The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

The fields of Hyrule are where I first fell in love. Like any memorably cliched romance, this love bred microcosms of nostalgia you cling to, forever. I share mine with others, with pride, with perhaps most of the over 7 million people who played The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for the Nintendo 64. And, like the romances of literature and film, this was a timeless love which will also pry at me, always.

I did not fall in love wandering Kokiri Forest. This was a muted, small place. In the Forest, all the villagers wore the same outfit – uniforms of pragmatism, I thought. Their tree houses were difficult to tell apart. You were welcomed in every person’s home; nobody would, or could, ignore you. One pathway, a loop connecting the homes and shop, canvassed the entire town; it was noticeable, its lightbrown contrasting the other endless brown hues of the trees and the homes and the clothes. And though the playful music’s childlike lilt comforted me into staying past my assumed time, its message was clear: this was a place for living, for staying – not adventuring.

Nor did I fall in love inside the Great Deku Tree. The scene it set was far too ominous, and my skills, at that point, were untested and fledgling. The Tree was a place of traps and puzzles; of clacking spiders, hidden and waiting; and of the many-legged Queen Gohma. Hers was a forced encounter. Lurking in her cavern – on the ceiling – in smoky blackness – at the base of the Tree – she would only begin to battle you after you dared to turn the camera upward and meet her single, redyellow eye. You could spend an eternity on her floor, in darkness, listening to her slow march on the ceiling neverending. The audacity to gaze, to face her, was the courage required to continue. I wouldn’t have fallen in love, then; not with this imposed bravery.

In a moment to encompass the patterns of my life, I fell in love once with the forest and its trees once I left them. After crossing a bridge, bidding farewell to a character who, should I have stayed, may have been a lifelong friend or partner, I received my marching orders. I mean this in the literalist sense: The snare which awaits you on the fields of Hyrule is colonial; it is revolutionary. Here is something vast, and sunny, and free. You almost need to look back, to make sure that comfort you left, that Tree and that Forest, are still there, waiting for you. You need to remember the patterns of their foliage and the houses and the paths which, if you just turned back, could keep you. Forever.

Hyrule Field is an imposing question, to any person, of any age. Was that what you wanted, or is this?

Should video games serve no other purpose than to expand imaginations and to allow us fantastical – and faked – lives, then, in some sense, I never actually made my escape to Hyrule Field. Perhaps I should stop playing new games; I think what was essential was back.