The final battle. The biggest bad. The beast who embodies pure evil essence. Ganon.
Ganondorf’s monstrous alter ego often serves as the final boss in Zelda games, and when I was growing up, confronting him was always a prospect that my friends and I both eagerly awaited and completely dreaded. Whenever we did face him, it didn’t matter who held the controller; everyone in the room still watched carefully, calling out advice and rooting for victory.
This story is about the time my friends and I, gathered together for some long-forgotten reason (perhaps it was somebody’s birthday), reached the end of Ocarina of Time and confronted the King of Evil in his more destructive second form. It is a tale of triumph, but also one of caution. But more than anything, it is a tale about just how stubborn a group of fourth graders can be when confronted with a challenge.
But first, a little bit of backstory is warranted. All of us sitting there that fateful night had played Ocarina of Time before, and most of us had seen the ending. Completing the quest for the legendary Biggoron’s Sword was something most of us hadn’t done yet, however, and this marked the first time in our little group’s collective history that one of us had acquired the sword. He was the best gamer among us, with older siblings to teach him tricks that the rest of us did not have access to. So when he showed us this mighty new blade, we were absolutely awestruck, begging him to tell us how he had gotten it.
With this powerful weapon in hand, there was only one thing to do: test it against the game’s final boss. Sure, we could demolish weak enemies with only a single hit, but we were really curious to know how quickly Ganondorf and Ganon would fall before the sword to end all video game swords.
Ganondorf was a piece of cake, as he tends to be when the player is well-prepared. We cheered and grinned in anticipation of the tougher fight to follow, wondering how easy it would be to defeat Ganon now that we could use a sword during the first phase of the battle. Sure enough, we depleted his health far more quickly simpler than ever before, which made us even more excited! (It should be noted that we were also hyped up on sugar.)
Then we made our mistake. See, as it turns out, the Master Sword is required to defeat Ganon. And I do mean that literally: if you do not use the Master Sword to deliver the final blow, his final death scene won’t be triggered, and he’ll just keep on fighting you indefinitely.
We did not know this.
So as you can probably guess, we just kept slashing away at his tail with the Biggoron Sword, trying to guess how many hits it was going to take. We kept track at first, thinking the number would be small. But the more hits we landed, the more we questioned if it had always taken this long to defeat Ganon. Then, we speculated that the game itself might be broken.
A full hour passed, and someone suggested — for about the 10th time — that the Master Sword might be the only weapon capable of striking down the beast. Our resident game expert, who had kept Link alive the entire time as he battled his seemingly immortal foe, had repeatedly turned down this proposition. But he actually listened this time, probably because he was tired and the sugar high had mostly worn off. And so Ganon, who had sustained hundreds of blows from a much stronger sword, was defeated after being struck with the Master Sword only once.
After finally wrapping up the longest battle of our lives, we then decided to gang up on our formerly invincible gaming king in Super Smash Bros. as punishment for wasting so much of our time. Naturally, we all played as Link.
Is there a moral to this story? Well, we definitely learned that reading video game text is important, but I think we all walked away with an even more valuable piece of wisdom that day: Even when they don’t work, big swords are still very cool.
