What Makes a Hero According to The Legend of Zelda

The Legend of Zelda series by Nintendo is one of the biggest and longest running in the gaming world, with it’s older games still garnering much love and attention. Though each game has its own unique story, the premise remains the same, a knight, a princess, and a great evil bound together by fate. You play as the knight, the swordsman, the hero – link. Though each iteration of the game plays with where its hero’s come from, the 2003 Legend of Zelda game ‘The Wind Waker’ plays with the ending and an important question is asked – if the hero fails is he still a hero?

‘The Wind Waker’ starts similarly to many games in the franchise; a young boy living a simple and carefree life encounters an evil creature and shortly after is given his task – take up the sword and save Hyrule (the kingdom of which he resides.) Here our young hero’s sister is stolen away from home, and he begins his journey to save her, though shortly finds through the wise King of Red Lions that his fate is larger than that. His journey is difficult and he succeeds at sealing away the great evil, and saving the princess, but the world unlike other Zelda games falls to ruin in a great flood that covers the remaining islands of his great ocean home and all the characters you have come to meet perish. Only him, his sister, the princess, and the small crew on his ship live. This begs the question – how much can a hero fail before he is no longer a hero? And who is he a hero to?

Though each Zelda game has come to make a hero out of a link with each his own past and story, few have shown failure as an option – though, the others that did, also allowed their link to keep his title of hero. In ‘Legend of Zelda: The Twilight Princess’ our link is trained by a hero of the past who died before he could save his princess or kingdom, but even as his ghost trains you and warns you of his failure and shortcomings, he remains with his title of hero, being referred to as ‘the hero’s shade’.

‘Majora’s Mask’ is another Zelda game wherein a hero fails to a certain degree, as while you can save your town the time element in the game means that you cannot complete every side quest given, and you leave multiple characters in peril. In the much newer game ‘Breath of the Wild’ (which came out in 2017) Link wakes up after having been asleep for 100 years, healing after having been heavily injured in battle. Though he is given the chance to finally defeat Ganondorf, his previous comrades died in his absence and much of Hyrule was destroyed and left to ruin. All these variations of Link, whether believing themselves to be heroes or not, are given the title by other characters or at the least the story itself.

So, what does make someone a hero? Can a hero fail, in large or small ways? Ostensibly the games’ answer is yes, but much more interestingly is the why? Though different characters throughout the games will all have their own reasons for declaring Link a hero, or more often their hero, the answer to what makes a hero lies at the heart of the game. The hero always has courage, or despite fate and gods ruling, the hero is always a young boy whose courage leads him to be a hero. A young boy faced with a seemingly (and sometimes truly) impossible task will always find a reason to try, he’ll always summon up the courage.

So, the Legend of Zelda poses this in its story – a hero is not found in the end result but rather he is found in his first courageous action.  A hero is simply anyone who finds it within themselves to face the difficult thing, and whether or not they succeed is irrelevant.