The joy of flight.

I finally finished The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword recently after a whole month of time in which all I wanted to do was play it; alas, though, life occurs and even my favorite videogame series must wait in its wake.

Now, after spending a good 40-50 hours in the game, I think I'm finally ready to talk about not only it, but the Zelda franchise in general.  I'm going to try to keep this relatively short, because I know I could talk for ages about something that's so close and personal to me.

Yes, the Zelda series is a very important thing to me.  Yes, they are a bunch of video games that follow similar archetypal storylines that have been repeated since the dawn of man. 

In that vein, though, "The Canterbury Tales" is just a collection of stories.  "Citizen Kane" is just a movie.  Shubert's pieces were just music.

Just as generations of literature and fine music have inspired people to reach their true potential, I too believe that videogames can and will hold the same power over generations of people--especially those that grew up playing them.  Indeed, the works that I mentioned before are all incredibly important in the creation of movements that we see today and have seen in the artistic and cultural history of the world.  

At the same time, though, they all echo and are conglomerations of all of the artists, composers, writers, historians, scientists, religious leaders, architects, etc. that have come before them.

There is no single original story that one can realistically trace the genesis of an idea to.

GTFO, man!

Even before the first alphabet was created, there were thousands of rich, independent oral traditions that had been passing tales down since the beginning of language.

And that's a beautiful, wondrous thing.  Especially in the fact that thousands of years of traditions and stories can translate to relatively newer mediums within the last 200 years, like photography and film, and now videogames. 

I believe that certain videogames can be placed in the same category as other important works of art, music, literature and film:  some of the Zelda series in particular.

I digress, though.  Skyward Sword.  It's not among the pantheon of the best video games of all time, and definitely not even in the Zelda series.

However, it's still an experience that had me smiling constantly and shouting for joy at the right moments; even amid all of the frowns and groans at the clunky remnants of an era of videogames long past.

These relics serve to take the player out of the game.  For example, the first time Link grabs an item after starting a new play session up, the item must be explained in detail, no matter how many fucking amber relics or bat claws or pieces of excrement from ChuChus you've ALREADY collected.  Or the repetitive dialogue.  Or the excessive tutorials that you can't turn off--though this one is a newer feature in the Wii/DS Zelda games that needs to go away.

Blatantly Zelda stuff like this is still okay, though.

These things constantly show up in Zelda games.  It's like Nintendo is stubbornly refusing to let go of the past, or more likely, they're mistaking these bits of clutter as necessary to a truly classic Zelda experience.  

What the game does beautifully, though, are some things that I've always wanted to see in a Zelda game:  live, orchestrated music and ease of mobility in controls, all blended together with an incredibly grandiose sense of scale and epicness.  

The dungeons are huge, vast, puzzling, time-consuming and devilishly clever.  The bossfights are epic and require most of the usual tenacity of a good Zelda player.  The swordplay is (mostly) sublime in how responsive it is and in how involved it can get the player behind the controller.  Their wiimote becomes the sword, and they in turn become the motherfucking HERO OF TIME.

Maybe this was just me, but I really felt like I was beating the tar out of my enemies with sometimes dazzlingly cinematic swordplay, notably the reoccurring David Bowie-esque Demon King boss whose fights always involve epic clashes of swordsmanship.

This guy.  And his tongue.

It was this mobility and responsiveness of the controls--combined with the fact that Link can now finally sprint and climb up walls with ease--that makes Skyward Sword great.  Also, you can fly.  And the orchestrated music that the Zelda franchise so badly needed compliments everything so friggin' well--your heart soars along with the music, emphasizing the beautiful aesthetics of flight in the game.

It makes me wish with all of my heart that I could have a live band performing the epic musical score to my mundane life.

Seriously. I need it.  I want to charge into my last class of the quarter minutes before the big final with a chorus of cellos and harps blasting the song of the hero, speeding me onward.  I also want a sword to wave around and hit random shit with, but that's not necessary to this particular fantasy.

The story may be derivative, but going back to what I said before, it's the fact that it's not just a cut-and-dry Hero's journey.  It's the story of a hero in particular.  The story of Link.  The story that fans know and love and cannot stop living and loving as if it was the story of their own life.

It's our story.

The innocence of childhood growing into the vibrancy and immediacy of young adulthood, and finally melancholy when our journeys come to a sort of end, as needs be.  We continue to travel those paths in our mind, in flights of fancy before we settle down to rest, in stories that we tell our children.

These feelings we experience in our lives are echoed in Zelda and played out through Link before our very eyes.

And when the story finally ends in a Zelda, we experience that delicious, frustrating feeling that occurs when any good tale is done.

"To sleep, perchance to dream."