When observing with a long-running and venerable series such asThe Legend of Zelda, it isn’t difficult to see how it becomes slavish to a formula that has slowly developed over time. For that reason, entries likeMajora’s MaskandBreath of the Wildinstantly stand out for their incongruent and formula-breaking nature. Yet one of the more unusual and off-kilter entries in theZeldacanon isThe Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, a game that was developed with that very formula in mind.
Link’s Awakeningcontains all of the usual puzzles, dungeons, and explorations that classicZeldagames have, but features cameos from characters expatriated from other Nintendo franchises such asMarioandKirby. Koholint Island, where Link is stranded, is aTwin Peaks-inspired place both wonderful and strange, featuring a cast of oddball supporting characters and bizarre labyrinths.
When speaking about the production and conception ofLink’s Awakening, developers and producers often called the game a “parody” ofZeldagames, which led me to ask a fundamental question: what exactly does a parody entail?
There was an era in popular culture in which whenever the word “parody” arose in conversation, the first piece of media that would be recalled wasScary Movie, and the bastardized Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer-helmed follow-ups likeEpic Movie,Meet the Spartans, andVampires Suck—nothing more than crude and sophomoric reference-fests. Those wiser to the history of the cinematic genre of parody would instead hearken back to the works of Mel Brooks or Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker, the latter team responsible forAirplane!andThe Naked Guntrilogy.
Little explanation is needed for why disaster film parodyAirplane!is an exemplary comedic film, but I found myself extracting a greater deal of humor once I started working backward from the film’s point of origin. The 1980 film is nearly a word-for-word remake of the 1957 straight disaster filmZero Hour!, withAirplane!peppering in a number of verbal and visual gags to mock the heightened melodrama and the dire stakes often seen in those usual disaster movies. It became a perfect parody not by pointing out the absurdities, but by inhabiting its tropes and amplifying them for comedic purposes.
Parodies in visual media are not so much for pure mockery and cheap gags; they are meant to highlight tropes and leverage our familiarity with them for comedy. They can bring light to elements of the original source material and inspiration; it’s why the producers ofJames Bondhad a hard time returning to the series afterAustin Powerssuccessfully dissected the formula of those films. Other times, it can lead to inspired creative decisions: directors Anthony and Joe Russo, then known for their pointed genre parodies onCommunity, i.e. the action parody episode “A Fistful of Paintballs,” would successfully reverse-engineer their knowledge of the genre to create the straight action filmCaptain America: The Winter Soldier.
So who better to parody theZeldaseries than Nintendo themselves?
“Self-parody” would probably be the more apt descriptor forLink’s Awakening, but even still, it might be best to use the term loosely. The “parody” elements didn’t come so much from the conceptualization of the game—the developers might say that there wasn’t much of a conceptualization process in the first place, with the off-beat nature of the game coming from a more free form development workflow. Director Takashi Tezuka would say in a 2009 edition of Iwata Asks:
Tezuka:… We moved along at quite a good speed in a relatively freewheeling manner. Maybe that’s why we had so much fun making it. It was like we were making a parody of Zelda.
Iwata:A parody of your own game? (laughs)
Tezuka:Yeah. (laughs)
Iwata:Today, if you just barged ahead using characters resembling Mario and Luigi—even if it were for a Nintendo game—it would be quite a problem.
Indeed, seeing Goombas and Shy Guys and fake Kirbys roaming the overworld of aZeldatitle was enough to signal to players that something unusual was afoot. At its core, the story premise ofLink’s Awakeningis that he is a stranger in a strange land, and having characters that blatantly do not belong in the familiar world ofZeldais a near-fourth-wall-breaking wink to the player for the strangeness to fully register to them—Link’s Awakeningdepends on the player’s familiarity withZeldaand plays with those preconceptions to drive the weirdness home.
And those pseudo-crossovers are far from the only elements needed to convey this strangeness. As someone who has digested a fair amount ofZeldain the past several years, I found myself amused by some of the methodsLink’s Awakeningused to guide and give hints to players through my playthrough of the Switch remake. I guffawed the first time I received a hint through atelephone, a completely out-of-place modern device in a high fantasy world.
Puzzles in theZeldaseries are usually complex with some vague clues laid about, so imagine my joy when one key puzzle was simply an open area with signposts that very simply and explicitly shouted: “GO THIS WAY” with an arrow pointed in a direction. And then there are the four children in the village, each giving Link button prompts and directions in typical Zelda NPC fashion, while also demonstrating an unusual amount of sentience by following with a variation of the dialogue: “Don’t ask me what that means, I’m just a kid!” Not the most groundbreaking self-aware joke, but let’s say that this was probably good enough for a video game in the early 1990s.
That being said, I would love to see what game developers and writers could come up with in making a modern-day video game that is designed as a parody from its conception. You can say that a handful have tried and failed— the most prolific example might beEat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard, a 2009 third-person shooter that attempted to be a meta fourth-wall-breaking parody of games likeMax PayneandMetal Gear Solid, making not-so-subtle jokes about in-game glitches, instructional text, tutorial missions, and characters that vaguely resembled Mario, Master Chief, and others. And then you see games likeDuke Nukem Foreverand theBorderlandsseries, lazily inserting “remember this?” references through brief dialogue or environmental decoration without having any commentary on their targets.
WhileLink’s Awakeningmay not be a straight parody ofZelda, the devil may care attitude towards development led to a lot of moments that poked at brains trained to the standardZeldaconventions and created a unique experience out of it. WithLink’s Awakeningas a starting point, I yearn for more comedic games that deconstruct and reverse-engineer some of our favorite games and move past silly winks and nudges for cheap, unearned, lukewarm chuckles. Video gaming may be a younger medium than film, the latter being much more susceptible to parody, but in the decades since the originalLink’s Awakening, game developers and enthusiasts are familiar enough with the tropes to have a large enough palette to create comedy with.
And as for theLegend of Zeldaseries, I would hope that theLink’s Awakeningremake has had enough people revisit the material for them to realize that this unusual game has a special place in the series. If anyone wants to play the “definitive” and “purest"Zeldagame, the fairly obvious choices would be something along the lines ofOcarina of Time,A Link to the Past, or perhaps just the originalThe Legend of Zelda. But out of all of the games in the franchise, no otherZeldatitle “gets"Zeldamore thanLink’s Awakening.
