The Legend of Zelda series

The Legend of Zelda (ゼルダの伝説 シリーズ Zeruda no Densetsu Shirīzu; often shortened to just Zelda) is a series of video games created by Nintendo and industry legend Shigeru Miyamoto that began in February 1986. The games are set in a fantasy world, and the gameplay generally consists of a mixture of action, adventure, and role-playing. It is considered one of the most influential video game franchises ever created.

Overview

The Legend of Zelda games feature as their central character and protagonist a young Hylian named Link. Link is frequently called upon to rescue Princess Zelda, after whom the games are named. The main villain of the series is known as Ganon, also known as Ganondorf. The action occurs in the mythical land of Hyrule. In terms of story, the earlier games did not deviate much from the standard "save the princess" theme, but later installments have diversified their themes somewhat.

Another important element in the series is a divine relic known as the Triforce, left behind by the three goddesses that created Hyrule. It consists of three golden triangles, one for each goddess, being the Triforce of Power, the Triforce of Wisdom, and the Triforce of Courage. Each piece will bestow its own divine essence on the one who possesses it; typically Ganon has the Triforce of Power, Zelda has the Triforce of Wisdom, and Link has the Triforce of Courage. If the three pieces of the Triforce are united, it will grant the deepest wishes of anyone who touches it.

However, at the core of all Zelda games is not the plot, as the stories of the individual games do not always match up, but a successful mixture of complex puzzles, strategic action gameplay and exploration. This formula has remained fairly constant throughout the series, with further refinements and additions featuring in each new game, and it has made the Zelda franchise one of Nintendo's most successful game series, along with the Mario, Metroid, and Pokémon series.

The Legend of Zelda was principally inspired by Miyamoto's explorations as a young boy in the forests surrounding his childhood home in Kyoto. Miyamoto has mentioned that several elements of his 'adventures' through those woods were taken into the Zelda games, like a lake he suddenly found one day in the middle of the forest, which at the time surprised him for being a totally new discovery for him, and which according to him, has been a recurrent element in all of the Zelda games (both the lake and the exploration and discovery factors).

Games

The following is a list of the main installments of the series, with the original year of release and the platforms they appeared on. Note that the two Oracle games were released simultaneously.

1. The Legend of Zelda (1986 Japan, 1987 America and Europe – Famicom/NES, re-released on Game Boy Advance in 2004 as part of the Classic NES Series)
2. Zelda II: The Adventure of Link (1987 – Famicom Disk System, 1988 – NES, re-released on Game Boy Advance in 2004 as part of the Classic NES Series' Famicom Disk System-selection)
3. BS Zelda (1995 – Super Famicom, Satellaview)
4. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (1991 – Super Famicom, 1992 – SNES)
5. The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening (1993 – Game Boy, Game Boy Color)
6. BS Zelda: Kodai no Sekiban (1997 – Super Famicom, Satellaview)
7. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998 – N64, GameCube)
8. The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask (2000 – N64, GameCube)
9. The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages (2001 – Game Boy Color)
10. The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons (2001 – Game Boy Color)
11. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past featuring Four Swords (2002 US, 2003 Japan – Game Boy Advance)
12. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Master Quest, a.k.a. Ura Zelda (2002 Japan, 2003 US – GameCube)
13. The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (2002 Japan, 2003 US – GameCube)
14. The Legend of Zelda: Collector's Edition (2003 – GameCube, by Nintendo of America, never to be sold separately)
15. The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures (2004 Japan, US, 2005 Europe – GameCube)
16. The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap (2004 Japan and Europe, 2005 US – Game Boy Advance)

Upcoming games

A game, tentatively titled The Legend of Zelda, The Legend of Zelda GCN or Zelda 2005, is confirmed and will be released on the GameCube platform. This has been the #1 most wanted game on gamestats.com since the first trailer was shown at E3 2004.

In addition, a Zelda game for the Nintendo DS has been announced. It has been confirmed in an interview that it will be a "Four Swords" style game (rather than a single-player focused adventure) but the actual details are still unknown. Apparently Anouma himself is working on this one, rather than Capcom/Flagship as with the previous games. Currently Nintendo lists this title as "The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords". The game will feature online play, though, as confirmed in a recent interview in Hobby Consolas in May 2005 with Eiji Aonuma.

CD-i games

Beyond the commonly recognised games, there have been three Zelda games made for Philips' CD-i multimedia system under a special license agreement. These were made without any involvement from Nintendo and they deviated significantly from the other games in style and gameplay. In 1989, Nintendo originally signed a deal with Sony to begin development of a CD-ROM add on for the Super Famicom. However, Nintendo suddenly broke the contract and signed with Philips in the early 1990s. However, the CD-ROM add on was dropped, but Nintendo had licensed the rights to some of the characters, including Link, Zelda and Ganon, to Philips, in the hopes of gaining Philips as a partner on their way to making a compact disc-based console. Philips used the characters to create three CD-i games. Like the system they were created for, these were never very popular and can today be considered obscure and not canonical. They were:

1. Link: The Faces of Evil (1993) – Animation Magic ' CD-i
2. Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon (1993) – Animation Magic ' CD-i
3. Zelda's Adventure (1995) – Viridis ' CD-i

LCD games

There were also two LCD-based games, the confusingly-named "Zelda Game Watch" and "Zelda Game & Watch".

The Zelda Game Watch

The Game Watch was a multi-purpose wristwatch. It not only told the time, but also helped tell a timeless tale, that of Link and the Triforce. It was based on the original The Legend of Zelda and included such familiar foes as Aquamentus and Keese. However, it was the worst of the two LCD games in that the screen was too small to reasonably allow much strategy or movement. The playing area was even smaller than that of the Game Boy titles in the series.

It came in black (shown), red, white, and the unusual choice of pink (a color very unrelated to the game), which eBay sellers claim is rarer than the others; no doubt this is true, as it is to be assumed that only girls would have bought the pink watch.

The game consisted of eight dungeons with four rooms each. In each room, Link would have to collect a sword and/or a boomerang to beat his foes. As reward he gained a key to the next room. When entering it though, he lost his found items and had to recollect them. The last two rooms of every dungeon also had hearts to replenish Link's health. Once all the enemies in the fourth room were dealt with, the dungeons boss (which always was Aquamentus) appeared. To defeat him, Link had to collect a bomb and place it in front of Aquamentus. At victory a Triforce fragment would appear, which, when collected, gained him access to the next dungeon.

The Zelda Game & Watch

The Zelda Game & Watch was released in August/September 1989 (reports vary). It had two screens with a hinge in the center and the buttons on the bottom half, making it look strikingly like an early Nintendo DS. It was a platformer, and the gameplay and items were based off The Adventure of Link.

There was no jump button (Up on the D-pad served this function) and there was only one attack button. To use the health-restoring Water of Life, the player pressed Down on the D-pad. The player can also collect a Tomahawk much as in The Adventure of Link.

The storyline was the same-old "save Zelda" but it did not feature Ganon; instead there were eight stages (similar to the classic Zelda fare of eight dungeons) filled with enemies, with a dragon waiting at the end of each stage. The player fought the enemies on the bottom screen first, and then progressed up to the upper screen to fight the dragon. After killing each dragon the player got a piece of the Triforce. When the last dragon was slain, Link could finally free Zelda. Because of the limitations of the LCD screen there was of course no fancy ending scene. Zelda walks out of her prison and comes right up to Link (just as she does in The Adventure of Link) as if to embrace him, but just before they meet the animation ends, leaving it up to the player's imagination.

In 1998 Toymax Inc. was licensed to make keychain-sized remakes of the Game & Watch series, one of them of course being the Zelda title. It has a significantly smaller screen size, and, unlike its predecessor, looks more like a Game Boy than a DS.

In October 2002 Nintendo included a port of the game as a hidden unlockable extra in Game & Watch Gallery 4 for the Game Boy Advance. It wasn't a secret for long, however; word soon got out, and Zelda fans rushed to pick up the game. However they first had to do well in all the other games to earn enough stars to unlock the coveted port, as Nintendo had made it the very last of the unlockable games with the highest number of stars required to play it.

However the game world is significantly different in this port. In order to fit everything onscreen at once, the second screen was reduced. Its height is about 2/3rds that of the original screen, but it is almost twice its length.

Game & Watch external links

• A Link to the Fan has some excellent closeups of the onscreen graphics. You can clearly see the different frames of the animations (the slightly greyed-out body parts). The first picture is from the cover; while it has been edited to look similar to the others, it is to be assumed that it did not appear onscreen.
• ZeldaLegends.net article has some great pictures and info.
• GameFAQs has a complete guide to the Zelda port.
• Video Game Museum's ending gallery showing the complete ending sequence. *warning, spoilers*

History

The first Zelda appears relatively crude and simple by today's standards, but it was a very advanced game for its day. Innovations included the ability to use dozens of different items, a vast world full of secrets to explore, and the ability to save progress via battery backup. The game also featured a "second quest" where, once completing the game, players could replay the game using a similar overworld layout but with all the items and dungeons re-arranged. Its formulaic story put the player in the shoes of a boy hero in the land of Hyrule set out to rescue the Princess Zelda, by first collecting the 8 fragments of the Triforce of Wisdom. Beside its technical innovations, the gameplay, which consisted mainly of finding items and using them to solve puzzles, battle monsters in real-time, and interact with the environment, was a successful formula, and was widely copied, including by later Zelda games. The game was wildly popular in Japan and America, and many consider it one of the most important videogames ever made. A modified version known as BS Zelda was released for the Super Famicom's satellite-based expansion in the early 1990s in Japan.

The second, also known as Zelda II, was a departure from the concept of the first game as it exchanged the top-down view for a side-scrolling one and introduced RPG elements not found in other installments of the series. Many consider it the "black sheep" of the series; it is sometimes deplored for its difficulty and lack of adherence to series staples. However, Zelda II has its adherents despite its comparative unpopularity.

The third, Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (initially known as Super Zelda), returned to the top-down view and added the concept of an alternate dimension, the Dark World, to explore. It was released for the Super Nintendo in April of 1992 and re-released for the Game Boy Advance on Dec. 9 2002 in North America, combined with the multiplayer addition Four Swords.

The fourth game, Link's Awakening, was the first Zelda to appear exclusively on Nintendo's Game Boy handheld, and additionally was the first not to take place in Hyrule. It was re-released for the Game Boy Color in 1998 as Link's Awakening DX with some additional features.

After a relatively long hiatus, the series made the transition to 3D with Ocarina of Time, the fifth game in the series. Ocarina of Time, initially known as Zelda 64, retained the core gameplay of the previous games and was very successful both commercially and critically. The popular Japanese magazine Famitsu gave the game its first ever perfect 40/40 score. It is also the number one ranked game at Game Rankings. Appropriately, it is considered by many fans to be the best game in the series. Ocarina of Time saw a limited re-release on the GameCube in 2002 when it was offered as a pre-order incentive with The Wind Waker and featured a previously unreleased expansion known as Ura Zelda, containing remixed versions of the game's dungeons. It is known as Master Quest in English.

The sixth title, Majora's Mask, used the same game engine as the previous Nintendo 64 game, but added a novel time-based concept which led to somewhat mixed reactions from series' fans. Gameplay changed in that Link could transform into other versions of himself with the aid of masks. While keeping the same graphical style of the landmark Ocarina of Time, it was also somewhat of a departure, particularly in atmosphere – the game was much darker and had a sense of impending doom, due to the moon being poised to fall upon the land of Termina (an alternate dimension of Hyrule).

The next two games, Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons were released simultaneously for the Game Boy Color platform, and, by exchanging codes, could be combined to form a single story. They were not developed by Nintendo, but rather by Capcom under the supervision of Miyamoto.

The next Zelda was initially believed to be a development of the more realistically styled N64 games, but Nintendo surprised many when it was revealed that the GameCube game, The Wind Waker, would be cel-shaded – a more cartoon-like style of graphic design first seen in Sega's Jet Set Radio. Initial fears that this would affect the quality of gameplay that many fans had grown accustomed to were eased when the game was released to critical acclaim in Japan in 2002 (when it became the second Legend of Zelda game to earn the score of 40/40 from Famitsu a feat still held today by only 5 games) and elsewhere in 2003. It featured gameplay based around control of the wind and sailing a small boat around a massive ocean-based world, and puzzles requiring the use of enemy weapons or sidekick-like secondary characters.

Next in the Zelda series of games was The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures for the Nintendo GameCube. It was another huge departure from the previous Zelda games in terms of gameplay, since it focused around multiplayer gameplay. For the multiplayer features of the game, each player was required to use a Game Boy Advance system linked to the Nintendo GameCube via a GBA to GCN cable. Although it focused on multiplayer, a single player feature was included, where a Game Boy Advance system was optional. The Japanese version included a mini-game known as Navi Tracker's (Tetra's Trackers) that was not included in any other incarnation of the title. The game contains an important first for Zelda; the game has spoken dialogue for all the characters (except Link).

On May 11 2004 at Nintendo's pre-E3 press conference, they revealed the latest game in the series for the GameCube, currently titled The Legend of Zelda. This game was expected to use the cel-shading graphical style from The Wind Waker. However, the new game has a more realistic look, similar to the Spaceworld 2000 technology demo. Not much has been released about the title thus far, though it appears to be quite similar in gameplay design and atmosphere to Ocarina of Time.

On Jan 10 2005 Nintendo released a new game for the Game Boy Advance, The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap in America. The central concept of The Minish Cap is Link's ability to shrink in size (and thus literally combat evil on all scales) with the aid of a mystical living cap named Ezlo.

The new Nintendo portable console, Nintendo DS, unveiled at 2004's E3, is expected to be home to a new take on the Zelda series. Although no information other than its existence has been released, a new game in the Four Swords series has been confirmed for the Nintendo DS.

Chronology

The chronology of the fictional Zelda universe is debated among fans. As time progressed and more games were released, the order of the games in an overall timeline became complex and heavily disputed. It is widely accepted that the games have some connection to each other, usually coming in pairs. For example, Majora's Mask is a direct sequel to Ocarina of Time, and The Adventure of Link is a direct sequel to The Legend of Zelda.

On November 13, 1998, series creator Shigeru Miyamoto was interviewed by Nintendo Power Magazine. When asked where the Zelda games fall when arranged chronologically by their stories, his response was:

Ocarina of Time is the first story, then the original Legend of Zelda, then Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, and finally A Link to the Past. It's not very clear where Link's Awakening fits in--it could be anytime after Ocarina of Time.

Official Zelda.com Old Interview,

(NOTE: This interview has since been revealed to have been mistranslated. Nintendo of America, Inc no longer endorses the quote and Shigeru Miyamoto says it is not the timeline nor was this the timeline he meant to convey)

Majora's Mask was released shortly after and fit nicely into Miyamoto's timeline. Being a direct sequel, it stated that Majora's Mask occurs a few months after Ocarina of Time. However, when trying to piece subsequent games (including the Oracle and Four Swords series) into one timeline, fans do not agree on the fact that there is only one timeline, let alone the order of the games. The controversy of the multiple timeline debate began when Eiji Aonuma in a speech about Kaze no Takuto (Takt of Wind) before it was released in Japan, in which he stated Ocarina of Time had two endings and two time periods. He said The Wind Waker took place 100 years after the end of the Adult Link ending.

However, this statement came under heavy scrutiny when the in-game text of all versions reveal The Wind Waker takes place not 100, but hundreds of years after Ocarina of Time. Additionally, the quote by Mr. Aonuma was given out before the final version of the game was complete. There is also the issue of a translation error or a slip of the tongue. We may never know what Eiji Aonuma meant to say unless another interview asks him to clarify.

Regardless, the exact order of the games and how many timelines exist remains a mystery. However, Eiji Aonuma promised he will do his best to patch it all up and hopefully reveal the timeline someday, and Shigeru Miyamoto publicly stated there is a master document containing the timeline.

Other fans point out that the chronology of the series should not be so rigid. Just as real-world legends are retold with different variations, each game would merely be a different retelling of the same story. With each advancement in videogame hardware and the ever-changing desires of the consumer, the base story of Link saving Zelda from Ganon and recovering the Triforce is embellished, modified, and out-right changed. Just like any other legend, The Legend of Zelda changes as it is retold through the years and these fans believe the chronology debate is pointless.

Cartoon series

The Legend of Zelda was made into a cartoon series as a "show within a show" in the live action Super Mario Bros. Super Show TV series produced by DiC. The animated Zelda shorts were aired each Friday instead of the usual Super Mario cartoon that aired during the rest of the week. The series loosely followed the NES Zelda games. Due to the Super Show's syndicated nature, only 13 animated Zelda shorts were featured within the show's entire 65-episode run. Here, Link and Zelda battled Ganon on a daily basis while keeping Hyrule safe.

Although the series was created to attract fans of the games, like many Nintendo spin-offs it was poorly received by its intended audience, perhaps due to its simplistic plotlines and shallow characters. Link, in particular, is portrayed as a rude, lovesick teenager, contrary to the quiet presence displayed by his game character.

After the cancellation of The Super Mario Bros. Super Show, the DIC incarnations of Link and Zelda appeared in various episodes of Captain N: The Game Master during the second season of the show, where they helped Captain N and his friends fight the evil Mother Brain.

The Zelda Cartoon is based on the Comic series by valiant(not the one in Nintendo Power!) more than the game, yet at the same time, the Comic is very closely based on the game. Link's appearance is changed drastically from the comic series(Again, not the Link to the past comic!) to the cartoon.

See also

• The Legend of Zelda series characters
• The Legend of Zelda series enemies
• The Legend of Zelda series races
• Zelda Classic

External links

• Zelda.com – Official site, featuring an encyclopedia.
• Zelda: The Grand Adventures – Zelda novelizations, and one of the oldest Zelda sites.
• Zelda Legends – Detailed storyline, and one of the largest Zelda sites.
• Zelda Universe – Huge Zelda fan site.
• Zelda Elements – A Zelda fan site from GameSpy Network, currently offline, but the main page now says "returning Autumn 2005".
• Zelda Central – Offers quality Zelda information and news.
• Realm of the Triforce – Offers articles and theories, a forum, an interactive section, fan work, and much, much more.
• ZeldaPower.com – A well establish Zelda sites which is 7 years old as of March 15, 2005. A great media and info center for Zelda.
• Zelda.com.br (Portuguese) – Brazilian site
• Gannon-Banned
• Desert Colossus – A gigantic Zelda fan site that explores the games and the epic storyline behind them.