Skyward Sword succeeds among adventure games as an example of structure. This is a game about growth, and every aspect of its design is based around that. As you play, you gain more tools, more skills that make you a better hero. As you grow, the world around you changes and evolves to challenge you. Analyzing these aspects under the lens of Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, it becomes clear that Skyward Sword is committed to putting you on a journey unlike any Zelda game before it. If you’re not already familiar with the monomyth, Campbell conceived this theory in his comparative mythology book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. In comparing myths and religions across cultures and ages, Campbell found that they are all structured the same way; a person leaves home, faces various trials, transforms, and returns as a hero. This is otherwise known as the hero’s journey. There are 17 stages to Campbell’s monomyth, but we can really simplify them down to 8 key moments. This is exactly what creator of TV shows Community and Rick & Morty Dan Harmon has done throughout his career. Harmon calls this the embryo, or story circle. Each half of the circle reflects the theme of its opposite side. From top to bottom, we see the hero’s two worlds – known and unknown, normal and special, life and death. From right to left, we see the hero’s two states - stasis and growth, passive and active, mortal and god. The Typical Zelda Story CircleHere’s how a typical Zelda game can be broken down in this framework. You – The Protagonist
It’s very simple, but it gets the job done. And this structure isn’t limited to Zelda games. You can probably make a same step-by-step breakdown of any video game you’ve ever played. But if all Zelda games can be structured this way, what makes Skyward Sword so special? If you consider each dungeon its own story circle, then Hyrule is the common ground that connects them together. You leave Hyrule behind, enter the dungeon, have your adventure, come back to Hyrule, and then look for the next dungeon. Hyrule is the space between adventures, and what happens in between adventures isn’t as impactful as what happens within them. Hyrule is static. Once you’ve taken everything a location has to offer, you’re quick to throw that old spot away so that the adventure can continue. Returning is never very fun because there’s very little for you to do when you go back. For example, in Twilight Princess you are asked to go back to your home village Ordon to pick up the iron boots you need to climb Death Mountain. Besides talking to a few villagers, there’s nothing else to do besides pick up the boots and leave. Revisiting old areas in a Zelda game means you’re on some kind of fetch-quest, where your overall progress is blocked until you pick up some key item. You know the old saying, “It’s about the journey, not the destination?” This is a prime example of what that isn’t. When a Zelda game sends you on a fetch-quest that has you backtrack to a familiar area, it’s all destination and no journey. What makes Skyward Sword different is that you are constantly returning to old locations rather than discovering new ones. But every time you go back to these places, every time you’ve grown as a hero, you have the chance to discover something new about it. These areas, and the way you explore them, evolve as you progress through the game. Return becomes rediscovery, as a place you thought you knew suddenly becomes unfamiliar. The circle rotates, and the adventure continues almost seamlessly. The Faron Woods Sequence Faron Woods is a great example of what I’m talking about with these rotating, linked circles. For most of Act 1, Skyward Sword is standard Zelda – you go from Sky, to Province, to Dungeon, back to Sky, and then to the next Province. Compared to Wind Waker, where you go from Great Sea, to Island, to Dungeon, back to Great Sea, and then to the next Island, these structures are identical. But by Act 2 of Skyward Sword, you’ve unlocked all surface provinces. You’re meant to return to Faron Woods and find a Trial Gate. The game sets this up narratively by telling Link that he needs to power up his Goddess Sword. It’s basically a fetch-quest – go back to this spot, get a powerup, then continue with the story. Faron Woods is already part of your known world, so there’s nothing presented here that’s as challenging or interesting as your first time exploring the area. But then you find the Trial Gate and cross over to the Silent Realm. From here, you’ve crosses the threshold into the special world. The Silent Realm is still Faron Woods, but completely changed. It’s gone from familiar to unfamiliar. You adapt, complete the trial, and are rewarded with a literal Gift of the Goddess – the Water Dragon’s Scale. Now you can return to the ordinary realm of Faron Woods, changed. When you return, however, that’s when the circle shifts again. Your new ability allows you to explore more of the woods than before, making for a renewed sense of exploration and adventure. The new underwater sections have made the known world of Faron Woods into a special, unknown one. Explore all of that and you meet the Water Dragon, a god-like being. She tasks you with going back to Skyview Temple, the very first dungeon of the game, and retrieving some magic healing water. But when you go back to Skyview Temple, lo and behold, it’s changed too. Now full of new enemies and puzzles, making it special and dangerous once again. You beat the miniboss, retrieve the healing water, and go back to Faron Woods. Once you get back, surprise, surprise, Faron Woods is changed. Like the temple, it has been repopulated with new, more powerful enemies. Again, it is unknown and dangerous, and you must approach it with the same caution as you did when you first arrived. The neat thing about this shift is that it brings us back to our original reason for coming to the woods – upgrading the Goddess Sword. If the enemies have powered up, the hero needs to power up. The upgrade is no longer a narrative Need, but a gameplay one. You return to the Water Dragon and she points you to the Ancient Cistern, the dungeon that houses the special flames that will upgrade your sword, and thus the end of this sequence. It’s still one location but shifting and evolving into the unknown four times. This sequence is made of five story circles chained together, keeping the revisit a fresh part of the adventure and not a stale list of tasks. You’re still backtracking, technically, but you’re discovering something new. That makes it fun; it’s about the journey, not the destination. But this is a great example of how Skyward Sword is built on linked story circles, not an example of Skyward Sword being great. If getting the magic water felt like a padded fetch-quest to you, there’s a very simple reason for that. Take our five circles and consider what we learn about the game from each one. The darkened parts of this chain are redundant and can basically be removed from the sequence without changing the game. Here’s the padding. If we remove these parts, the Faron Woods revisit would still be the same, but with better pacing. If the game repopulated the area with stronger enemies immediately after completing the trial gate, then you can skip the fetch-quest while still demonstrating how areas will evolve with the Water Dragon Scale and reminding players to upgrade their weapon through introducing tougher enemies. But the main idea communicated throughout this sequence is that, when you return, things will change. That’s the DNA of this game. The Return Home This is further emphasized through Skyward Sword’s sidequests in Skyloft, Link’s home. Going back to our circle diagram, our known and unknown worlds are the Sky and the Surface, respectively. Every time you need to continue the adventure, you go to the surface. Every time the adventure is complete, you return to the sky. When you return home, that’s when the hero’s journey is given meaning. The hero’s growth, or change, is only meaningful in how they are uniquely able to help the people around them once they go back home. According to Campbell, “a hero, properly, is someone who has given his life to something bigger than himself or other than himself.” In most Zelda games, sidequests exist mainly to help yourself. Collect pieces of heart, get more rupees, unlock more abilities – the express purpose is to make your situation better. In Skyward Sword, sidequests are about helping others. Characters will tell you when something is troubling them and ask for your help in a way that only you, the hero who has grown from your adventures, can. Even your reward for helping others isn’t meant to help you – the gratitude crystals exist for the sake of the kind monster Batreaux, who needs those crystals to become human. Every time you come back to Skyloft with new tools or abilities, you come back to the opportunity to change things for other people. The more people you help, the more heroic you become. Mastering Your Sword Moving on, because this is Skyward Sword, we naturally must talk about the combat system – one of the major complaints against this game. With a heavy emphasis on 1-to-1 sword tracking, combat is much more about when and where you swing rather than how much and how quickly. Skyward Sword treats combat like its own puzzles, where you solve it with your skill and understanding on how each enemy operates in each environment. In terms of the 8 stages of the story-circle, we can break down combat encounters this way –
But learning new tactics doesn’t completely translate to the feeling of heroic progression, so you need powerups of your own throughout the game to meet these tougher challenges. When your growth is visible or tangible, that has real impact. Skyward Sword rewards players for their understanding and mastery of the game by upgrading the Goddess Sword at different points of the story. And thus, as the Nintendo story always follows the Nintendo gameplay, a game about mastering your sword literally becomes a game about the Master Sword. Which brings us to the narrative. The Narrative and Story Circle Compared to previous Zelda titles, this game spends the most amount of time developing its characters over the course of the story. Even extremely minor characters such as Fledge and Batreaux exhibit transformation, however shallow. But the real metamorphosis is witnessed in the characters who journey to the surface. Groose, Fi, Link, and Zelda each follow their own heroic journey, and can have their respective arcs represented by the story circle.
Groose’s Circle
In most Zelda games, she’s the princess waiting to be rescued. There are a few exceptions, like in Ocarina of Time, where she guides Link as the ninja Sheik, or Wind Waker, where she lives freely as the pirate Tetra, but these characters are static. There might be some minor changes over the story, but both Sheik and Tetra are comfortable enough with who they are and what they need to do. So, for the first time in the series, Zelda herself embarks on her own journey.
While this might not be your favorite game in the series, I hope you recognize that Skyward Sword is entirely committed to the heroic structure. Every aspect of the game, from the exploration of its world, to the dungeons, combat, puzzles, and epic narrative, exhibits a kind of growth alongside you. They’re all built around the experience of the player journeying into a new situation, learning from it, gaining from it, and returning with change. Skyward Sword is the monomyth in action. Was this intentional on Nintendo’s part? Probably not. In fact, I hope not. The coolest part of the monomyth is that it’s not actually a guideline for telling stories, but some universally recognizable set of elements that make a story meaningful to us across disparate cultures, ages, and media. I like to think that Nintendo genuinely wanted to make a game about growth and mastery, and their designers, through some distinctly human understanding of the nature of meaningful change, serendipitously stumbled into this structure of going on a journey and coming back home. But whatever the case, they made an excellent game that should serve as an example to many on how to structure an adventure.
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AuthorGreg Anthony is a game designer and writer who turns his long essays into videos for YouTube. ArchivesCategories |