a ghost, a flute, a shovel, a side-Quest: Legend of Zelda A Link to the Past

The cost of a bird is one shovel, one young man’s soul, and a field that was once blessed with music.

Let that sink in for a moment.

We’ll come back to this in a minute.  But first let’s talk about me getting published.

Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past is a videogame that means more to me than possibly any other videogame because it is the first one I remember playing.  It’s also a game that, as of this writing, I have never beaten. The game follows the protagonist Link as he must rescue Princess Zelda, and six other maidens who are descendants of the ancient Sages who, long ago, locked the evil of the world away with a seal. Naturally, because it’s a Legend of Zelda game, evil forces in the form of Ganon and his puppet the wizard/priest Agahnim manage to break the seal in order to find and acquire a mystical artifact known as the Triforce.  This object grants the wishes of anyone who holds it, so it follows then that numerous souls besides Ganon, hungry for fame, fortune and glory have sought out the Triforce.  

Many of these souls were lost to their greed. And while most of the non playable characters(npcs) that Link encounters in the Dark world seem to have deserved their fate, there’s one that sticks in my memory in no small part because of his tragedy.

I was thinking about all of this when I was contemplating my pitch to the website intothespine.com.  This essay was partly written to announce and celebrate that I’ve recently had an essay published on a website that isn’t a blog hosted by me. I’ve actually been paid for my writing, and getting paid to write about videogames no less. Into the Spine is an organization dedicated to publishing writing about videogames that isn’t just talking about new titles that are hot, new, and interesting. This site publishes articles and poetry that are emotionally deep and intellectually stimulating such as how gender portrayal in Final Fantasy 7 Remake has been subverted or refashioned in interesting ways, how negative space is employed in videogames, or how Breath of the Wild became a means of achieving catharsis after losing a loved one to cancer. The fact that I’ve been allowed to publish anything among this body of work is humbling to put it mildly. I cannot believe my essay was accepted, but I won’t question my success, I’ll just try to enjoy it.

I knew that I would probably write something about Legend of Zelda, and I figured I would write something about A Link to the Past since I had already written an essay about the boss Vitreous for my own website. The game is almost always buzzing around in my skull and serves as a regular font for thinking about videogames and my own emotional and intellectual growth with games.

It’s also, fun fact, a really great videogame.

There’s a number of emotionally compelling stories in Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, but there’s one in particular that’s always made me sad. Seeing as how that’s on brand for me, it seemed the perfect subject to write about. But there was one issue. The essay I wrote for Into the Spine was part of their “Fragments” series; these are articles that are written at or about 300 words in total.  I managed to work the word count down, and I want to give the editor Diego Argüello endless praise for being able to help out there. I’m nothing if not loquacious. Writing 300 words about a young man who goes looking for fortune and finding only his ruin is doable, but I knew as soon as I had finished the last revision that I’d have to write more. 

 There’s just too much to be said about what is still, to my mind, one of the saddest stories in any videogame I’ve ever played.

No matter where you are in terms of the narrative of Link to the Past, the player is likely to pass a field encompassed on all sides by trees. On the map it shows this small meadow right next to Kakariko village, and once I fight past the soldiers looking for me and cut my way through the brush, I push into a beautiful scene. In the middle of the field there is a young boy playing a flute (it resembles an ocarina in its design, but the game only ever calls it flute so I’m going to stick with that word for now). He’s plainly dressed in yellows and browns, with a bright green cap, and he rests on a tree stump. Surrounding him are a gathering of animals: song birds, squirrels, rabbits, and a large red bird I always thought was an ostrich. I hear this boy before I see him. As long as I remain along the tree line he will continue to play. It doesn’t take long before I’m able to observe the animal sprites animated so that it looks like they are swaying or tapping their feet along to the song, enchanted by the sonorous melody. 

Out of instinct or curiosity I take a few steps forward.

The animals hop up and run away.

Link is suddenly unable to move.

And to my shock (at least the first time this happened) the boy begins to fade, his image disappearing before his song. And once that ends, the meadow is silent but for the background music that’s always playing.

When I was a kid this boy’s disappearance blew my mind and I vividly remember trying over and over again to speak to him. Leaving the meadow and then coming back I saw the boy had returned. I thought if I approached slowly that maybe I could actually reach him and speak to him, but much to my frustration he always disappeared. I drafted numerous hypotheses for experiments all involving how to test this system, how to actually talk to this young man. Maybe he was a kid like me who had an interesting story, maybe he was lost, maybe he would help me in my quest to save Zelda and the land of Hyrule. But every attempt resulted in failure and after numerous attempts I painfully had to accept the data I had and reach the conclusion given to me: there was no way to speak to this boy.

His ghost, like his song, remained a mystery.

Until it didn’t.

Once Link draws the Master Sword in the woods the second half of the game begins and Link must travel to the Dark World where he must find and save the seven young maidens that Aghanim imprisoned in crystals(one of them being Princess Zelda). Each of these maidens is held hostage in one of the seven dungeons in the game and protected a by a Boss-NPC, each of them memorable and pretty slick in their design and I’m not just saying that out of nostalgia. A Link to the Past is a game that is well crafted because each dungeon feels so organic, the enemy npcs feel like they have just dripped from the walls of their lairs, and the bosses of each realm are so visually distinct that, well over 20 years later I can still describe them perfectly. They’re also really, really fun to fight (except Trinex (I fucking HATED that dude)). And because it’s a Legend of Zelda videogame, each dungeon gives the player a new tool/weapon to overcome obstacles in the world and the dungeon itself. This is where the Metroidvania aspect of the game is most felt because some dungeons can only be accessed using these tools.

The sixth dungeon, Misery Mire, requires a bird.

In the middle of Kakariko village there is a bird statue that, when I passed it for the first time, seemed like just part of the atmosphere. It had a little pinwheel on its tail; it was cute. When I talked to one of the villagers they told me that the bird was once supposedly a real bird that could travel anywhere in Hyrule. I thought it was just a lore dump and moved on. I collected the first five crystals and then hit a wall. The map provided showed me a location in the southwest where I could find the last castle. There was one problem however, there’s no way to walk into the region; in the Dark World the player is just left with a solid wall separating the marshy realm from the rest of the world. I tried looking in the Light word, which happens to be the desert, and combed every square inch of the region desperate to find something, anything, that might be a portal until eventually I found it. Two malachite stones on an unreachable hill lie in the far corner and there’s no way to get to them.

At this moment I played Link to the Past aimlessly, wandering the Dark World for anything and everything, positive that there was no way to move forward and the game was glitched.

At some point, I decided to go back to the meadow. Since the Dark World had become a mirror realm to Hyrule there had been plenty of moments where I had encountered npcs in houses and temples telling me their stories of how they had come to this world looking for gold, riches, fame, etc. and instead had been transformed by the darkness of the greed in their hearts. I hadn’t seen what the young boy in the field would be replaced with, assuming he would even be there.

Waiting in a barren field sat a goblin-looking humanoid resting on the same stump. I approached and he remained perfectly still, his eyes staring away from me at something. Speaking to him he said:

After wandering into this world I was changed into this shape…I enjoyed playing flute in the original world…There was a small grove where many animals gathered. I want to see that place again. I buried my flute there with some flower seeds. Will you try to find it for me?

Returning to the meadow in the Light world the boy, or really what is now the spirit of the boy, is still playing. The animals enjoy the song and I start digging. Eventually I try a patch of flowers in the Northwest corner, and as I push up a lump of dirt a blue flute pops up, hops three spaces, and lands on the earth. The first time this happened I didn’t hesitate, I just grabbed the flute. And there was a moment of horror in my young mind as the animals immediately ran away, and the clunky SNES sound system began to make a whirring noise as the image of the boy faded until he was completely gone, the last part of him remaining was the song from his flute.

And then he was gone.

I returned to the Dark world only to the find the boy’s body had changed. Plants had consumed his legs, and he was affixed to the stump. He told me that he would not be able to leave this place. He asked me to play the flute for an old man in Kakariko village who was his father. And then he asked me to play the flute for him one last time. I did, and again to my horror, the boy’s body transformed into a solid tree.

And now he was truly gone.

From this point, I’m supposed to take the flute to the bar where the boy’s father learns of his son’s fate and then instructs me to play the flute in front of the aforementioned bird statue in the middle of town. Playing it will cause the statue to burst open and inside will be a small white bird that frankly looks like a platypus and a seagull crossbred. From this point however, whenever I play the flute the bird will appear, lift me up, and the screen will shift to the map that now has around 7-8 flashing circles that, when selected, will transport me to that location. One of these will be the space in the desert that allows me to access the marsh and thus begin the dungeon of Misery Mire.

From a pure design perspective the flute is an early version of “fast travel.” While the world of Hyrule on the SNES cartridge was nothing compared the Hyrule players would encounter in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, Link to the Past was released in 1992 so it makes sense that the designers would include a faster means of travel besides just walking everywhere. There are some locations in the game such as the mountains that require navigating tunnel systems that are almost literal mazes and so having a bird drop me off near the top and circumnavigate that headache isn’t just convenient, it’s delightful. Gamers in 1992 hadn’t been conditioned to expect 40 hours or more from a videogame, so it makes sense that the production team would design something like the bird.

And I want this to be clear, I like the bird. 

It’s one of the reasons why I enjoyed the game. 

I remember playing the flute over and over again enjoying the high of lifting off and being dropped over and over again over Hyrule. I even remember once in my childhood playing Link to the Past and for about 10 minutes just playing the flute over and over again imagining the bird getting tired, winded, and absolutely miffed at me. It was funny.

I add that anecdote because, again, this sequence is still one of the saddest moments I’ve ever experienced in a videogame.

From a narrative standpoint A Link to the Past is, above all else, a story about how greed can ruin lives. In just about every cave, temple, and house in the Dark world I will encounter npcs who confess that they were drawn to this world because they were greedy and wanted to find the Triforce for some selfish purpose. Whether it was ambition for fame, fortune, glory, or power these stories stack up to show how willing people were to abandon what they had for the elusive goal of power. Ganon himself, known as the “King of thieves,” has twisted this realm into what it is because of his own greed, and he himself has become a giant green pig monster. From a basic rhetorical angle, greed is demonstrated to have real consequences and those who have allowed their greed to lead them to this place have suffered.

Looking at the boy, his story is the same; he was driven by his greed to pursue the Triforce and will now become a deformed monster before eventually turning into a tree. Before this he played music to animals in the woods and made the world better for being in it. 

So, I look back to my opening sentence, and observe again that the cost of a bird is a shovel, a young boy’s soul, and a field that once was filled with music.

I can return to the field once I have acquired the flute, but no matter how many times I do it will be empty. The animals won’t be waiting by the stump. It’s quiet but the constant background music. I wrote in my article for Into the Spine that I can hardly bear this silence, and I can’t. The sadness of knowing that this boy’s soul had to vanish just because I needed a flute is unbearable.

I’ll admit that I’m uncomfortable writing about my emotions so honestly, especially when I try, in my non-fiction writing, to focus on just the facts and analysis. And nostalgia is definitely haunting every word of this essay. But well over two decades after playing this videogame for the first time the quest to attain the flute is still a remarkably beautiful story contained within a larger game that, in spite of its technical limitations, is still one of the most beautiful videogames. There is so much tragedy in Link to the Past that can become background noise while playing it and it took writing a short essay to remind me of the real humanity that is present in this tale.

Greed destroys those who become possessed by it, in small or magnificent ways. Silencing the music that gifted a space in the world is not done out of one’s own greed, but really just the result of someone else’s. 

This was a mature lesson to my young mind. I hadn’t appreciated the cost of what talking to the young man would actually be, and when I found out what it was, it was too late to take it back.

Joshua “Jammer” Smith

3.18.2024

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My essay for Into the Spine below:

https://intothespine.com/2023/11/23/there-was-a-boy-here-hes-gone-now/