The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy_ I Link Therefore I Am - Luke Cuddy [53]
Any interpretation of the game’s plot must begin by assuming that what we see when we play is not meant to be seen as exactly what “really” happened in the game world. Instead the game structure relates the story without conveying everything about its world, just as when we read a fairy tale even if the narrator doesn’t say, “The protagonist was in a room with normal flooring and ordinary walls and an average ceiling and …,” we can still safely assume that the minor details of the character’s world that are left out are as one would expect. Characters in stories have an eye color, even if that color is never mentioned. The story that the audience hears is not the fullness of the world of the story. In the same way, when we play a Zelda game, what we get is not the story of that particular Zelda game. Even though it helps to convey that story, the game is not what we are supposed to think “really” happened, just a window that conveys the plot in a roundabout way. The game we play shows us part of another world and invites us to fill in its details with our imaginations.
This approach to the suspension of disbelief allows us to resolve some other problems not mentioned above that are a part of the nature of interactive games. As a videogame, each time a Legend of Zelda game is played, it’s different. Sometimes you go straight to the end of the dungeon, and sometimes you mess around with a side-quest first, and yet other times you just go fishing for hours and hours. If we imagined that the Zelda game we play is the same as the Zelda story we’re interpreting, the problem wouldn’t be how does Ocarina of Time relate to Wind Waker; the problem would be how does my game of Ocarina of Time relate to your game of Ocarina of Time, since in my game I named Link “Carl,” but you named him “Thrillhouse,” and in my game I got the arrow upgrades, but in your game, you collected all the Poes, and so on. Just by assuming that individual games are not the real story, only a version of the story, we can make a lot of our interpretive problems go away.
But new problems arise to replace the ones we remove. Since we have assumed that the game as played is just a window into the larger, “real” world of Zelda, there must also be some way for us to fill in all the gaps in that world if we are to work out the interconnected history of the Zelda universe. However, there are still two big problems that we must face before we can do away with those gaps.
First, when many of the games were made, the thought given by the writers and programmers to the placement of their individual game within a larger Zelda cosmos was cursory at best, since different games present baldly contradictory versions of past events. Wise men, sages, maidens, and magical seals come and go as the means of ensuring that Ganon “dies” for the final time shifts from one game to the next. Of course, no matter how expertly sealed away at the end of a particular game, Ganon inevitably finds a way to come back in the next, with no explanation given for how this is possible or why the means of striking evil down keeps subtly changing from game to game. In interviews, developers will talk at length about the reasoning behind minor game play details like making broken signposts float in the water,37 but spare no more than a dozen or so cryptic words about the relation of their latest game to the previous entries in the series.
When asked in an interview if there is in fact any internal agreement about the timeline of the Zelda series, Aonuma stated that while there is a confidential document on the company’s PCs that purports to show the relationship between the games,