Blank Boy

Jake Sully. When I saw Avatar last December I remember thinking that the only moment I believed Jake Sully was actually a person was when he picked his weird thong out of his blue butt. The rest of his actions I attributed to the heroic machinations familiar to anyone who's played a videogame or seen Star Wars (though, as time goes on, Star Wars seems more and more atypical).

Link's Awakening

I first entered the world of Zelda on Game Boy, where everything is represented in tiny blocks of pixels, flat and in a top down view. At this height, Link is a patch about 64 pixels wide. His sprite is no more interesting than the rocks around him, or patches of flowers, trees and the various monsters you have to fight in every screen. You could say exactly the same thing of Avatar, that Pandora itself is the only draw (and Netyri, but we won't go there). His sword swings (at least in the two Oracle games and Link's Awakening) are denoted by a satisfying little swish sound and the quick flash of a tiny pixel sword. Surrounding you are a whole host of charming characters and frightening bosses, fiendish dungeons and fields swarming with enemies, those are what you are here for anyway, to fight your way across a tiny universe and find all of its secrets. Many other characters talked to him (or at him) but in only a few cases would you say anything at all back. In Link's Awakening you get the most opportunity to say anything at all by comforting Marin at the beach, and at this point you get a little bit of an external personality. You really aren't any good at talking to ladies.

Tati and I started playing Zelda: Ocarina of Time last week, and about the same time Panda arrived to crash at our house for a couple of weeks. I had never played a 3D Zelda before and frankly they had always kind of scared me because I didn't think any of the logic would carry over from 2D to 3D and I was afraid to be out of my element in something that was otherwise very familiar. With the processing power of an N64 Link is now a rough shape made of shaded triangles, which works surprisingly well because the animators took care in giving him relatively smooth and natural movements (Link's loping run is reminiscent of Wander's awkward run in Shadow of the Colossus). Added to his repertoire is a series of non-verbal sounds like various screams, "hah!"s, yawning (kind of cute when you're kid-Link), and "eh!"s. As we played one evening Stephen commented on how much screaming was in this game as I accidentally fell down a well. So far the only thing Link's said (via text) is his own name. But because the game exists in the context of 1998, this is unnoticeable and certainly not a problem, I've been playing it as I have any other Zelda game I've touched. Judiciously used, the game has wrought some humor from its set of screams.

For a couple evenings I watched Panda finish his Twilight Princess game. Twilight Princess came out soon after the Wii, and as such the environments have a good, Game Cube / PS2 era gloss to them. Link is actually more or less like a person, appearance wise, not having various polygons jutting out and having shapes that actually connect, and some mo-cap animation for sword swings. His voice is a little rougher and more Japanese sounding, but it's still confined to the set of vocalizations that are present in Ocarina of Time, with perhaps a little more variation (especially on the "HAH!" and "eh!" side). Personally, I mostly dislike voice acting, the notable exception being Ratchet and Clank. You want to make me hate your cut scenes (of which there are too many) hire some guy who can take "intensity" straight into camp via wormhole. But on the other end of that, I couldn't help wondering what decisions other than legacy resulted in Midna being the only main character who can talk. Midna speaks gibberish, but gibberish is still helpful if it conveys some emotion. Ico and Shadow of the Colossus both use gibberish to brilliant effect, because while you can't understand the words there's still a clear message.

I ended up watching the final battle in Twilight Princess, which became unintentionally hilarious. See, the problem with keeping Link blank all the time is that you end up with fewer and fewer opportunities to make a good impression. Link is fine when you're out, floating behind his head as a camera as you fight monsters, but when the moment comes to push the story along with a cut scene, and the modern expectation is some sort of conversation, you end up setting up contrivances to avoid what you've been avoiding for over a decade. Even more painfully still, Link's supposed to have some sort of reaction, yet he can't speak! Watching Link dive for Midna in slllooooooowww motion with a weak little "eh!", it was hard not to snicker. Link's default expression is rather misty, and it doesn't really ever leave the mist, as far as I can tell, so the grand total of my impression of Link is that he's a complete dope. You end up with the butt-picking and nothing else. Panda aptly named the Link of his save-slot "Boy".

I'm not clamoring "Let him speak let him speak!", because done badly it would be unplayable and atrocious. Looking at Ico or Wander, neither of these heroes spoke much at all, but the stories supported that approach and the few cut scenes, while they were often times in the vein of throwing obstacles in your way to get things moving along, they were done with sufficient emotional content. Of Ico I could say that he's both frightened for and cares for Yorda beyond the fact that she can get you out of your predicament. Of Wander I can say that he's obsessive and love-sick, long beyond reason.

Those are broad strokes, but they still work, and both Ico and Wander have a awkward dignity to them that is external to the player. Both stories are also relatively small, in spite of their high fantasy trappings-- a boy trying to escape a labyrinth, a young man destroying ancient beasts of rock and stone and black earthy blood to restore his love-- they work the same way the simple myths do in the Arabian Nights or Grim's fairy tales. My favorite Zelda game is Link's Awakening, where your goal is to leave an island you've been stranded on. You're not meant to save the world, you weren't chosen for this task, the only thing that sets you apart is that you're an outsider, and your closest companion is a girl who also wants to leave, and it's so bittersweet when you do leave that when I first finished the game I cried.

Unfortunately there's not a big market for stories like that, so it's likely that silliness will be endemic to the Zelda series, piling epic proportions onto a simple character that can't bear the weight.