“A New Life for Us”: Zelda and the Future of Stories
“A New Life for Us”: Zelda and the Future of Stories
“A New Life for Us”: Zelda and the Future of Stories
By Marek Makowski
December 6, 2023
Summary
Little has been written about Tears of the Kingdom's narrative developments and how the new traversability of Zelda has necessitated a new approach to storytelling.
Previous Zelda games guided players to complete dungeons in order and gain new abilities before conquering the final boss.
The 2017 game fulfilled the old dream of the series creator, Shigeru Miyamoto, "To create a game world that conveyed the same feeling you get when you are exploring a new city for the first time," and "Make the player identify with the main character in the game and get completely lost and immersed in that world."
The preoccupations of solitary characters populate the world even beyond side quests, existing for no purpose other than to make the game more representative of life.
The game opens like a film, and as Link searches for Zelda after the opening sequence, he collects cutscenes in the form of Dragon's Tears, which allow you to watch how Zelda travels to the founding of the kingdom, labors to return to the present, and asks her forebears for help with, as one sage says to her, "The burden my era left to you." In this narrative parallel to Link's search, Zelda glimpses the story of the past in hieroglyphs, then disappears into the past, lives in it, and transforms it-a fable for the immersion of art and how we interface with those people who came before and left us a shattered world.
In a previous Zelda game, this story would have been linear, and Link would have completed tasks that generated new cutscenes in order.
While Link, described by one character as a savior, connects all stories through his journey, the game also allows you to not connect anything at all, to choose indifference, avoid all stories and pet horses, swim in lakes, and roam forests picking mushrooms and fruit.
Reference
Makowski, M. (2023, December 6). “A new life for us”: Zelda and the future of Stories. Public Books. https://www.publicbooks.org/a-new-life-for-us-zelda-and-the-future-of-stories/