Beneath the fluorescent haze of our regional Target’s basement, I grasp at words for my father. I know they exist, but I’m not certain what they are. There is some phrase that will set a chain of events into motion. Some incantation that ends in my kiwi green Game Boy Color reproducing the images & sounds described to me through playground whispers.
I must ask my father, to ask an employee, to retrieve a key, to unlock a plastic barrier, to retrieve a box, to be taken to the register, to be exchanged for currency. I understand these steps. I understand them individually, and the order in which they must take place. But I don’t understand their significance. There are justifications for these things, and I want to be sure I have them. I need to be precise in justifying them to my father. I need to be precise in justifying them to myself.
In The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages, you watch them build the final dungeon. They build it right in the middle of the hub town over the course of the game. It isn't hidden. It isn't far away. It isn’t even ready for you when you show up outside. But it’s bound to be finished someday, like an office building slowly-but-surely being transformed into luxury condos. Aside from the temporary scaffolding and an architectural rendering filled with little stock-image people, it’s almost invisible. Something slow enough to give you all the time in the world required to understand that it is going to hit you and there is nothing you can do to stop it.
You do try though. It wouldn’t be much of game if you didn’t have to. But even armed with a sword and the ability to travel through time, nothing seems to be enough against inevitability. When the people of Labrynna began raising a tower into the heavens, they did it for love. Their queen’s lover was lost at sea and they hoped to guide him safely back to her. The people in turn loved her and worked happily for a time, until an oracle came before the queen.
The oracle told the queen her fate. She would be known as Labrynna’s greatest queen when the tower reached the sky, but her people must go without rest to see it completed. To ensure they would work without rest, the oracle offered to grant the queen an endless day. By the time you arrive, the sun sits in the sky and does not set. The villagers ask after their relatives, the ones who toil away on the tower. None of the workers can tell you the last time they saw their homes.
I never beat the game as a child, but when I played it again on the 3DS Virtual Console in 2013, the tower seemed smaller somehow. The cutscene art was still evocative, but nothing on the overworld reflected the sheer dread I remembered emanating from it. There were four screens of pixelated stone and dirt leading to a door that lead into yet another dungeon. The tower had become another inarticulate fear lost to my childhood.
But my dread returned quickly enough. It was something so simple too. By playing the game, you advance the plot, and by advancing the plot, the tower gets built. After beating the first dungeon, you return to the village and find the tower has grown. Each subsequent dungeon lets you climb it a little further, and rapture gets a little closer with it. Every puzzle solved and every enemy defeated is another brick laid into the sky. The villain cackles in monologue and the workers toil in sorrow.
I got a hunch. One of those hunches you desperately want to be wrong. Something about the past you just can’t seem to shake, and won’t be able to shake until you manage to dig it up.
So, I started digging.
In 2001, Nintendo Online Magazine ran an interview with Hidemaro Fujibayashi, the game’s director. Near the end, the interviewer asks him to tell a story from the game’s development. It’s an anodyne question, the kind you expect to see in every interview about a piece of media. It’s the kind of question you’re expected to ask. We all want a peak behind the curtain. Could you give us some insight? What was it like to make this? What sequence of words pulled it all together?
This is the story he told:
There’s a “Dark Tower” in Oracle of Ages, with people made to work there. Their dialogue is along the lines of “There’s no end to this work” or “I can’t go home”. There were also team members that couldn’t go home much during development, so we put those characters in as a parody (laugh).
Of course, the tower is all part of a plot to summon Ganon. It wouldn’t be a Zelda game without Ganon being behind it, or someone who wants Ganon to be behind it being behind it. The tower is being built to collect suffering as part of a magical rite to resurrect the king of evil once again. The new in service of something old. The tower was being built long before I began my quest. The tower was being built long before my father and I went into that Target basement.
The sun sits in the sky, and the tower grows. They build it to this very day.
