There has to come a point in time where you don’t just get beat, you get really beat. I’m talking about the same ol’ scenario playing over and over again. Subject A (Usually the Hero) goes on a quest, and after X amount of time beats down Subject B (Usually the Villain)

Such is the case with the Legend of Zelda series. Our good old Subject A (Link, for those of you who can’t figure it out) always manages to save Hyrule while putting the hurt on our friend Subject B (Ganon/Ganondorf).

Of course this kind of thing has to wear down our villain. You can’t just keep losing every single time. Something will eventually break be it mentally or physically. Every time the poor Gerudo tries to take over Hyrule, Link arrives once again to deliver what I have decided to call, a Linkwhopin’

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Ocarina had it, Waker didn’t have enough of it, and fans can’t get enough of it. No, I’m not talking about being free of Tingle! I’m talking about dungeons! Not surprisingly, the dungeons are the life-blood of the Zelda games; they’re the parts that make us rack our heads about how to get onto the other side of that locked door… or how to climb up to that cliff. They’re the most challenging part of the Zelda game. Yet interestingly enough, they’re often the least talked about parts of the game. Everyone talks about timelines and shipping and blah blah blah blah blah. All of that is the speculation stuff. The most we ever talk about dungeons is the occasional Internet poll of “which dungeon do you like best?”

Let’s take a stroll down memory lane and take a look at some of the most interesting, the most original, the best designed, and yes, the most evil dungeons out there.

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Aside from the neverending shipping debates and the timeline debates, the biggest debate—what some would actually call… controversy… le gasp!—in the Zelda community is the whole concept of genre. It seems to be mankind’s incessant desire to classify things. From the whole taxonomy of life divided into kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species (or as I like to remember, Kings Play Cards On Fat Green Stools) all the way to the strict divisions of books in bookstores, people like to classify things into categories. Perhaps this is because we like to figure out what items are similar to another item, making comparative shopping all the more easier. (It certainly does guarantee that you won’t get a romance movie for Christmas when you asked for The Lord of the Rings on DVD.)

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There’s been a lot of speculating and postulating about the plot of Twilight Princess over the past few months. Back at E³ 2005, we found out a huge bit of plot about what’s going on in the state of Hyrule during Twilight, but surprising as it may be to say it, that only brought more questions than answers. We know about the Twilight Realm slowly eating away at Hyrule, and we know about Princess Zelda cloaking herself in her funeral shroud warding away the poisonous air, but why is Link able to survive it? What magic is causing this to happen? Why is this happening? And just how are we going to turn back the tide?

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Were Link a pirate (which is quite arguably the case in Wind Waker), Link’s eyes would alight with fire whenever he were to find pieces-of-eight. Be that as it may, Link is not, and so Link is forced to content himself with pieces of heart instead. It’s a shame really; pieces-of-eight are so much more valuable!

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I have found that most people walk around blissfully unaware of what to do if they are attacked by a ReDead. A new poll done in my head shows that 91% of all people would be eaten by a ReDead within the first few hours of Ganon’s rise to power. Therefore, I have compiled some useful information in this edition of A Somewhat Serious Article: KNOW YOUR REDEAD.

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As I sit here at my computer and I gaze over the lovely vision of all my games within about 10 feet of where I’m sitting, I can’t help but see my GameCube copy of Ocarina of Time. I suddenly remember that, yes, Virginia, there is another version of Ocarina. It’s the version that hardly gets any talk about it because, let’s face it, it wasn’t a new game for all intents and purposes. It was a remix in the classic sense of the term, a copy of an existing game with everything changed, throwing you for a loop in the process because nothing is the way you remember it. The experience feels like a warm blanket in its similaries, yet at the same time you feel as if the game has tossed you out of your house without your key on a cold winter night when you encounter one of those glaring differences.

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