King Dodongo, Or, A Rather Forgettable Boss Fight: Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time
Any Boss NPC in a Legend of Zelda videogame is, at their core, just a pattern.
Some bosses are memorable(see Bongo Bongo, Blizetta, or Vitreous) because of their sheer visual spectacle. Some bosses are tedious affairs that aren’t fun to beat (I’m looking at you Gohma(Ocarina of Time’s not Windwaker’s(Windwaker’s Gohma is actually pretty cool and I might write an essay about him someday))). Some bosses are challenges that actually force the player to reevaluate their handle of the in-game controls. Some bosses are not difficult to beat, and have obvious weaknesses that can be quickly and easily exploited. Some bosses are just giant plants. Most bosses are dispatched by some weapon that was acquired in the dungeon or temple Link was exploring before they arrived. Some bosses are just giant birds. Some bosses can push Link off the edge of a platform that sends him down to a lower level forcing him to ascend back up to the fight and start fresh. Some Bosses are literally just faces. Most bosses have eyeballs for weaknesses and require the player to target them in order to win a fight. Several bosses are giant bugs. And inevitably, almost all final bosses are Ganondorf.
Looking at all of the bosses I’ve fought and defeated over the course of the Legend of Zelda franchise have been memorable or difficult or easy or absurd or strange or fun, but as I wrote at the start of this essay they have all ultimately been patterns that I have had to recognize.
King Dodongo in Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is no exception to this rule.
The only difference is, I practically never think about him.
Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is a videogame that I never got to play because I came to the Nintendo 64 late. I was usually two consoles behind my school-mates because their Moms and Dads were lawyers, doctors, engineers, and even politicians. My Dad was an exterminator. And I want to make this clear, my family was not poor by any means. We were comfortably middle-class through most of my life. I just assumed my family was poor because my house didn’t have two stories, my mom didn’t drive an SUV, my Dad didn’t wear a tie to work, and, again, I was playing Super Mario World on an SNES while my schoolmates were playing Goldeneye on their Nintendo 64s. As such, I wouldn’t play Ocarina of Time until I was much older, and, if I’m being honest, I don’t believe that I’ve ever started and finished it to completion.
Though just so the record is clear here, I have beaten Ganondorf. It was at a friend’s house during one slumber party when I was a teenager. I had to talk-beg my friend Kevin to let me see the end of the game and so he loaded up his N64 and we played it. I beat Ganondorf, he beat Ganon, and then we watched Spaceballs, ate pizza, and played Super Smash Bros until he passed out and I stayed up envying his collection of videogames.
Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time still has, in my humble opinion, one of the best rosters of Boss-NPCS in any videogame to date. It has Volvagia the fire dragon, it has Gohma the arthropod parasite (arguably the worst boss-npc in history(wait for that essay in the future)), it has Bongo-Bongo (arguably the most visually spectacular Legend of Zelda boss in history(wait for that essay too)), it has Phantom Ganon the spirit pre-cursor to the final confrontation at the end of the game, and Twinrova the the busty amazon warrior who’s a combination of the witch sisters and who’s concept art made my puberty-addled brain feel “funny.” These bosses were designed, seemingly, by artists posing as software engineers who thought up spectacular fantasy monsters that were defined by their narrative depth as well as their visual design. Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remains one of the highest rated games in videogame history and is often ranked by critics as the best videogame of all time. Its Boss npcs are no exception to that. In fact, I’d argue they’re definitely one of the reasons for these endless accolades. When I think of boss fights in any Legend of Zelda game I almost always look back first to Ocarina of Time.
Then it’s usually A Link to the Past.
Then after that it’s Link’s Awakening.
At some point I may write up a “listicle” of best Zelda Bosses…but I probably won’t. Listicles suck, and they never have depth. Regardless, Ocarina of Time has the best bosses of the series.
Which is why I'm perplexed why I felt the intellectual compulsion to write something about King Dodongo, arguably the most forgettable boss in the entire videogame.
Before my reader asks, I don’t have any explanation for this conviction.
My brain follows its own schedule, and I just follow the energy.
With that said, let me look at the facts first.
King Dodongo is the second Boss-npc in the game. He’s literally a giant lizard that crawls along the edge of a small square shaped room with a sizable square of lava in the middle that the player has to get him to eventually roll into. On that note, King Dodongo rolls around the edges of the square to try and push Link into the lava to kill him. He has no exterior weakness and is thus immune to the Kokiri Sword and slingshot which are the only weapons in Link’s arsenal apart from deku nuts(and these are glossed up firework-poppers that cause no real damage anyway). The only vulnerability King Dodongo has is when he opens his mouth to breath fire at Link.
At this point the pattern emerges.
I have to throw a bomb into King Dodongo’s mouth when he opens it in order to harm him. The massive brute will crawl in my direction until his AI recognizes I’m within his space at which point he will open his mouth and inhale. The weapon acquired in Dodongo’s cavern is the Bomb-bag which allows Link to keep and carry bombs and use them whenever he needs them. A regular videogame player or Legend of Zelda fan will immediately understand, grab a bomb from their pocket (as you do), and hurl it into the giant lizard’s mouth at which point he immediately swallows it. Once the bomb explodes King Dodongo willwill belch smoke and slump to the ground and becomes vulnerable to attack(his body glows red(that’s the signal)). Once Link lands a few strikes, Dodongo curl into a ball and roll around the edges of the square trying to hit Link.
This is the pattern.
I should note though that unlike many Legend of Zelda bosses, Dodongo has to eat four bombs before he’s out. The rule is typically three strikes, but playing the level again I had to throw four bombs. This might have been memorable in and of itself, but the fact that I forgot this detail is only further damning evidence of how forgettable King Dodongo’s is as a Boss.
Looking at the actual fight itself most of the action is largely spent avoiding his movement which isn’t difficult to do given the fact that he’s, to quote the teenagers these days, a “chongus.” Throughout Dodongo’s cave Link has encountered a wide variety of enemy npcs, almost all of them being lizards. In fact at least three of them act, and even look, like smaller versions of Dodongo himself. Attacking these smaller lizard npcs involves Link running around them (an easy task since they’re slow-moving until they’re attacked) and striking their tail with his sword. These fights are different however because when Link fights them, he’s doing so in a larger space where he can move about easily.
The challenge of King Dodongo is not just his seeming invulnerability, it’s my ability to move Link freely in space. Had the designers simply dropped Link into a square with this giant lizard and had him try and throw bombs into his mouth, I suspect the fight would be not just forgettable but anticlimactic.
And this would undercut the dramatic tension that Ocarina of Time is trying to create.
Which is an excellent opportunity to discuss narrative.
I wrote in a previous essay for this website about the Boss npc Vitreous and how his role is not simply to be a final challenge before completing the dungeon Misery Mire, but also as a sort of narrative and aesthetic conclusion to the dungeon. One of the recurring motifs of the Legend of Zelda games is how they have developed Boss npc fights in this fashion. While the original Legend of Zelda for the Nintendo Entertainment System(NES) had to rely mostly upon the in-game manual for establishing story contexts, by the time players had gotten to the Nintendo 64 console system designers could include text boxes with optional dialog responses, cut scenes, and exposition for players. Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past for SNES had helped establish this depth by creating an elaborate story to explain who Link was, why he was fighting these monsters and enemies, and why there were actual stakes. The character of Ganon became fleshed out and, while he was still something of a Bowser knock-off, his personality as an antagonist and the cause of so much ruin and pain had a deeper dimension. He was the one responsible for these Boss-Npcs that held the maidens locked away in crystals. Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening for Gameboy and Gameboy Color further established Boss-npcs who were unique visually and structurally, but would also taunt Link at the end of each battle slowly building the dramatic tension of the growing narrative.
Looking back to King Dodongo, he was…he was there. I guess.
He was at least part of the larger narrative.
So, what was the larger narrative?
The larger narrative of Ocarina of Time is one many probably have a basic understanding of. Ganondorf, the leader of the desert-dwelling Gerudo people, seeks to overthrow the Kingdom of Hyrule and rule the world by acquiring a sacred item known as the Triforce. It’s up to Link and Princess Zelda to stop him and his followers. From there the story breaks down into various chapters that all boil down to Link trying to stop Ganondorf and undo the damage he is wreaking upon the people of Hyrule. In terms of the second dungeon, King Dodongo has been awakened by Ganondorf to prevent the Gorons (cute rock humanoids that talk like Hulk Hogan(“hell-yeah brother”)) from getting into the cave and mining rocks which are their primary food source. Dodongo, and by extension the various lizard enemy-npcs that accompany him, are a corruption that’s preventing life from going on as usual.
Put another way: defeating King Dodongo is curing cancer.
Hear me out.
While writing this essay I was reminded of an article published on the website Into The Spine, an organization that publishes essays, poems, and reflective commentary on videogames. They also were kind enough to publish an essay I wrote for them, so I have no shame promoting them endlessly. One of the articles on the site is titled “Confronting Calamity: Exploring Grief through Breath of the Wild,” by Athalia Norman and was published on November 4th, 2023. Norman’s article is about the emotional pain of watching her grandmother die due to cancer and how the videogame Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild helped her process her grief. It’s a beautiful essay and I would highly recommend it. In one passage Norman writes:
While caregiving for my Grandma, I started, stopped, and returned to Breath of the Wild more times than I can count. Link’s odyssey gave me a way to explore and meaningfully interact with a world outside my hopeless internal and external reality. Because of this newfound escapism method, I had the energy to provide compassion even when treatment after treatment failed. It’s important to note that even though I explored all over Hyrule, I never once entered a Divine Beast. Not after that first time when I saw the pink and black muck creeping all over Vah Ruta’s elephant-shaped machinery. Vah Ruta and Mipha struck me as an analog for my grandma. I knew it wasn’t healthy, but couldn’t stop myself from making the association.
Somewhere along the line, I got it into my head that if I explored Vah Ruta and destroyed Waterblight Ganon, I was also destroying Vah Ruta and Mipha. That’s why in the last precious months of Gram’s life, as her condition deteriorated, I put the game down for a span of eight months, the longest yet. I didn’t want any part in destroying a body and losing Mipha’s spirit forever. Some part of me knew that Mipha was dead and gone anyway, but I wasn’t ready to let go. I didn’t want to lose Grandma either. She was such an integral piece of all of our lives and so feisty and strong, so indomitable, that imagining she’d lose to cancer just wasn’t a reality. She could beat anything! This denial of the severity of the situation mirrored the way Princess Zelda thought the Divine Beasts and the champions would protect Hyrule from Calamity Ganon. As you find out in the first 15 minutes of the game, that isn’t what happened at all. Everyone lost. The way Princess Zelda was clinging for control in a situation where there is none, painfully paralleled the way my family and I were grieving the sudden loss of control: failure of immunotherapy and chemotherapy.
Defeating Ganondorf in A Link to the Past, Breath of the Wild, Twilight Princess, or even Ocarina of Time is, when observed from a larger rhetorical perspective, the elimination of a cancer which has infected the body of Hyrule. Each game establishes the threat and shows, over the course of the game, how it has metastasized and manifested differently according to the region that has been infected. Zora’s will typically be frozen in ice, forests will typically suffer from parasites, the Gerudo will be infected with storms, and Gorons, well, they’ll usually be inundated with lizards.
The Boss npcs of Ocarina of Time become a combination of technical ability for the player, as well as a way to achieve catharsis. Defeating King Dodongo isn’t just about learning how to throw and use bombs. This boss-fight is about teaching the player new skills for later in the game, as well as overcoming the evil which is trying to destroy the people of Hyrule.
Again, Legend of Zelda is about recognizing a pattern and then finding a way to overcome it. King Dodongo is a pattern, both at the micro-level of simply being a pattern of behavior that Link has to observe and then defeat, and then at the macro-level King Dodongo is yet another Lizard npc which is tormenting the Gorons.
What remains fascinating is, even after all of this analysis I still find King Dodongo forgettable as a Boss npc. Age and experience may be playing some role in this, but as I played through this fight recently, and I watched the giant lizard sink into the square of lava, I didn’t really feel or think anything. It was just done. There was one more piece of heart to collect, one more portal to walk through, and then the start of the next dungeon to get to. The only actual event I remember is laughing when King Darunia dropped out of the sky, beat his chest in celebration, and patted Link on the head which sent the poor kid to the floor.
In fact, as I think about it, I always remember this sequence more than fighting and defeating King Dodongo. I remember the laughter of watching poor Link get knocked out, and watching the Gorons shuffle forward to give him a hug of thanks. Watching this cutscene generates more emotional and intellectual response in me than fighting a pattern does. And maybe that’s the point.
Joshua “Jammer” Smith
7.8.2024
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