I first encountered Link’s work when he was a temporally displaced preteen in 1998’s The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. He had finally unlocked the inner sanctum of the Temple of Time and seized the hilt of the mythic, Excalibur-ish Master Sword. A wreath of blue light circled Link’s feet, shunting him seven years into the future. Link left the temple as a grown man, with a post-pubescent voice and a chiseled jawline, to discover that the bucolic lands of Hyrule had become twisted and malignant during his absence. Vacant zombies roamed the newly befouled farmers market, the royal castle had been demolished in favor of a Sauronified citadel, and the volcano painted against the skyline (called, yes, Death Mountain) roiled with portentous, tectonic energy. This is the sort of experience that would leave anyone with deep psychological scars, or at the very least a desperate need for clarifying exposition. Are all my friends dead? Is my house still standing? Is my innocence lost? But no, stoic as usual, Link sheathes the Master Sword and refuses to ask any questions. Our hero sticks with the only language he has ever known: a nod, a head shake, and a small collection of martial yelps and groans.
I’ve been around Link in so many different forms and fashions since that first meeting. There were those ancestral early years, filtered through 8-bit processing power, when we stared down at the top of his forest-green nightcap as he slayed an endless tide of tentacled Octoroks and skeletal Stalfos on his original quests to rescue the perpetually imperiled Princess Zelda. (It might be hard to imagine, but Link was even more wordless and taciturn in the mid-’80s.) Perhaps you also remember his experimental age of the mid-2000s, when—after trudging toward grimdark photorealism throughout the ’90s—Link endured a crisis of faith and reforged himself into a chibi toon with Spongebob-sized eyes, provoking a genuine meltdown among those who fell in love with him during the gloomy Ocarina heights. (This was also around the time Link took up sailing, and then locomotive engineering, the latter of which could be accurately compared with Bob Dylan’s brief, bizarre gospel period.) Now Link returns to our lives again, after one of his characteristically long hiatuses, in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom—a sequel to 2017’s Breath of the Wild, which was universally regarded as a stunning, late-career masterwork in a creative field that generally favors the young and the bold. (The early reviews, to nobody’s surprise, are over the moon.) At 37 years old, he is somehow at the peak of his powers, even as he remains a total enigma. (It goes without saying, but Link declined multiple interview requests for this story.)
So, what do we know about the man we call the Hero of Time? He is certainly brave, or at least that is the impression he wants to leave us with in his work. We have watched him vanquish a rogues’ gallery of demons, beasts, and curdled outlaw despots—to the point of infamously taking on Queen Gohma, a “parasitic armored arachnid” with the spatial dimensions of a school bus, at 12 years old with only three hearts in his life bar. We also know that the Zelda catalog is singularly consumed with a Manichaean, good-and-evil binary. Link consistently stars as an undisputed avatar of justice, with no vexing second thoughts or adjudicatory dilemmas clouding his moral authority as he swashbuckles his way toward victory. Some critics have wondered if Link ought to challenge himself with a Raging Bull–esque detour into antihero murkiness, but unlike De Niro, the man is a conservative at heart.
And most notably, we know that Link appears to be unburdened by any memory of his other ventures in the Zelda franchise. Whenever he reprises the character, he is doing so with zero connective tissue—multiversal or otherwise—binding him to the dozens of other versions of himself that have wielded the Master Sword on screen. (Ocarina’s saga operates independently of The Wind Waker, which is severed from A Link to the Past, which doesn’t overlap with Skyward Sword, and so on and so forth.) Link starts fresh at the beginning of every save file, alone in Kokiri Forest without a boomerang, or a hook shot, or even a couple of trusty bombs in his inventory. The adventure begins maddeningly anew. Some contend that Link suffers from a Sisyphean curse, or a hellish form of recurrent amnesia, that seems to kick in whenever he’s asked to save the universe. Fans will likely be debating the truth for years to come because—again—Link refuses to speak, on or off the record, about what is going on between his ears.
This makes him something of an outlier in the Zelda franchise. Hyrule is stuffed with vibrant, motormouth characters: the Goron king Darunia, the freestyle-rhyming Guru-Guru, and Princess Zelda alike have provided reams and reams of breathless dialogue, often expressing a bone-deep sorrow about the evils threatening the kingdom. Link, on the other hand, doesn’t demonstrate any interior motivation, which sometimes makes him seem oddly ruthless and hard-bitten. In Link’s Awakening, an eccentric 1993 Game Boy entry that takes place entirely within a restless dream conjured up by a dozing Link, the citizens of the land beg him not to wake up, for if he does, they will slip from his consciousness and cease to exist. Link pays them no mind. He dispatches the final boss with a flurry of bladework, condemning everyone—potential love interests, doddering old grandparents, everyone who has helped him on this journey—to the unknowable netherspace between the curtains of reality. This has always been central to Link’s character: He’s Luke Skywalker with a lobotomy, a hero with no social tact or emotional vulnerability, who also, unfortunately, is our only hope. Link will conquer Dark Lord Ganondorf, his eternal nemesis, in a selfless duel to the death; he will reforge the Triforce, consecrate the bloodline, and bring light to Hyrule once more. But along the way, he might burst into your cottage, totally uninvited, and smash open your pots in search of a few spare arrows, without a shred of gratitude. Anything for the war effort, I suppose.
Honestly, Link is better off never explaining his process. The policy has surely put a hard limit on how much we can relate to our elven champion (which is likely the No. 1 reason the Zelda franchise has never made the jump to the big screen), but Link understands that there isn’t much to gain from radical transparency. He attempted to be more personable exactly once, when he appeared on the Super Mario Bros. Super Show—a 1989 Saturday morning cartoon in which Mario and Luigi battle against the forces of Bowser with the help of Milli Vanilli—in a number of Zelda-themed shorts that seemed to be the soft launch of an entire trans-media brand extension. The results were disastrous. Link was saddled with a sneering, syntactically tortured catchphrase, “Well, excuuuuse me, Princess,” which was swiftly codified into a derisive, legacy-altering meme. Here was Link, in all of his delicately cryptic grandeur, doing Marvel-tinged “he’s right behind me, isn’t he” gags for an audience of catatonic 10-year-olds. It destroyed the Sphinxlike appeal of the Zelda mythos, and nobody was surprised when Link decided to forget that misbegotten era in his career, just as he has forgotten so much else.
But lately the Nintendo Corporation has renewed its desire to bring us carefully sanctioned access to its marquee star. In 2011 the company published the Hyrule Historia, a coffee-table book that lays out a comprehensive “timeline” chaining all of the Zelda games together into one questionable lineage. Yes, if you squint hard enough, something of a Zelda canon comes into view. It requires some magical thinking to believe that a video game series that aggressively resists rational sequential storytelling could ever be threaded onto a coherent ongoing narrative, so you won’t be surprised that the Historia gets very specious very quickly. For instance, the book asserts that Zelda II: The Adventure of Link—the second game in the franchise, released in 1988—is actually the 12th entry chronologically and that its events occur in a parallel pocket dimension where Link fails to defeat Ganondorf during Ocarina of Time. Zelda II, of course, was conceived for the Nintendo Entertainment System with absolutely zero foresight of the global superstar that Link would soon become. But as we learned through the tales of Frank Ocean, Taylor Swift, and Kendrick Lamar, fandom can grow gnarled and recursive when presented with an absence of information. Swifties will continue to divine coded confessions out of reissued deep cuts, and Zelda stans will continue to keep the faith that Link has been cooking up a master plan since 1987.
I think he prefers it that way. There is a certain trollishness crucial to the man’s character. Remember, Link has never inserted his own person into the title of his life’s work. The words on the box speak only of a legend, and like the legends of yore, the Epic of Link is apocryphal, extrapolative, and chock-full of homespun narrative liberties. We were never supposed to know him well, in the same way that we were never supposed to know Odysseus, or Paul Bunyan, or Robin Hood. With Tears of the Kingdom, he and his fable are reincarnated once again. However many dozens of hours it takes us to finish the yarn, we will be left with more questions than answers. You might find that frustrating. I call it tradition.
