It always seems like a uniquely long time between Zelda games. I know they have good reasons for taking an age to develop, because games like Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom are gigantic and ingenious. But it feels to me like there’s something else at play too – an emotional aspect that makes the wait feel even longer. It feels like we see Zelda’s cast much less frequently than we see a lot of other characters. They have rich lives, presumably, that they live elsewhere. To put it another way, Mario turns up in a lot of games that aren’t the main platform adventures he’s known for. Zelda’s characters, though. Zelda…?
It’s an unfair comparison. But maybe it’s unfair in an interesting way. Mario does a lot of sports in between all the platforming. Over the years, he might do a bit of education, and might have an excellent line in RPGs, but most of the time if he’s not stomping on goombas, he’s kart-racing or playing football or golf or somesuch. This makes sense! As much as Mario is anything, he’s a sense of energy and weight. He’s the guy who can walk left to right but can also run left to right if you hold down the correct button. All that running! From early days, Mario was practically an athlete!
With the Zelda series it’s a lot more complicated. And I think this is because Link is not a mascot in the same way that Mario is. Mario is Nintendo’s Mr Peanut. Link and Zelda feel more like ghosts that haunts the mansion Nintendo lives in. Ghosts with whims and strange demands. Ghosts that make their presences felt in unusual ways.
Earlier today I sat down and tried to construct a list of Zelda off-shoots just to see if I was right about any of this. And now I’ve done this: it’s an odd list. Yes, Link has been in Mario Kart, which has always felt slightly sacreligious to me. And he’s been in Smash Bros and Soul Calibur 2. He’s great in all of these, but they feel a bit like contractual obligations, like a subpoena came all the way to Hyrule and he couldn’t duck it. Link in Mario Kart? That’s Link turning up to cut the ribbon at a friend’s supermarket.
Elsewhere it gets much more interesting, however. A lot of the games are Link dropped into harmonious worlds. Hyrule Warriors – great stuff, but Link makes sense here pretty easily, as he does in Link’s Crossbow Training and even the Battle Quest mode from Nintendo Land. These games are illuminating in a way, though, because they suggest that Nintendo feels that Zelda is not as stretchable as Mario, not as transferrable. You can’t suddenly dump Link into his own baseball game – which is a shame, now I think about it, because that game would rule.
The games I think are most fascinating, though? Well, here’s my favourite part of the list I made. Navi Trackers, Cadence of Hyrule, that Tingle game with the really long name I can never remember.
Let’s tackle these out of order. Cadence of Hyrule is an absolute stunner. It takes the clockwork rituals of Zelda – or rather it takes the series’ love of clockwork rituals – and just transports it into a new genre. You’re still exploring, smacking enemies around and solving spatial puzzles, but you’re doing it to a rhythm. And the rhythm stuff is so strong, and the sense of unfolding rituals so innate, that after a few minutes it doesn’t feel like an off-shoot at all. It feels like Zelda. It feels almost classic.
Tingle, meanwhile, gets an adventure that’s almost as indescribable as the character is. Freshly Picked: Tingle’s Rosy Rupeeland is either a slimmed-down RPG about collecting as much money as possible, or a sort of Wario-like side-on view of the main series in which bartering becomes as important as combat. Maybe it’s both these things. There’s the sense, as is the case with the Wario games, that the character’s silliness gives the game’s developers the leeway to make something odd, although it’s also possible that the link to Zelda allowed such a strange game to make it to production in the first place. Incidentally, I was delighted, while looking this game up again, to learn that there was a DSIWare off-shoot for Tingle that included a calculator and a coin-flipping mini-game. I don’t know what to make of any of this.