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But there’s one vital difference between the fantasy of a Zelda game and real life: the load saved game screen. The save game is a vital requirement of many contemporary videogames that allows the player to suspend his reality and enter the games. But it also provides a level of control that is simply not possible in everyday life. While there are formulaic and repetitive aspects of day-to-day life, they don’t necessarily equip you to deal with all, or even most, unexpected occurrences. For example, the fact that you got to Target too late to get one of the first copies of Twilight Princess might have caused you to reserve a copy of Phantom Hourglass upfront. But how could you have known that your Nintendo DS was going to break the day before the Phantom Hourglass shipment was in?

In contrast, most of the skills Link learns throughout a Zelda game will play a key role in solving later problems. Even if the player screws up while facing a boss, she can always reload an earlier game, allowing her to test different strategies and control as many aspects of the world as she likes. The few repetitive aspects of the real world seem tame in comparison—in fact reality seems almost chaotic. You can’t replay your day so that your DS does not break.

But when you play Twilight Princess, or Phantom Hourglass there’s a definite beginning, middle, and end. You are Link, you live in a small village, you begin a heroic (and undeniably fun) quest, you save the princess, everyone is happy, and the cycle goes on… .

And that’s what’s so valuable about this game series. Contemporary philosophers and medical scientists are in agreement on one very simple point: people like patterns. The world may be vast and incompressible, but that doesn’t mean people don’t like to see patterns and formulas in it. As kids, many of us enjoyed picking out shapes in clouds. The Zelda series can be seen as a more complex manifestation of this need.

In fact, Zelda is so formulaic it is almost surreal. This fantastical reality is so alien from that of the everyday world, it’s surprising gamers find it so easy to get immersed in. The fact that it’s easy to fall into Link’s imagined reality reinforces the notion that people like to be driven by a single, overarching goal. Not only does it become relaxing, but it is a potential coping mechanism in a cruel and illogical universe.

Surprisingly, however, there is one group of creatures in The Legend of Zelda that does obey the rules of death in the real world: the dungeon bosses.

The Humanity of the Bosses

The Zelda bosses have a tendency to inspire both love and hate in the player. They often require determination to defeat for the first time—after swearing and angrily throwing down the controllers, of course. The Zelda bosses provides a steadily increasing challenge to the player. At times they engender a great deal of anger and frustration, but not because of their persistent desire to eliminate the beloved Link. No. It’s something far simpler … the bosses inject a touch of reality into Hyrule. Unlike every other character encountered in the game, the bosses are mortal.

As strange as it sounds, every gamer knows this to be true. For all the hours spent defeating one of the big bosses, it has to be conceded that you only encounter them once. Return to the dungeon as many times as pleases you, but you will find that once frightening dungeon room empty. Once you have vanquished the boss and he has no more lives, he’s gone forever, making him, arguably, more human than any other entity in the game.

Link’s lifespan can be increased by the player almost indefinitely, making the character effectively immortal, and the minor minions always re-spawn. But, like the gamer existing in the real world, a boss has a certain amount of life energy that, once exhausted, is utterly gone.

Vanquishing a boss allows the player to continue on to the next stage of the linear journey. But where does that boss go? Back to