What defines the Zelda experience?

[Khuutra]

When I played the original Zelda for the first time a couple of years ago, I didn't have a map - naturally, since I was playing on the virtual console. But I was easily lost. So what I did was draw out my own map using a plain sheet of printer paper, a pencil, and a ruler. I mapped out the most important parts of every screen, including the exits, so that all I needed to do to plot out a course to any previously visited screen was glance at the map. By the end of the game, the map was a mess, but I could read it perfectly.

There is one room in Death Mountain in the first game - everyone knows it, if they've seen it - with an absurd number of Blue Darknuts and nothing else. That room is Hell. I can't get through that room without dying at least once, but it hones your skills to a razor edge before you can continue. If you can get through that room, you can get through anything in the franchise.

When you leap headlonng into the Pyramid of Power in Link to the Past, you fall directly into combat with Ganon. There is no intro, no moment to take a breath - just a couple of lines of dialogue and then being thrown headlong into combat. It's intensely frantic, and becomes only more frantic as time goes on. I fought him a couple of days ago and won with a single heart left.

In Ocarina of Time, the final battle begins after the enemy fortress has fallen. He rises up out of the rubble and turns into a monster, huge and ominous and screen-filling, the only visible parts of him being his eyes and his colossal, twisting horns. You could not se him properly, save only when lightning flashed and illuminated him for a raction of a second, giving the barest immpression of his appearance. Your previously powerless helper, in a moment that still gives me an adrenaline rush every time I see it, says "He won't hold me back again! This time, we fight together!"

In the Great Deku Tree, at the very top, there are a series of jutting platforms that lead out into thin air and precipitate a long fall to the bottom of the tree. Most people would never leap from these, except that there are rupees at the end of the platforms, far enough out that you have to jump for them. I remember jumping out for them the first time, and falling - I hit the webbing at the bottom of the tree slightly off-center, so it did not break. But that let me figure out how to get into the lower levels, and I climbed up and jumped off again.

In the Tower of Spirits, Zelda flips her shit and goes ballistic over the idea of the bad guy possessing her empty body. She goes on a long and frantic tirade, ending with her telling Link to go get her body, and then asking a crippled old woman to help him. "I will stay and wait here! It is what princesses do! I UNDERSTAND IT IS A TRADITION IN MY FAMILY!"

In Wind Waker, you come home after a long time, perhaps curious to talk to your grandmother. You can talk to villagers, and they'll mention that she is sick and not feeling well. It's not just that, either: with her two grandchilden gone, she literally worried herself sick, and then spiraled into full-blown depression. She doesn't go outside. She barely eats. She doesn't even know you're there. You need medicine to help her get better. And all this is because you left her alone. Your only grandmother. I have never completed any sidequest with the speed and guilt with which I completed that one.

In Ocarina of Time, there is a soldier that 99% of players will never see, because he only appears after you meet Ganondorf outside of Hyrule Castle Town and before you go into the Temple of Time to pull out the Master Sword. He's wounded in an alley, and breathes his last words of regret before dying.

In Twilight Princess there is a dungeon that does not feel at all like a dungeon, and you spend most of your time and energy getting ingredients for soup to nurse a yeti's sick wife back to health. Every time you bring the yeti an ingredient, he knocks you over in his eagerness to add it to the soup.

In Majora's Mask, I helped Anju and Kafei die in each other's arms, their final fulfillment before embracing oblivion.

In The Legend of Zelda, I burned bushes without knonwing what they might hold.

In Link to the Past, I opened up chests full of hundreds of rupees when my wallet was already full.

I wanted desperately to see Colin returned safely so that I could look his mother in the eye.

I laid a Goron chieftain to rest, and played a lullaby for his infant son.

I listened to a girl sing on the beach just to hear the music.

I held a golden sword over my head, relishing the sound it made as it cut the air.

I leaped over walls on my horse.

I put on a red ring, and felt ready to do battle with evil.

Zelda for me is something like a collection of moments, a string of experiences given cohesion by mechanics. Each game has managed to make me care deeply about what I was doing, whether I was exploring the ocean or fighting enormous lava-dwelling insects or trying to kill undead abominations. The essence of Zelda doesn't lie in any single mechanic or concept, but in those moments that I remember so well.

I don't have a good answer - or, at least, not a concrete one. There is no doubt that I enjoy Zelda games as products of craft, where introduction to mechanics facilitates moving through levels beyond initial challenges (both in terms of combat and puzzles), but I also enjoy them as experiences. You can do so many things in them, whether required to or not, and I don't think there was a tim in a single Zelda gam where I wasn't having fun in some capacity. If it ever happened, I have forgotten it, and all that is left in my memory is the good.

I'm going to go start another file in Wind Waker tonight, I think.