The Hyrule Fantasy, as envisioned by Katsuya Terada

Katsuya Terada is a Japanese artist cut from a different cloth, with an intimidating body of work evoking memories of 1980′s film classics like The Dark Crystal and Conan the Barbarian rather than the typical doe-eyed anime flavors that his contemporaries so often cling to. Some time in the late 80′s, Nintendo discovered his work, and perhaps figuring that his depiction of sword ‘n sorcery was a good sell for Western audiences, commissioned him to create several illustrations for in-house strategy guides and magazines like Nintendo Power.

From what I recall from early Nintendo Power issues, Terada’s work appeared in articles promoting Dragon Warrior, Secret of Mana and Final Fantasy, but his Zelda illustrations were the most prolific, and those are the ones that have made a recent resurgence on the internet. (See a complete high-res collection here.) They’re interesting because they’re so intertwined with “classic Zelda,” AKA the first four games of the series. Those four entries, right up to Link’s Awakening, possessed certain characteristics that would later be shattered by 1998′s Ocarina of Time. Specifically, they all came out at a time when Zelda was still evolving, and was first and foremost a 2D franchise with graphics that were left open to interpretation. Link might have been a pink-haired blob on the television screen when you were playing A Link to the Past, but because those two dimensional collections of pixelated dots were just abstract enough, you could still choose to imagine him as a rugged, strong-jawed adventurer making his way through a twisted, murky fantasy world - rather than the earring-sporting anime kid that Ocarina of Time would fashion him into just a few years later. 

Terada’s artwork clearly plays on this still-open-to-interpretation early version of Link, Zelda, Ganon and the other inhabitants of Hyrule, and it’s clear that he was drawing from the sparse screenshots he was probably presented with to manufacture something elaborate, colorful and very special. I particularly like his gorgeous interpretation of Marin, the biggest female character in Link’s Awakening, and it’s fascinating to see how a few of his designs, like the buxom Great Fairy, eventually became a reality in later Zelda titles over the years. Or maybe he drew that one after Ocarina of Time had already come out? Either way, there’s a raw imaginative edge to his art that you just don’t see much of anymore, and although Terada’s newer works are more refined and techno-laced (not to mention filled with nipples), that energy and sense of unbridled imagination is still present.

I really wouldn’t mind seeing another Zelda game emerge with this sort of look, but it’s unlikely to ever happen. Video games are realistic enough these days to simply not need artists of Terada’s caliber to represent them in strategy guides and magazines, and even if Terada were to take up a job in the modern day world of video game character design, it’s doubtful that Nintendo would hire him for The Legend of Zelda series, which seems to have firmly taken up roots in the land of anime aesthetics. They didn’t even bother to include his work in the Hyrule Historia, though there’s really a lot they left out of that book in favor of gushing about Skyward Sword.