time and The Wind Waker.

Nintendo has aimed with each installment to offer something new to players beyond a re-hash or direct sequel:

• Ocarina of Time offers open-world play in a 3D landscape — the first in the series. It also uses a time-travel feature allowing players to skip forwards or back by seven years. Navi was introduced as a fairy sidekick to help players with the all-new Z-targeting system.
• The Wind Waker offers sailing with the King of Red Lions and an in-game photography element — it also experimented with elements of humour and comic relief characters. It also introduced a flying element with the Korok leaf that allows gliding, and optional exploration of the map and the islands. This was the first to use the cell-shaded art style which gives a more cartoony look — something that divided fans at the time.
• Twilight Princess features animal shape-shifting, an alternate ‘Twilight’ world, and a darker storyline than others in the series (it is rated Teen, unusual for a Zelda game). Midna, a companion character, also joins you throughout the game. A more realistic art style was reintroduced, and the game was bigger than the previous, offering the open world format and nine dungeons, the most of any Zelda game.
• Breath of the Wild uses a food-based health system that requires you to cook meals or create potions for health. It also uses weapon deterioration — swords, shields, and bows break after a certain amount of use, requiring you to find new things to fight with. It adopts a sandbox approach to gameplay, as while there are main story objectives, you can complete these in almost any order and deviation with side quests and exploring is encouraged. The art style is also exceptionally beautiful, using cell shading once again but with a more traditional approach to Japanese animation than the cartoon style of The Wind Waker.

The Zelda series is brave in that it keeps experimenting and trying new things. Successful elements are sometimes carried between games, but rarely. This can be seen with the use of songs and music between Ocarina of Time, The Wind Waker and Twilight Princess. Instead, the unique elements that define that game are typically limited to that single installment.

This constant reinvention and re-evaluation of what’s possible to achieve with the gameplay keeps Zelda relevant and unique to each generation of gamers who encounter it. Maintaining familiar elements of gameplay and stylistic markers also gives them a sense of familiarity — and game developers are always adding in easter eggs for long-time fans to enjoy.

Hey, Listen!

Link’s silence (bar his shouts and grunts) is part of his character. He is highly expressive through body language and facial expressions (sometimes comedically so). I believe that Link being a silent character is another part of the series’ enduring nature.

Gaming is an embodied experience. Players respond to the gameplay; you tense up in concentration, jump at unexpected scars or enemies, feel elation as you progress. By not giving the character a voice, players must give him one themselves. It gives a deeper level of attachment as he is not speaking for you, the player — instead, you are experiencing things exactly as he does in the game.

The Legend of Zelda’s fanbase is one that spreads generations, and yet it retains relevance for all the different audience types. Those who grew up with the earlier Zelda games are now seeing their own children play them. By evolving gameplay and art style while sticking to a core story structure that works, Nintendo has created a formula that fans can recognise and enjoy (guaranteeing sales) while also not limiting themselves to a finite number of stories.

The Legend of Zelda and the story of Hyrule is one that spans across multiple worlds and settings allowing exceptional creative freedom for the development team, and putting the focus on innovative gameplay and styles as opposed to higher res graphics and a re-hashed story.