Coming of Age With The Legend of Zelda

One of the first video games I ever played—if not the first—was The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I couldn’t have been more than 10 years old, arguably too young to fully appreciate the game for what it was. But it stuck with me for how tender and real it felt, from the memorable musical score to the detail it paid to even the most minor characters, and I’ve followed the franchise religiously in the years since. The Legend of Zelda games have offered plenty of lessons, from the obvious moral of the importance of kindness to the darker idea of the inevitability of death, but it’s only with the latest installment, Breath of the Wild, that I realized exactly what Zelda has given me.

In each game, the story is roughly the same: A hero named Link (played by you) must be awoken to help the Princess