What Makes the Legend of Zelda Games so Special?

Catching lightning in a bottle is a rare feat and few studios in the videogame industry have managed to catch that lightning and produce a smash hit. Even fewer manage to be a lightning rod; channeling the energy straight into bottles ready to be sold at $59.99 a pop. Nintendo is one such studio. Listing Nintendo series is like reading the roster for a gaming all-star team: Mario, Donkey Kong, Metroid, Pokémon, Kirby, and Zelda. While not its best-selling series, the Legend of Zelda does seem to have a unique hold on Nintendo’s fans. In several polls, like this one conducted by GameSpot, the Legend of Zelda comes out on top as people’s favorite Nintendo series. In online lists ranking Nintendo’s franchises, Zelda also frequently comes out as the top dog. The highest-ranked game of all time on Metacritic, a popular review aggregating website, is The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Finding a niche among series with as much name-brand recognition as Mario and Pokémon is no small feat and it speaks to the power that the Zelda games have over their fans. So, what is it about Zelda that makes it so special? Why do millions of people from all walks of life still wait for new releases with bated breath? To answer these questions, we need to meet two young Japanese boys: one spelunking in the caves around Kyoto and the other designing intricate marionette dolls to the north in Nagano.

Shigeru Miyamoto’s Overworld

The first boy, Shigeru Miyamoto, is a Nintendo legend. He spent his childhood exploring the caves and fields around his home in Kyoto. Of this experience, Miyamoto said in an interview that “there were plenty of caves and mountains. We didn’t have that many toys to play with, so I would make slingshots or use sticks and twigs to make puppets and keep myself amused.” This childlike sense of wonder Miyamoto gained from his childhood pervades the Legend of Zelda games and defines much of the underlying ethic behind Nintendo’s game-design philosophy.

Miyamoto came to work for Nintendo in 1977 and is credited as the creator of Mario, Donkey Kong, Star Fox, Pikmin, and the Legend of Zelda. Early during his time at Nintendo, Miyamoto and his team were tasked with the production of the first Super Mario Bros. game for the Famicom system (Nintendo Entertainment System in the U.S.). Once that game was nearing completion, Nintendo asked Miyamoto to make a game for the new Famicom Disk System, which had the capability to store much more data and thus allow Miyamoto’s team more creative freedom over the nascent project. In designing the Super Mario Bros. game, Miyamoto had designed a unidirectional romp wherein players were tested on their ability to jump, dodge, and run forward. This new disk system, with its increased memory, allowed for something multidirectional, something much closer to Miyamoto’s childhood experiences: an overworld.

The Legend of Zelda (1986) was revolutionary. Players were dropped into the land of Hyrule with complete control over their destiny. They could explore caves, bomb cracked walls to reveal new areas, or simply walk around the overworld and fight enemies. This freedom was coupled with a feature that game players take for granted today but which was exceedingly rare at the time; the ability to save. Saving your game meant that players were not simply playing arcade games in their homes, it was the birth of something altogether new. The ability to explore freely and to save one’s progress turned the myopic and simple tests of reaction time that videogames were into real adventures. These virtual adventures tested the player’s problem-solving abilities and got them to think abstractly about progression. Gone were the days of infinitely running to the right side of the screen and stomping on goombas, but the overworld alone was not enough. There needed to be something mysterious lying beneath the surface that pushed players to continue their exploration. The solution: a young boy from Nagano.

Eiji Aonuma’s Dungeons

Miyamoto based his idea for an interactive overworld on his experiences as a child exploring caves and mountains. Eiji Aonuma, on the other hand, based his intricate dungeon design on a childhood experience as well, though a very different one: building and designing marionette dolls. These marionette dolls were not mere inanimate objects like most dolls, they had interactive elements. Pushing a button or pulling some piece of the doll would affect some other part of the doll. Aonuma’s dungeons work in a similar way.

Nintendo had made a number of Zelda games before Aonuma took over dungeon design in 1998’s The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, however, before Aonuma’s arrival the objectives in each dungeon were more linear. Players were tasked with finding some way to access the dungeon in the overworld, and then they progressed roughly in a straight line from room to room, defeating enemies and solving little puzzles along the way until finally, they would fight the boss: rinse and repeat. Aonuma remembered his experiences designing intricate mechanisms in his youth and put that skill to use as the director and dungeon designer in Ocarina of Time. In an Aonuma- designed dungeon, a player must not see the layout as a series of individual rooms, but as a cohesive whole. In the water temple of Ocarina of Time, for example, players are given control over the water level in the dungeon and must use their critical thinking skills to find the path forward. In his online video series, Boss Keys, YouTuber Mark Brown of the channel Game Maker’s Toolkit had this to say of Aonuma’s dungeons, “they challenge something that videogames rarely test you on; your spatial awareness.”

Combat, exploration, and spatial awareness; it is this combination of mental challenges that makes the Legend of Zelda what it is. Today, many games have flashy combat systems, puzzles, and dark dungeons to explore. Few games ask their players to consider all three elements as a part of a succinct whole. Add to that beautiful art, meaningful stories, and a wonderful soundtrack based on composer Koji Kondo’s original work in the 1980s and it is no surprise why fans are so enamored. In the most recent game in the series, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, players can explore a massive overworld and more than 120 mini-dungeons called shrines. There are also 4 massive mechanical beasts, infected with malice from the game’s antagonist Calamity Ganon, which can be intricately controlled by the player to create a number of thought-provoking puzzles that require the use of a player’s visuospatial intelligence (the divine beasts best capture Aonuma’s experience of building marionette dolls). In Breath of the Wild, exploration and progression are only limited by imagination.

This May, Nintendo’s newest entry to the series is set to be released; The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. We currently have limited knowledge about how overworld exploration or dungeon crawling will work in the game, but fans are excited. The game was awarded 2022’s “most anticipated” award by The Videogame Awards, a popular ceremony dedicated to honoring the year’s most influential games. Aonuma, working as the producer for the new game, will likely continue the trend of including complex dungeon design and stimulating puzzle solving. If coupled with an overworld design based on Miyamoto’s original philosophy of unencumbered freedom, it seems unlikely that the game will be anything less than another bolt of lightning firmly caught in a bottle. I know I’ve already preordered my copy.

“Only a handful of characters can last for one, two, or three decades.” — Satoru Iwata