Naomi Aonuma

Now a harder question: how much of what you read, hear or see do you memorize within a given week? How about a year? How about a lifetime? Some of us are good with historical dates, birthdays, addresses; some smaller portion of us can memorize mathematical formulae, digits of pi, or even entire books of the Bible. But let's face it: that is far far less than 0.1% of what we have seen and had the opportunity to memorize.

All of those… well, all of those somethings… will disappear [?] like tears in rain.

Out, out sweet candle. Life is but a walking shadow. Creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded history… wait, no, that’s the wrong order… I think it's… well, fuck.

I have always told myself that I have a poor memory, but I figure this isn't quite true. There are tricks I have for remembering, and I do not use them. I learned quickly that in mathematics and physics, one can memorize only two or three definitions and derive the rest of the necessary formulae from there. With history, the more facts you learn the more you can fill in a sort of mental calendar; Truman dropped the bombs on Japan, and given Eisenhower was a general in World War II, he probably became president shortly after, etc. etc. etc. As for birthdays, I am sure I could form the same sort of calendar; the difference is that I don’t.

“But I didn't snuff it,” he said as he walked in on me reading A Clockwork Orange, alone in the lunchroom. It was my third day, and while I was assigned a desk I was not yet assigned any work.

“You didn't what?”

“Oh, have you not gotten there yet? What's going on where you're at now?” He looked over my shoulder, analyzing the font size and page structure. Before I had a chance to answer:

“Ah yes, I imagine it's around page 215 or so in your copy. But I didn't snuff it.”

Sure enough, it was. On page 215, Alex writes “But I didn't snuff it.” So there it was: Ron had some mental map of A Clockwork Orange that he could scale and translate to pinpoint the precise position of “But I didn't snuff it.” Bullseye.

The more I sat alone in that lunchroom, the more I learned about Ron's mental maps. There were literal maps –- he knew the names of every major body of water in the world –- as well as figurative maps of phylogenetic trees and chemical signaling pathways. He knew baseball division standings despite not caring for the sport, he knew the latest video games although he could hardly work a modern personal computer, and above all he knew literature and poetry.

A week or so into my time at the Harold Lab, I had picked up a book on the Belgian Congo titled King Leopold’s Ghost, which he saw and seemed quite pleased with. “You know, the title is from an old poem, from Vachel. Lindsay. Would you like to hear it? Be warned, it gets a bit racist.” And then he launched in, not a word out of place, before I had a chance to say ``yes, I suppose I would like to hear it," because for some reason I did.

Zelda was always kind of unique in that the franchise is enormous, but the dedicated fan community was pretty tight-knit. It was the sort of group where there would be a person who lived to go into a Skype chat or onto the ZeldaDungeon forums to talk about enemy placements in one room in Adventure of Link, and another person who lived to write two-thousands words about why the first person was wrong.

I was a big participant in this community - I wrote walkthroughs and editorials, I had a small but robust Twitch following, and I was in two or three Skype groups in which I met some people who I still talk to today. I was (and still am) a rabid collector of official products and re-player of the vintage games. In a meaningful sense, I am a Zelda superfan, but I haven't felt that way in ten years.

Unfortunately, the Zelda fandom was very vulnerable to the effects of Discord and Reddit replacing Skype and traditional forums, respectively. The issue was one of barrier of entry - Reddit is particularly troublesome in this way:

1) Joining a subreddit requires pushing one button. It's one of the most successful gaming franchises of all time, so if you write "press if you like Zelda" on a button, a few million people will hit that button.

2) Visibility on Reddit relies on up-voting, which is a very minimal form of engagement compared to maintaining activity on a forum thread.

The result was that superfans were lost in a sea of the sort of hype or low-effort nostalgia posts that generate up-votes. (People complain about this all the time in comics communities; it's definitely worse there.) Here's a spiteful anecdote about the first and only time I posted on the Zelda subreddit:

I found a copy of Oracle of Seasons in-box, which completed my collection of every to-date official Zelda title, including almost all side games (one day I will buy a CDi). I arranged the boxes in a nice fashion, and took a picture. I thought it was pretty impressive; there were some pretty rare ones in there, as well as multiples of certain games because the cartridges had different editions. I uploaded it to Reddit, and received two upvotes. Later that day, a man posted a picture of a Link's Awakening cartridge in his palm with the words "Girlfriend got me this for my birthday." That post got 12,000 upvotes. I had three copies of that game in my picture, but no girlfriend (is this incel bait?).

Just a year or two after this point, Breath of the Wild released. It was a commercial and critical success, which only further compounded the problem as Reddit and Discord communities grew with the influx of BotW posts.

I should stop myself briefly to point out that these are not "fake fans." These are the fans - they are far more representative of the Zelda player base than the members of a 3 AM Zelda Gremlins Skype call. My seventeen-paragraph essay on Demise from Skyward Sword was never going to affect the design decisions of the people at Nintendo - Breath of the Wild sales numbers would, and Breath of the Wild was not a Zelda superfan's sort of game (one day I'll write a whole essay about that, even though I probably don't need to).

I don't think there is any hope anytime soon of getting that community back. If there were a new superfan Zelda community of just the right size and intensity, it still wouldn't be the one that I had (that's why the King of Red Lions does what he does at the end of Wind Waker...). But there is a chance that we'll get new games of the type that built that community decades ago.

Sofija Marino, stepped into that room no fewer than six times each day to see her poor father. Each morning she turned on his lights, and each night she turned them off. He got his three meals. He received his psychic and physical examination – she is a self-trained doctor.

Today, she came to turn on his lights and found him in his usual state, frozen in place and staring at the ceiling; after two years, it was no longer jarring. The gray roots of his hairs had slowly become gray halves of his hairs, his wrinkles had begun to set in, his skin had lost all tone; he may have frozen, but time had not. 

She walked over to his side and picked his thick glasses off of the nightstand, so that he could focus better on the eggshell-painted ceiling. 

Not to say the ceiling was Alexander's entire visual world. If he could work up the energy to tilt his head slightly to either side, he could see the paintings, drawings, and collages he had collected in his more active decades – all originals, primarily of the Yugoslav zenit movement, known to few but him these days. He may even witness his daughter, with a hopeful smile and tearful eyes.

“Dad,” she said. 

“Dad, she said,” he said, walking the line between concerning patient and playful father. Or perhaps he was far off on one side of that line; who could say? Sofija could say. She laughed.

Could he see his daughter once she gently lifted his head and rotated it towards her? If he were only half-conscious, he might not even recognize her: she painted her face a new color and bloated her lips and cheeks; opposite her father, dark roots battled the bleached white rest of her hair for dominance. Revolting against the body her father had given her, he might have been upset, if only he could be upset.

“Dad, I have great news for you!” He looked straight past her, but she believed – knew – he heard her words. “I know what's wrong, and I'm sure this time. Do you hear me? It's not just a hunch. I'm sure.” She was sure. 

–

Past diagnoses conceived of by Doctress Sofija had informed unsuccessful treatments, but these were never replaced so much as built upon. When eighteen months prior she had determined that her father had a vitamin K imbalance, she put him on a strict diet consisting primarily of potatoes. As his health failed to improve, this became a diet of exclusively potatoes. 

But he was still sick. 

“Well, it didn't hurt” was not the philosophy either. Once the catatonia was seen to persist in spite of the potatoes, Sofija remembered that her father had once been a smoker of cigars – withdrawing so quickly after the onset of his illness must have added to his unease. She started placing nicotine patches on his arm, and found that he began convulsing violently each day shortly after application. 

It did hurt, so the convulsions needed to be solved as well. She searched for a home remedy for epilepsy and found an obscure technique once used in ancient Caribbean medicine: the healer would grab the seizing patient by the shoulders and whip him around in time with his convulsions, but in the opposite direction. This ostensibly cancelled out the dark cosmic force (which moved him) with a benevolent mechanical force. She did that every day. 

As you likely have by now, she determined that there must be a psychosomatic (or as she said, psychic) component to his illness. You cannot give a mostly unresponsive man traditional talk therapy, so alternative routes needed to be explored. She knew that psychic ailments were often caused by childhood experiences, but his parents had both died long ago and he had no living siblings to ask about his youth. She turned to the only person who may have heard more stories of Alexander’s childhood than she had: his ex-wife, Natalia.

Natalia was not Sofija’s mother – she had been married to Alexander in their late teenage years and early twenties, and had little-to-no contact with him since their divorce. She was not particularly moved either way by the news of his recent debilitation. 

Still, she was a good source of information on his parents – his mother, in particular. As Natalia told it, Alexander’s mother was a manipulative narcissist; she would be cruel to the people around her son to evoke nasty responses, and then complain about that nastiness to him as if it had not been provoked. She had tricked her son into believing she was an empathetic woman, she loved him, she only had the best of intentions, and using this false image, she convinced him to leave his wife (her). 

What a miserable woman, Sofija thought, and what a shame that she was so miserable in such a specific way that he would not even know she had been miserable! It explained why he had never spoken a bad word about his mother, and why he may be unable to work through this particular trauma without a push from the outside. She called it a narcissistic wound.

So Sofija would sit next to her father and tell him, usually without response, about how his mother had wounded his psyche. She would periodically return to Natalia for specific examples that would lead his thought patterns in the right direction, and she was certain that one night, in a dream, he would come to understand.

After months of potatoes and nicotine patches and counter-convulsing and speaking ill of Alexander’s dead mother, he was only declining. While he used to frequently turn his head about the room and stare at his zenitisms, he was spending more time staring at the ceiling; while he used to lift his own fork and water glass, his daughter often had to do this for him. This is where she got the idea for an at-home eye test, inspired by one she had seen at the Department of Motor Vehicles – perhaps he simply could not see. She determined that his prescription was quite poor.

–

Today, Sofija entered her father’s room, turned on his lights and said: “I know what’s wrong, and I’m sure this time.”

What was wrong?

“I looked through your calendars, and found that just one week before you fell ill, you were out in California. Is that right, dad?” He did not respond.

“And I found the hotel booking in your records, and I called up the hotel myself, and would you know it, nobody answered. They closed down just last month, dad. Does that sound like a coincidence?” He did not respond.

“And then I thought to call a local hospital there, and if you can believe it, it’s not just you, dad. There were many patients there with horrible coughs and terrible rashes after their stay in that very hotel.” He did not respond.

“The doctors say it was a pernicious sort of mold, but all of their patients have improved. And I ordered a remedy – it should be in the mail already! – and it’s only one intramuscular injection each day, only for one month. You can get better, dad.” He did respond:

“I –”

She smiled, seeing that this news had filled her father with the sort of energy that can only come from hope. 

And then, slowly, he rose for the first time in two years. His expression relaxed. He stood above his daughter and pet her hair softly with one hand, removing his glasses with the other. He said:

“Nicholas, are you aware of Chemo. Taxis?”

His idiosyncrasy, lovable at first and exhausting after two or three conversations, is to break uncommon words into their roots as he speaks. Chemo: chemical, chemistry. Taxis: arrangement, like taxonomy. Chemo. Half-second pause. Taxis.

“Yeah, I think so. Isn't that the thing where bacteria sort of move in the direction of a concentration gradient? They have some sort of internal second derivative, or -”

“Good man!” Now the word chemotaxis has entered the realm of mutual understanding, and Ron can drop the pause. He stared at me with small, shining blue eyes and a small, shining bald head. “Yes, it seems you know a thing or two already. You see, it was my doctoral advisor Julius. Adler. who discovered the mechanism. What he saw,” grabbing a napkin and pen to illustrate, “was a process with two discrete stages.”

He drew a crude bacterium on the bottom-left of the napkin as an oval with several wisps emanating outward to represent flagella. “First, they perform what is called a run,” drawing a diagonal arrow from the oval to the center of the napkin, “in which they move along a line segment. Then they ask themselves: is there more or less food around me?” He draws a second oval at the center with a little plus symbol next to it, and goes back to draw a little minus next to the first.

“Then they tumble. That is, they rotate and fly off in some direction, really any direction!” He draws an arc with an arrowhead to indicate counter-clockwise movement, and then a seemingly random, shorter arrow to another part of the napkin. There he draws the oval again with a larger plus sign. “Now as they find more and more food, what do they do?”

“They -”

“They tumble less. So what they have inside is something of a derivative, as you said, but not a second-derivative, as you also said. Just a first derivative. And by derivative here, we really just mean subtraction.”

He may have kept going on about the chemo. taxis. and Julius. Adler. Worse, I may have even enjoyed it, but at this point we were interrupted by a secretary with matters of bureaucracy to discuss with the new hire.

“Gale!” he shouted, interrupting himself. “This is Nicholas. Cag-li-a-no-ne. from Belle. Harbor. in the distant land of Queens. He will be joining our laboratory as a postdoctoral research scientist starting approximately right now.”

He pronounced my name, I presume, correctly and in a faux Italian accent, despite my introducing myself as “CaGliO-n” with a hard G and a few missing syllables.

“Nick is fine,” I said, rising from my chair to meet a woman who looked somewhat out-of-place in the twenty-first century – she had up-done hair that seemed a foot in height, and a blouse-and-long-skirt combination that made the total woman appear more as a television character than a naturally occurring phenomenon. Of course, the same could be said for Ron by way of his speech and dress (a shirt buttoned to the top despite the lack of a tie, covered by a mahogany vest), but he was nearly eighty years old. Gale had no such excuse, appearing to be at most thirty-five.

“I see Ron has wasted no time showing you his napkins,” she said, with an exaggerated professional smile.

“Go deal with your headaches,” Ron said, allowing us to leave. “I’ll see you in my office afterwards to discuss research.”

Indeed, we had not yet discussed research (or as anyone else might say, research) in any capacity. Ron had offered me a two-year appointment based solely on a fifteen-minute interaction at a lab meeting when I was a graduate student. It has always been my theory that the only factor in the hiring decision was my recognizing a photograph of Paul Éluard on the wall in his office, although it is possible that he had read one or two of my publications.

Indeed indeed, I had no plans for research because I did not care for research. The decision to join a Nobel laureate’s lab was a matter of pure circumstance, utter luck and youthful folly. First, I had no choice but to stay in New York so that I could remain near my girlfriend, who summarily left me weeks after I agreed to join the Harold group. Second, I had to get a job offer - and a good one, at that - because once I had one, my doctoral advisor would be forced to let me defend my thesis two years earlier than she may have otherwise preferred. Third and finally, I had fallen in love with Ron Harold.

I think as far as top-down Zelda titles go, it hits a sweet spot in aesthetic design between the vintage games and the 3-D titles starting in the DS era. The visuals and music both have this "bouncy" feel about them that connects well with what Wind Waker did, and whatever Phantom Hourglass was trying to do, but it still manages to be unique and charming.

The dungeon, boss, and world design take a quality-over-quantity approach that serves it really well; the overworld is tight and detailed without being cramped, and the dungeons are all memorable. The non-generic NPCs feel designed and your interactions with them stick with you after you're done playing, which is the greatest strength of the best preceding Zelda titles (Wind Waker, Ocarina, Majora, Link's Awakening) and sorely lacking in other titles (BotW and TotK are the worst offenders here, but Link to the Past and the Oracle games suffer a bit from this too).

For weaknesses: it definitely lacks the depth in story and character design of Link's Awakening, which I think is its strongest comparable competition. Some of the music is a bit generic, or straight-up ripped from older games (like the central overworld theme). For a game with so few bosses, it is a bit disappointing that they use the "big chuchu" idea twice.