Took You Long Enough

I'm sure others are writing about this very topic today but this is my take. Yesterday Nintendo had their big June Direct. The one that we would have referred to as the "E3 Direct" if E3 were still around. It's the big Summer Direct that reveals games that are going to be coming out the second half of the year or the early half of next year. It's always a big deal for Nintendo fans, journalists, and the game industry as a whole. And yesterday's Direct did not disappoint. It was indeed a big deal for a lot of reasons, not the least of which being the announcement of a new The Legend of Zelda game.

Any Zelda announcement is going to be a big deal when it comes to Nintendo Directs, but this one was a particularly important one. No, it's not the next big 3D open world follow-up to Tears of the Kingdom (I suspect we won't see that until the Switch 2 comes out). Instead, it's a new traditional-style "2D" Zelda game called The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom.

A new traditional-style Zelda is something that fans of the series have been wanting for a number of years. So that's kind of a big deal but that's not why this announcement was important. The reason it was important is because—for the first time ever in a mainline Zelda title (and not a spinoff or that weird CD-i game that no one talks about or the one where she had to die first and you played as her ghost)—Zelda herself is going to be not only playable but also the main protagonist of the game.

Finally.

The first thing out of my mouth when I saw the announcement was "Thank God. It's about damn time. Took you long enough!" As has been discussed nearly endlessly by this point (and yet not enough), Zelda has been the damsel in distress for too long and it's about time she gets the hero role in a mainline game.

And yeah, I know Link is sort of an "empty" character. A blank slate that the player can project themselves into, no matter who they are. And yeah, he's been decidedly androgynous to varying degrees over the years. And yeah, my younger daughter loves Zelda games and has no problem playing as Link. But ultimately, he's still a dude.

When I was growing up, there weren't a lot of female protagonists in games. I have been playing games as long as I can remember. My parents had an Intellivision that I remember playing earlier on, but my gaming life really started in 1986 when I got an NES for my 7th birthday that December. But I wouldn't become obsessed with video games until the following Easter of 1987 when the Easter Bunny left a copy of Super Mario Bros. in my Easter basket. That was one of two games I got that year that turned me into a gamer. Like, a gamer gamer.

The other, and probably even more significant one (somehow) was Metroid. I remember the first time I ever played Metroid. It was on a demo kiosk at a Toys "R" Us. The moment I saw the mysterious main character materialize on the screen in the strange alien cavern, I was utterly and completely enamored. Who is this mysterious person? Why are they here? What is this strange place? How the hell do I play this game? Were all questions running through my mind as I was trying to figure out why I couldn't walk any further to the right as I played.

I became obsessed with it. It's all I thought about after leaving the store and for weeks afterward. My imagination went wild speculating what Metroid was all about. I remember telling my Mom, rather emphatically, that I had to have that game. Because I had to have it. That's all I knew. This would have been the Summer of 1987 after the game had first come out. And I had it later that year, for my 8th birthday if I remember correctly (I only got games three times a year on my birthday, Christmas, and Easter).

I spent a a lot of time with that game. This was due in part to its obtuseness. It took me forever to figure out that the way to progress was to go left and get the morph ball rather than right, as Mario had drilled into my brain. And figuring out the rest of the game proved to be just as tricky. But I was obsessed with figuring it out and so I spent every hour I had available to me playing it and progressing through it slowly.

All the while my imagination continuing to make up bits of lore surrounding what was going on in the game. As any longtime Metroid fan knows, the story is told mainly through the environment with no substantial story beats handed directly to you. This resulted in a lot of headcanon amongst Metroid players in those days.

And now, the part of the story you've heard a million times before.

I didn't beat Metroid on my first playthrough. Or even the first few. Even with the password system, I ended up replaying that game from scratch dozens of times before I got good enough at it to finally get through it. And when I did finally beat the game for the first time, I got one of the "good" endings. One of the ones that revealed that Samus, the dude in the space suit, was actually a woman the entire time.

I was shocked.

Not because I didn't think a woman should be a video game protagonist. But because I had never played a game that had one. I had played dozens of games by that time thanks to being able to rent them from the video store around the corner. Not once had I played a game where you played as, or even had the option to play as, a woman.

Now it should be said here that the ending of Metroid isn't the feminist legacy that it sounds like. After all, the better you played the game, the better the ending you got. And by "better" I mean the more scantily-clad Samus was after she removes her power suit. This offers a woman as a reward to the (presumably) predominantly male audience. This in spite of the fact that the decision to make Samus a woman was supposedly inspired by Ellen Ripley from Alien who is considered by many to be a true feminist icon.

I didn't question it at the time because that's not how I saw it. I was eight years old after all and hadn't yet started thinking about girls "in that way." I had friends at that time who were girls and I just remember thinking it was extremely cool that the hero of this game was one. And I couldn't wait to tell them. I couldn't wait to tell everyone. "MOM!!!" I remember shouting as I rushed downstairs after beating the game. "THE PERSON YOU PLAY AS IN METROID IS A GIRL!!!" I was so excited.

I spent the following few years feeling occasionally disappointed that there weren't many other games that featured women protagonists. I grew up with girls who played games just as much as I did and I felt bad for them that they had to play as guys all the time.

This thankfully isn't as much of a problem nowadays. There are a lot more woman protagonists in video games. The biggest problem right now is men continuing to be very weird about them. But that is a topic for another time and one I plan to write about in the near future.

Anyway.

Back to Zelda

The fact that it took Nintendo until 2024 to feature Zelda as a playable character is absurd. She's not your stereotypical princess of the ye olden days, helpless against some evil dude's plot of terror and constantly subject to repeated kidnappings. She's a reincarnated goddess. A goddess! Infinitely more powerful than Link, who only has a magic sword and "the blood of the hero."

Please understand, I like Link. Link is very cool. A good and decent guy. But Zelda is a goddess, dammit. Not only is she powerful, she's also kind, compassionate, intelligent, wise (of course), and a natural leader. But she is powerful. Like really powerful. The idea that she should be a damsel in distress, even despite being a reincarnated goddess, because she is a woman—and the hero, a man—is really pretty ridiculous when you think about it. Even if she wasn't a goddess, it's just such a dated concept.

Let's do away with that concept once and for all. After all, Samus isn't a goddess. She's just a regular human woman with a whole lot of weaponry and incredible skill that I'm sure she's spent countless hours training to acquire. Well, I mean she is part alien bird but you know what I'm saying.

Zelda should have had her own game ages ago is what I'm saying. And I'm glad that my daughter, who loves Zelda games, can finally play one that has a woman protagonist. And I'm glad I can too.

What I'm hoping is that this sort of sets a precedent for the series going forward. I don't expect Nintendo to make Zelda the main protagonist of every game in the series. But it would be kinda cool if she was at least playable in them. Now that Nintendo has (finally) taken this leap, I see no reason why they shouldn't feel empowered to give her, and other women in the series, a more active role going forward. And I hope they do.

Took ya long enough, Nintendo.