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One immediate answer to this kind of question is that it’s a person’s soul that makes them the same person through time. Because a person’s soul is always present, it’s the common element that persists. There are philosophical problems with the concept of a soul. But even if this is the right response, it’s not clear that it’s the right response in the context of the Zelda games. We know that ghosts exist in the metaphysics of the games, but there’s no consistent view of souls or life after death that would conclusively justify this kind of answer to the problem.33

Another solution may be to identify some physical feature of an individual that may persist through time. At first glance, a promising candidate for such a view may be an individual’s DNA make-up. This doesn’t seem satisfactory however, because on this view, a person’s clone would be identical to them even though they may have been born at a different time, in a different place, and have different life experiences. Other physical continuity models identify the relevant physical component to be something like the brain. Both of these models fall short of explaining what is going on in the case of the Zelda games. Even bigger problems arise if we apply this type of a view to the Zelda games.

In a number of the games, Link performs a spell on another creature so he can move with their body. This may be so he can fly to reach something too high for him to reach otherwise or perform some other sort of task that he was unable to perform in his Hylian body. The spell Link casts makes it the case that his consciousness is somehow projected into the creature he is controlling. He does this on multiple occasions in Wind Waker. He’s able to control seagulls to see things that are up high or far away. He’s also able to control the bodies of temple mages to achieve various ends. If the physical continuity model is applied in this case, we can’t make any sense of how it is actually Link controlling the creature. Once Link is disconnected from his physical body, he is no longer Link.

Another problem for the physical continuity view occurs in Twilight Princess. Link transforms into a wolf in various scenes throughout the game. Certainly his brain does not transfer over to his new wolf body, so if we accept the physical continuity model, we would have to accept the result that Link is no longer the same person when he is in wolf form.

Psychological Accounts: The memory of the kingdom vanished, but its legend survived on the wind’s breath.

The first approach to solving this problem is a psychological approach. This kind of theory identifies an aspect of an individual’s psychology as being the essential characteristic which makes a person the same person even through time and change.

One famous advocate of such a view was John Locke (the one in seventeenth-century England, not the one in Lost). Locke argued (in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding) that the essential psychological characteristic of a person is their memories. Experiences, thoughts, and actions come together in the form of memory and this kind of psychological continuity provides persistence of personal identity through time. So, as Locke sees it, a person at a later time is identical to a person at an earlier time if and only if the person at the later time has all the same memories as the person at the earlier time.

This view is not without its problems. For example, a person at age twenty may have memories from when she was five. The person at age fifty may have memories from when she was twenty. The person at age fifty, however, may not have memories from when she was five. The person at age twenty is the same person as the people at age five and age fifty, but the people at age five and age fifty are not identical to one another. Contemporary followers of Locke’s view argue for psychological continuity but add additional conditions that protect the account from this criticism. They argue that a person a