Links fall apart: Game over in Zelda

One thing that made Breath of the Wild such a notable departure from what had become disparagingly known as the “Zelda formula” was that it was remarkably easy to die. A lot. In so many different ways. Fell too far? You’re dead. Stood too close to that explosive barrel with your fire arrow? You’re dead. Snuck up on a dozing Hinox? You’re dead. Swam too far out from shore? You’re dead. Ran out of stamina two-thirds of the way up the mountain? You’re dead.

The sheer variety of ways to die in Breath of the Wild invigorated the series, and critics and fans alike praised this newfound level of challenge in a series that had grown too forgiving over the years.

But it wasn’t always this way, oh no. Before Zelda games became cakewalks through Hyrule where every patch of grass could be cut for a few hearts and some rupees, Zelda games were tough. When I saw the “Game Over” screen in Breath of the Wild, it got me wondering: When was the last time I saw a Zelda game over screen this much?

Finding the fun in death

Before I answer that question, I first recommend watching this video. Once you’re refreshed on all the Legend of Zelda game over screens — both the ones you saw near-constantly and the ones you’ve never seen before — we can talk.

Death in video games — unlike the real thing — is fun. We don’t want to die, but we like to die. Those two ideas are not in opposition to one another. Paradoxically, dying is a source of pleasure. In video games, the immediate feelings of defeat or loss a player feels upon dying is mediated by the game over screen. The boundary between death and rebirth lives there, and how the various Zelda games handle their game over screens sheds light on the reason players like dying in video games — especially when that death is squarely their own fault.

Death in video games is fun. We don’t want to die, but we like to die.

In the book The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games, Jesper Juul argues that failure in video games is part of a paradox built around our desire to avoid “unpleasant experiences [which is] at odds with a longer-term aesthetic desire in which we understand failure, tragedy, and general unpleasantness to be necessary for our experience” (115). Death in Zelda games is built around the second half of Juul’s paradox: We want to understand failure as necessary. In other words, through failure, we learn the real meaning of success. This is something the Dark Souls games understand perhaps too well, and something that Zelda games knew, forgot, and have only recently relearned.

Death in the beginning

The beginnings of the Zelda series exemplify the paradox Juul illustrates. The Legend of Zelda and, to an even greater degree, The Adventure of Link both taught players how to survive by ruthlessly killing them over and over.

Death is very much abstracted in the first Zelda game. Upon dying, Link will spin rapidly as the screen flashes red and fades to black. The stark black and simple “Game Over” of The Legend of Zelda immediately gives the player a chance to continue. Death in this game is instructive. You are meant to get right back into the game, applying what you learned from your death, and overcome the obstacle.

The game over screen carries both narrative weight and significant consequences.

By contrast, the stakes are raised in The Adventure of Link. The death animation and game over screen both convey this to players. When Link dies in this game, his figure freezes and turns black. Death here is more lifelike in that it is the absence of movement, the stoppage of life’s flow. The screen flashes (or not, depending on the version of the game you’re playing), and Ganon appears in silhouette to laugh at you, taunting you into trying again. Notably, the text gives real consequences of your death: “Return of Ganon.” Your death means the death of all of Hyrule at the hands of the evil Ganon. What could be more motivation than that to get back in the saddle and try again?

In her essay “The Hero With a Thousand Hearts: Death in Zelda” found in the book The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy: I Link Therefore I Am, Anna Janssen writes that Link is in a kind of Purgatory where we as players suspend our usual understanding of the finality of death. Instead, Janssen says, players of Zelda games gain something “more valuable than an abstracted view of death,” and that is an understanding of the larger place of death as a universal construct. The abstraction of death in video games is in part due to technological necessity, but it also underpins the philosophical reasons why dying in games is a major source of the fun we find in playing them. Death is not the end; it is the chance to begin again with acquired knowledge and skill at our disposal.

The first two games laid the groundwork for the mechanics, music, and leitmotifs throughout the Zelda series, and even their death screens echo across the ages of Zelda games.

A Link to the Past works to combine the sentiments expressed by both NES Zelda games. Link spins quickly as the screen flashes before fading to black, just as in The Legend of Zelda, but one detail hints at the finality of death and the consequences of it: Link’s fallen body lies there amidst the field of empty black space, even as the player chooses to continue. This game over screen underscores Janssen’s analysis of Link’s purgatorial existence — something that borders on a Sisyphean task were it not for his (and the player’s) eventual victory over evil.

Link’s Awakening revisits the style of the game over screen from The Legend of Zelda. Aesthetically and technologically, this feels appropriate. Without spoiling the game for anyone (especially considering the upcoming Switch remake), this makes a lot of sense.

Death in the third dimension

The next Zelda release is the first in a new era of gaming. Ocarina of Time functioned similarly to The Legend of Zelda in the way it laid the foundation for what Zelda would look and play like in the 3D era. Generally speaking, game over screens also evolved in this era, and they also grew increasingly rare. For a variety of reasons, death in video games became less common in general, and Zelda games reflected this shift in design philosophy. Many have theorized that the shift to moving in 3D spaces added enough challenge that simply moving around in the game world was difficult enough without added environmental dangers.

By situating Link’s death as a theatrical performance, the game underscores the real meaning of death.

Game over in The Ocarina of Time is a chance for the designers to show off the new ways in which three dimensions enhance the experience of dying. Rather than go for verisimilitude in death, the designers chose to stylize Link’s final moments in a theatrical manner. Upon losing his piece of heart, the camera zooms as it pans around Link, who is frozen motionless as he falls to his knees and then on his face, utterly defeated. By situating Link’s death as a theatrical performance, the game underscores the real meaning of death in video games: It is performative and shapes the experience as one that is meant for the viewing pleasure of the player-audience. As red, emblazoned text tells the player the game is over, the option to save appears, as it does every time. Once again, this is not the end. It is just another beginning.

Link’s deaths grew more theatrical with each subsequent 3D release.

Game over screens in Zelda games continue more or less in this fashion depending on if the game is a handheld or console release. The Oracle games follow the lead set by A Link to the Past and Majora’s Mask similarly follows Ocarina. Wind Waker uses the newfound graphical power of the Gamecube to make Link’s death even more dramatic, and Twilight Princess does the same, freezing all action on the screen to highlight Link’s death-stricken staggering and ultimate fall. Interestingly, the DS games (Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks) have more in common with their console counterparts, which points to the importance of the theatricality of the game over sequence as instructive of the mythmaking that video game death participates in. Skyward Sword follows the game over example set by the previous 3D console games without adding much more than extra graphical fidelity to the death sequence. (As a side note: It would have been fun, albeit a bit morbid, to be able to control Link’s death spins with a little bit of classic Wiimote waggle.)

As the Zelda games grew more formulaic and player choice was increasingly constrained, the game over screens grew more and more theatrical. Since death was something a player may not see that often in a game like Skyward Sword, it was important to play up the sequence as much as possible. The narrative weight of the game over screen was being entirely supported by Link’s exaggerated animations. The narrative elegance of the game over screen from something like Adventure of Link has been entirely stripped away. The motivating factor shifted away from stopping Ganon’s return — a goal in line with the narrative of the game — and instead became stopping Link from suffering, which is something in direct opposition to structure of narrative underpinning of many action-adventure games like Zelda and something in opposition to the classical Hero’s Quest as understood by Joseph Campbell. The more theatrical the death, the more fidelity given to Link’s final moments, and thus the further away from the point of dying one gets.

After Skyward Sword, players were given a lengthy break between console Zelda titles. In the interim, remakes of the N64 games popped up on the 3DS, which updated the games in many respects but retained the game over screens from Link’s first forays into 3D.

Death gets born again

The next real evolution in game over screens actually occurs with A Link Between Worlds. The game over screen in A Link Between Worlds serves as a callback to the same screen in A Link to the Past, with which the game shares an overworld. But in so doing, the game also partakes in the current media landscape’s obsession with nostalgia. It isn’t a secret that a game like A Link Between Worlds was predicated upon nostalgia for what many were choosing to view as Link’s golden age before the 3D games fell into rote predictability and formulaic repetition. In Mediated Nostalgia: Individual Memory and Contemporary Mass Media, Ryan Lizardi writes that “remakes are saturated in nostalgia” because one of the primary pleasures of remakes is the memory of the original. While A Link Between Worlds isn’t a remake per se, it has enough of the key components to be what Lizardi terms “recombinant” in such as way that “exploit[s] its pre-existing relationship” with not just A Link to the Past, but the kind of Zelda game that didn’t hold your hand so tightly as not just its game over screen but play mechanics echoed the more free-roaming past of the franchise.

Breath of the Wild sheds the recombinant features of A Link Between Worlds and instead charts new territory for the franchise while echoing what made it great in both the 2D and 3D eras of gaming. In Breath of the Wild, the theatrics of death are gone. Link dies. He falls, flops, or crumbles to the ground, and the screen fades completely to black as the text game over sits red and bold in the center. Rather than give you the option to save first, it lets you continue or quit. Either way, Link will be resurrected again, calling back to the central conceit of Breath of the Wild and the series as a whole. By downplaying the theatricality of Link’s death in Breath of the Wild, the game actually pushes players to try again. Death comes quickly, and it isn’t lingered upon. Instead, the chance to try again motivates the player to press continue in order to keep going. Death is neither taunt nor roadblock to playing; death is another puzzle for the player to solve using Link as their immortal avatar.