Two Paths to Find Home: On Trials of Mana and Breath of the Wild
What is it about wandering that feels so good? An adult blithely strolling around the city; a teenaged coterie kicking sweet beats on a drive to no place in particular; a child uncovering shortcuts through backyards in search of grand adventure in nearby fields, creeks, or woods. Nothing invokes a need to explore like wandering. Compare wanderlust: There is no vacationlust. No one would ever writes essays about their commutelust. No.
Aimlessness as goal, not side effect. Travel—where destination matters as much, or more, than journey—is far too benign a concept. Wanderlust comes from the soul.
It is hard to know when the need to wander might wane. Home as a static location is antithetical to wandering in the sense that it trades new experiences for familiarity. But home as a concept tends to travel with a person; it is only when the need to re-experience a home arises that dissection of what home means truly begins. Time tends to wipe homes away. As time sweeps by, home becomes a memory that rises unbidden at the strangest things: the bite of a madeleine, perhaps. Or the tap of a keyboard.
I refused to leave these mountains until I made it over there.
June 2019 saw the official release of Seiken Densetsu 3, 1990s-era Super Nintendo game I spent longer to try to stuff an unofficial translation crack onto than actually playing. The trifecta of dial-up modem, ZSNES—or Snes9x?—emulator, and Pentium with MMX technology weren’t up to the task. Or my computer skills weren’t.
The first and only time I played, I barely made it to the second town before frustration with numpad controls and emulation hiccups sent me packing. But now, finding it on the Nintendo Switch? 1995 stretched through time and plucked at my heart.
I was nostalgic for an experience that never actually existed.
A similar sense of wistfulness permeates The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. It is new—comparatively, as things released in 2017 can seem ancient by game development standards—but it contains the same feeling of mystery and excitement as 1987’s NES The Legend of Zelda did. Both SD3 (released in English as Trials of Mana) and BotW sent ripples through my mind in completely different ways. Both offered me the chance to relive the childhood adventures of my imagination. Neither were adventures that had actually taken place.
The original Zelda was a social game: I vividly recall rumors on the schoolbus describing a series of precise directional inputs to traverse the Lost Woods; I barely remember the kids my sister babysat, but I haven’t forgotten watching with bated breath as the eldest uncovered Labyrinth 8 and was quickly defeated by a host of Darknuts. Speaking of tricky enemies, every kid I knew tried to defeat those rabbit-monsters from Labyrinth 5 by playing the flute into their ears. After all, the manual did say that Pols Voice hated loud noises. And if you can’t trust the manual, what else is there?
Here are some extremely known bits of NES trivia:
I found this in a pile of Brooklyn street garbage after my second day of jury duty. It still works!
The U.S. Super Mario Bros. 2 is actually a reskinning of a game called Doki Doki Panic.
The Famicom is the name of the NES in Japan. It is a portmanteau of Family Computer.
The Famicom had a second controller with in a built-in microphone.
You could shout into said microphone to destroy those big-eared ghost bunnies in The Legend of Zelda.
In the original Zelda, I was unable to parse rumor from reality, and it was not solely because of mistranslated instruction booklets or childhood naiveté. I lacked access to the hardware. My family was late—Super Mario Bros. 3-era late—to adopt the system, even though I (probably) pestered my parents and (definitely) cried over the issue all the time. I didn’t have a way to explore Hyrule, the world within Zelda, on my own for years—which to someone under ten is an eternity. I relied on friends who had the game and the system to share their experiences and their knowledge: They played the part of Marco Polo [you are all so lucky I edited out “Mario Polo”] while I was the rest of Western Europe, trying frantically to piece together a cogent vision of places I had never seen. Hearsay was the norm, and large chunks of Zelda action would happen while I wasn’t there, but when I did have the chance to play on my own—it was the first game we bought with our NES—I had strangely specific gaps in my knowledge. I still cannot find the second labyrinth with any regularity. Despite the playground hints, I can’t get to the graveyard without the ladder. Where was the Power Bracelet again?
Breath of the Wild takes that “anything can happen” feeling and applies it to a framework much larger than, “bomb every rock, burn every bush, maybe an old man is hiding in there with a heart container.” A seven-year-old, cobbling together a working theory of a gameworld from other kids’ narratives would have a monumental task delineating childhood hyperbole from in-game mechanics: would you believe you can accidentally catch the grass on fire with your torch and unintentionally create an updraft that sends you and your hang-glider zooming skyward? Or that there is sometimes some sort of celestial dragon that might want to blast you into a lake with its lightning-body? Or that you can find what appears to be one of five Great Fairy Fountains, except when you approach it, a bizarre Horse Skeleton god is unleashed upon the lands and…well, you get the idea. And if you don’t, welcome to the rumor mill. The korok seeds are poop. No, really. And that celestial dragon? It’s probably just trying to live its best celestial dragon life, dude. Standard advice: don’t pester the celestial dragon.
Choosing to wrap up BotW meant severing a connection to the type of wonder that tends not to survive into adulthood. It was exploration with no sense of urgency. There was no fear of missing out if I didn’t see the whole game, because what I saw and what I did was—tautologically, I know—all I ever could have seen and done. What happened in my game was the game for me: a Link who didn’t fight anything he didn’t have to, who only ate mushrooms and boiled fruit, who wore the same bandana even when new helmets and magic circlets were de rigueur. There was no need to “maximize productivity” when the goal was to just exist.
Trials of Mana landed on the other end of the spectrum. I had spent so long reading about the branching paths the characters could take that twenty years later I still remember what each of them were: the thief becomes a Ranger or a Ninja, and then it splits again! A Ninja could be a Master or a Nightblade, and all the skills are different and that is simply the coolest to think about. AND you get to pick three characters to build your team and they all could change classes twice. That’s…a lot of math. What excited me most about the game when I couldn’t play it became its greatest weakness now that I could: there was no mystery to it, though I had played no longer than ten minutes before this year.
Mana was the inverse of BotW; it was like trying to find fragments of yourself in a place you used to call home. You may inhabit the space again, but never the time. I was playing Mana to see what I had missed, not to see what it had to offer. I was waiting for the next class change because I knew I could get better gear and stronger skills. I was waiting to fight the next boss battle because I knew it would be more challenging. It was pure travel—destination: ending. And a strangely abrupt ending it was, too.
That is abrupt. Have some tact, Mana Goddess.
The real magic was the friends we made along the way.
c'est la vie
Once something has its magic stripped away—learn too much; quell all rumors; part the mists of time—nothing can bring it back. But when that destination doesn’t matter—when wandering is the point—wonder like that can never disappear.