I Don't Know Why I Love Zelda
The games, not the character (though she's cool, too)
It’s spring 1999. I’m five years old, going on six. My family and I have been living in a house surrounded by cornfields for the past five months or so. It’s a whole new environment for me.
In our living room, I look out a window and see a man and a boy walk down the road. My family tells me they live next door, encourages me to introduce myself to them. I’m shier now than I will be in two decades, but I find the courage to walk outside and down to our neighbor’s front yard. In it is Steve. He’s about to become my best friend.
We introduce ourselves to each other. I ask him if he plays video games, hoping he does, so we can escape all this outdoors business. He immediately takes me in his house, into the living room, and turns on the TV and Nintendo 64, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time sticking out the top. On the TV, the moon descends as horse and rider gallop from right to left across a grassy field, and piano and synthesized string instruments kick in to decimate my puny mind into infinite pixels and invisible vibrations. This is my first experience with Zelda.
As you can tell, that moment had a lasting effect: I’ve been a diehard Zelda fan since. But why? I hadn’t played the damn thing yet! Today, I could say I love Zelda because it’s so fun, it’s beautiful, the soundtrack is always on point, its world building is topnotch, the puzzles are engaging, it’s weird but still broadly appealing, and so on. If you asked me right after Ocarina’s opening played what I liked so much about it, I don’t think I could’ve answered.
One clue could be the aesthetics and overall style, especially in regard to Link’s character design. Green is my favorite color, so Link being in his traditional green tunic the first time I saw him was huge. I remember thinking about how fucking cool he looked and how badly I wanted to be him. Swords are always cool, but they’re especially cool to five-year-olds, and the Master Sword is one of the coolest swords ever designed. The cherry on top, though, might be the Hylian Shield. The prominent blue, the yellow/golden Triforce, the red bird with its wings fully spread. In the dictionary of my mind, when you flip to the page with the definition of “striking,” a picture of the Hylian Shield is all you see.
Koji Kondo’s contributions to my Zelda love cannot be overstated, either. According to my Nintendo Music app, the title theme from Ocarina is simply titled “Title Theme.” I like to call it “Angel Tears Turned to Sound” because it’s almost too beautiful to be believed! I challenge you to listen to “Title Theme” and not be moved by its melancholic elegance. Tracks like “Gerudo Valley” and “Song of Storms” are outstanding, too, but this is all about the first minute of the game, so my five-year-old ears hadn’t heard them yet.
I can’t ignore the fact that my time with the Nintendo 64, a console I desperately wanted, was limited up to that point. For my fifth birthday, I asked for a Nintendo 64 and a copy of Banjo-Kazooie and got the bizarro versions instead: a PlayStation and Crash Bandicoot. Before then, I only played 2D games on my Game Boy and my cousin’s Super Nintendo, so my experience with 3D games was limited, too. I don’t know. Perhaps I’ll never understand why Ocarina of Time’s opening pulled me in so strongly. All I can say is I’m grateful to Steve and everyone at Nintendo who contributed to Ocarina’s existence. If not for this game, I may not have my passion for video games.