‘These aren’t the Guardians you’re looking for’: Is Terrako a nod to R2-D2?

Spoiler warning: Contains significant spoilers for certain Age of Calamity plot points. If you’ve not played either the game or the demo, you might want to bypass this article for the time being.

Stop me if you have heard this story before. A band of heroes, including a princess, a young hero with a magical sword, a cocky pilot or two, and a droid join forces to fight an overpowering evil that threatens to engulf the entire universe. And over everything is a strange, mysterious and powerful energy force that directs all life within this universe.

Now, then, do you suppose I am referring to The Legend of Zelda?

Or, perhaps, to another saga? One that took place a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away?

Well, the answer is yes to both.

We could go on forever about the many parallels between Star Wars and The Legend of Zelda: two well-established pop-culture franchises with legions of fans all over the world. Both are heavily influenced by generations’ worth of storytelling forms and character archetypes. And yes, both have notoriously wonky timelines, but that is a subject for another article entirely. (If you came here just to argue about that, or to start an argument about the three new Star Wars movies, I suggest that you go somewhere else.)

But for the purposes of this article, I would like to concentrate on Terrako, the little Guardian that beams forward from the Calamity-ridden future to warn Zelda and the others of the coming peril.

“You near-sighted scrap pile!”

“Oh my gosh, they put R2-D2 into this game.” That was my first thought upon playing the Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity demo. And after listening to Terrako’s beeps, whirs, and “oooo’s,” and I’m prepared to bet good rupees that many other Zelda players had the same thought.

R2-D2, as anyone with even a passing familiarity with Star Wars knows, is tasked by Princess Leia to deliver the Death Star’s plans to Obi-Wan Kenobi and the Rebel Alliance in the first film, A New Hope. When Leia’s ship is overtaken, Leia hides the Death Star plans in R2-D2’s memory banks just before Darth Vader captures her.

Likewise, Terrako arrives in the past — landing just outside Hyrule Castle, much to the consternation of Link, Zelda, and Impa — bearing images of the pending destruction contained in its memory banks.

Later in the game, Terrako brings Sidon, Teba, Yunobo, and Riju (and Patricia) back through time after the original Champions become trapped inside the Divine Beasts. Clearly, this little Guardian is a most unusual deus ex machina.

Terrako’s whimsical appearance and its language of beeps and whistles might immediately remind many players of R2-D2. However, given Terrako’s diminutive size and ovoid shape, it could also be compared to BB-8, the little orange-and-white droid that aids Rey in the new Star Wars film trilogy by Disney. In either case, Terrako serves the purpose that R2-D2 and BB-8 serve: friend, helper, messenger, and in some cases, deceptively powerful protector.

One thing we never learn is who, or what, induced Terrako to travel back through time to avert the coming disaster. Was it Hylia’s intervention? A clever bit of programming? A subconscious distress call from Zelda’s hidden powers? We may never know.

Terrako’s being beamed back from an apocalyptic future, in order to warn those in the past, may well be a tip of the hat to Terminator 2: Judgment Day as well.

The Friendly Little Terror

Being a Guardian, Terrako is technically the same type of machine as the “giant robotic death spiders” (as I like to call them) that first appeared in Breath of the Wild. But there could not be more contrast, at least not at the outset, between the little Guardian and the big ones. The larger ones clearly have an air of “this thing will obviously kill you,” and have doubtlessly caused many Zelda players to have a mini-heart attack every time that distinctive piano music starts playing. Terrako, by contrast, appears to be (mostly) harmless, looking much like a mechanical Fabergé egg with clawed feet.

Terrako is especially close to Zelda, for reasons that are revealed much later in the game. The little Guardian declares itself as one of Zelda’s protectors, and seems to get rather agitated when someone other than Link gets too close to her. At several key moments in the game when Zelda is in the depths of despair, the Guardian tries to cheer her up by humming “Zelda’s Lullaby.”

Besides Zelda, Terrako seems to have the closest rapport with Link, much as R2-D2 has with Luke Skywalker. Whenever the player is battling as Link, Terrako is always scuttling around nearby. It is R2-D2 that accompanied Luke off to his training with Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back. And Link, like Luke, is the peasant boy-turned-hero with a legendary sword. (Indeed, the Master Sword seems to look a lot like a lightsaber whenever Link is at full health.)

The Parallels Keep Coming

And like how the Empire sends Stormtroopers to hunt down R2-D2 and the stolen plans, the Yiga Clan breaks into the Akkala Citadel to steal Terrako. (Much like the Stormtroopers, the Yiga Clan as a group seem to be fairly useless as a military force.)

Zelda and Link are both very fond of Terrako, and the rest of the team seems to regard him with varying degrees of affection. Impa periodically finds him to be an annoyance, at one point angrily referring to him as “you troublesome teapot!” It is not inconceivable to imagine C-3PO uttering a similar phrase at R2-D2 during a moment of pique.

We can speculate at length at how much the Age of Calamity production team intended Terrako to resemble R2-D2, either in terms of appearance, personality, or role. Given the worldwide cultural impact that Star Wars has had over the past four-plus decades, with the first movie preceding the first Zelda game by about a decade, it is not unreasonable to imagine that the game’s developers were inspired by Star Wars in a way. Indeed, the impact appears to be reciprocal; in a 2019 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Stig Asmussen, the director of Jedi: Fallen Order, cited The Wind Waker as one of his influences.

A turn toward science fiction

Besides being an apparent nod to Star Wars, Terrako’s appearance in Age of Calamity also reflects how The Legend of Zelda contains elements of science fiction (both hard and soft) as well as fantasy.

The world of The Legend of Zelda is likely to be considered a fantasy world, in which different kinds of magic hold sway. However, in some of the games, the line between fantasy and science fiction becomes blurred somewhat. The land of Termina in Majora’s Mask, with the Indigo-Gos and a sort of magical ATM system for withdrawing rupees, was like the first foray into cyberpunk, while the use of trains and railways in Spirit Tracks took the series into the realm of steampunk.

With Breath of the Wild, the series took an even deeper turn into science fiction, with perhaps an emphasis on cyberpunk. The Sheikah technology that produced the Shrines, the Towers, the Guardians, and the Divine Beasts is described as ancient, but it all has the appearance of a futuristic past (or a past future), much like the world of Star Wars. The Divine Beasts and the Guardians seem to be the equivalent of computer systems taken over and used for evil. The blue-bladed ancient weapons, meanwhile, have elements of laser technology in their development, in that the light can cut through steel and stone. (Rather like a lightsaber, come to think of it.)

The first Star Wars prequel film, The Phantom Menace, indicates that R2-D2 was part of a fleet of similar droids in Queen Amidala’s service. That means the astromech droid has a long history with Leia’s (and Luke’s) family. Terrako is also revealed to have a history with Zelda’s family; Zelda built it when she was a little girl, and the Guardian acted as her friend and playmate until King Rhoam took the Guardian away, calling it a toy and a distraction. (Rhoam was certainly not in the running for Father of the Year.)

But even with the presence of a good little Guardian, we are reminded of the presence of evil Guardians, both large and small. The Empire and the First Order have their own droids that look somewhat similar to R2-D2 and BB-8. In Age of Calamity, it is revealed that Astor has a Malice Guardian that looks very much like Terrako.

Probably the most heartbreaking moment in Age of Calamity is when Terrako is corrupted by Malice — taken over by the Dark Side, if you will. The little Guardian’s allies are then forced to fight it.

Terrako is seemingly damaged beyond repair as a result, but it pulls itself together for one final stand before sacrificing itself to help defeat Calamity Ganon. The closest parallel to this act in Star Wars is Darth Vader. Finally coming back from the Dark Side, Vader sacrifices himself to save Luke from Emperor Palpatine.

All of this tragedy is why it’s a relief to see that the player can put Terrako back together through a new series of quests, and then unlock him as a fighter. (The game would have been too sad otherwise.)

What is the future of Terrako? Will the Guardian be a one-off character in Age of Calamity, or will it somehow be brought into the main series? It seems we may have to speculate on that as well, but who knows what the future will bring?

May the (Tri)Force be with you.