So, I have added my fair share of bumps to the Compendium's decorum lately. They were all the more noticeable because the Compendium is at a local nadir in quality of discussion. In my continuing effort to enrich the community, maintain my casual friendships here, and yet still be true to myself, I thought I would share a totally uncontroversial love of mine to which many of you will surely relate...
I love
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I first played it in the summer of 1999, between 11th and 12th grades. I bought a Nintendo 64 just to get this game, spending over $200 of my hard-earned Sunday school teacher's salary between console and game. That was a summer of magic for me. It was the beginning of my last year in the desert before leaving for college, and many of the hardships of my childhood evaporated beginning with that summer, as my pending adulthood and escape to college became less a dream on the horizon and more an inevitable reality dead ahead.
Those of you who know me better know that this game, which I shall conveniently call OoT (Ocarina of Time), was the proverbial last straw which caused all of my childhood storytelling desires, and all of my desire to assert myself as an adult, to manifest in what would become my first novel--a philosophical work of discovery and creation which I am still working on today. In OoT, we learn the story of the origins of Ganondorf, a ruthless king of a desert tribe who desires to rule the world by possessing the Triforce. I was always attracted to ambition, and by that point in my life I had realized that story villains, if separated from their comical cruelty, vanity, and general malevolence, are really good role models. What if Ganondorf weren't evil, but everything else about him were the same? The rest is history: I created the story that would become my novel...the story of a stranger in black armor from the desert who emerges to conquer the world and bend it to his will. Given the timeline with my own pending exodus from the desert into a life of self-determination granted by college and adulthood, it's easy to see how I romanticized myself into the leading role. My study of good and evil has been lifelong, and at that point in my life I had begun to realize, with the help of influences like Star Trek and Carl Sagan, that what people conventionally think of as evil, isn't really evil.
But what I really wanted to talk about is a particular sequence in the game. You'd better not read the rest if you don't want spoilers. When I played the game in 1999, the Forest Temple stood out to me very strongly. As it turned out, I didn't take my N64 with me to college, and so until this Thanksgiving weekend I had never again played the game all the way through. I was very much looking forward to this replay, especially since my girlfriend would be the one at the controls, playing the game for the first time. However, I was worried that "the magic" wouldn't be there anymore. O, how deliciously wrong I was! The replay so far has been beautiful, very stirring and invigorating.
And yesterday we got to the Forest Temple sequence. It contains almost everything that makes a Zelda game great.
First, the sequence has excellent tempo. It's the first dungeon after the midpoint of the game, where serious shit goes down and Hyrule winds up in a lot of trouble. Link emerges to confront the evil Ganondorf and begins his journey by returning to the forest of his upbringing. You're excited, because the events of the game midpoint were so dramatic, and this is your first chance to take action in what amounts to an entirely new landscape. The world is in big trouble. You're itching to move forward! The previous Zelda title,
A Link to the Past, didn't pull this off nearly as well. After the novelty of passing into the Dark World, you're essentially given the instruction to go to the first dungeon, and that's it. In OoT, you not only get a lot of plot about Link's passage through time; you also have to take Link to Kakariko and explore there.
Second, the Forest Temple sequence has a lot of plot surrounding the actual dungeon. This overlaps somewhat with my first point. The Forest Temple is foreshadowed the very first time you visit the Sacred Forest Meadow, and Saria says that she thinks this place would become very important to them someday. Then comes the plot points I mentioned in the previous paragraph: This temple is Link's first chance to kick some King of Evil butt--almost literally, as it turns out! Inside the dungeon, to your immense surprise, the boss of the dungeon is actually (sort of) Ganondorf! He sets up your anticipation for the game's final confrontation later on. Then, after completing the dungeon, you learn who the Sage of the Forest Temple is: Link's childhood best friend, Saria, who must leave behind her entire life to become a Sage. Link returns to Hyrule from the Chamber of the Sages with the knowledge that "Saria will always be...your friend." It was the most touching moment in the entire game, for me. Then, after that, Link witnesses the awakening of the Deku Tree sprout, bringing the circle of life all the way round again--the old Deku Tree is killed after the game's first dungeon--and the tone of the adventure changes with it. It's beautiful.
Third, the Forest Temple has the best dungeon music in the game...possibly of any Zelda game other than the original Hyrule Castle theme. This music enchanted me, and the spell lasts to this very day. I have structured many of my creative ideas around that music. (You can listen to it
here if you like.) I know that music is a very subjective thing, and it won't strike any of you the way it struck me...but tell me that this isn't at least one of the better Zelda dungeon themes ever written. The Forest Temple is a haunted place, on the edge of two worlds, surrounded by the real and the tangible world on one side, and the spirit world on the other. That's what this theme embodies.
Fourth, the Forest Temple has some of the best dungeon design of any Zelda game. I'll talk about gameplay first and aesthetics second. OoT features particularly well-built dungeons, but the Forest Temple stands out even among that illustrious league. The dungeon is filled with puzzles, classic Zelda puzzles as well as new ones which seize on the possibilities of 3D gaming in a way that very few video games after it have managed to outshine. There are the twisty hallways--they blew my 17-year-old mind. There are the Poe Sisters, who seal the sacred flames at the center of the dungeon. There are the chessboard, the wells with buried treasure too deep to dive into, the mysteries of the hookshot and the bow and arrow--both tools which make their first dungeon appearance in the Forest Temple--the jester's board in the lowest pit, and the haunted chamber just beyond it, where the Phantom Ganon dwells--who himself is an excellent puzzle. You have to shoot an arrow through a flame, and move blocks whose other sides you can't see, and climb tall vines, and fight skeletal knights. Spiders and ghosts abound. Parts of the dungeon, you tread over and over, while other parts you only visit once, creating an asymmetry which feels pleasant after the fact. And, as usual, the boss' lair is easily accessible from the main entrance, which is relevant if you die during the boss fight. But then there is the aesthetic side. The Forest Temple is simply beautiful--teeming with life and the memories of life, playing with light and shadow, mixing plush carpets with cold water and timeless tone, interposing beautiful courtyards below the naked sky with dank pits where the little candlelight available seems darker than nothing at all. The whole setting is an overgrown ruin, yet at the bottom of the dungeon, in the boss' lair, is the symbolism of the Triforce itself...making this place one of the most powerful points in the world. The dungeon has a near symmetry to it, which compels you when you realize that you've been to the left-hand rooms many times but whole sections of the right-hand side are still off-limits. The ghosts who hide between different paintings...that's a nice touch too. And the paintings in the boss' lair are suitably creepy--the more so because they are all identical to each other. This is just a friggin' beautifully well-designed dungeon.
Fifth, you have to work pretty hard just to get Link through the forest to the Forest Temple itself. Every dungeon that has a painful setup becomes its own reward to play.
Yeah, this is a great sequence...the highlight of the game, really. It's still early enough in the adventure that you don't feel the end is near. You're still getting used to Link's new reality as an adult. Ganondorf is still out there. Hyrule is still mostly ravaged. I was so pleased and delighted when I got to this part of the game and discovered not only that the magic of my climactic adolescent experience hadn't died, but that there were so many parts of the Forest Temple sequence that I had forgotten about and had the pleasure of rediscovering.
The Forest Temple and its many successes helped form the basis of another character in my story, and, ultimately, became a vector in the arc of my own life. I can think of few more gratifying compliments to pay any game than to say that it helped shape me into who I am.
