Wednesday, May 6, 2015

Legend of Zelda, the Christian past?

Not too long ago I started playing Legend of Zelda the Ocarina of Time by downloading it from the Virtual Console. I never owned an N64 as a boy so it has been interesting getting to know what all the fuss was about... more on that another time.

What I wanted to post was a link to an article by Chris Qu exploring how in the early Zelda games the world of Hyrule is Christian but that with the Ocarina of Time all of a sudden you get the religion of the three goddesses (who dress like prostitutes).

Nintendo made the decision in the mid 90s to move Link from being a kind of crusader knight character towards what we have today.

The article makes some really interesting observations, pointing out Christian artistic motifs in the early games as well as the fact that what is known in English versions as "spell book" is in Japanese referred to as "the bible". 

My absolute favourite piece of evidence is the great promotional artwork for "A Link to the Past" which shows Link in prayer before our Blessed Lord. Note he ain't a protestant either.

5 comments:

me said...

Actually, A Link to the Past was the first that i know of to mention the three goddesses, before Ocarina of Time. Not in the game, but in the manual.

I've not seen that artwork of Link kneeling in my copy of the ALTTP manual. Granted mine is missing a few pages, but none of it is in black and white, and the depictions of Link do not match the style of that image. It might be in the Japanese version of the manual.

I know the zeldapedia attributes it to LTTP, and zeldawiki has a section on its copyright, but i just can't find the original source for it.

Unknown said...

The goddesses are depicted as looking like golden statues (that look little like oscars) in Ocarina of Time. The only place I can think of where they might look like prostitutes is Din in Oracle of Seasons, because she wears a form-fitting body suit with streaming ribbons, but that's because she's a performing as a dancer in a traveling circus.

Unknown said...

Din farore and nayru did not offend me but this is interesting.

Unknown said...

I was under the assumption that the zelda triforce was related to the trinity. Only to look it up a few months ago to find it was about goddesses. That was a total bummer and another strike to videogames alltogether for me, but now I also has to bear witness to my firends who are currently playing the new game ( which from the hour or so of game play I saw, has quite a few heresies in it) some catholics dont care... I cant get past how we could play something that blatantly mocks the basic truths of the faith.

Thanks to this post though, I now know the original games were different and hopefully peoples hearts will be changed through this change to find out what is really important and to not offend our loving God for their own recreation.

Unknown said...

I miss old Zelda