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As soon as the news of a movie adaptation of The Legend of Zelda broke, there was one question that swept the discourse: Should series protagonist Link speak? A lot of people are very passionate about the possibility of the movie putting a voice in the head of the perennially near-silent protagonist, with many claiming that he should not, in fact, say anything.
And one can’t help but think of the “Well excuuuuse me, Princess!” cartoon adaptation from 1989 that filled the Link void with “attitude,” making him more an obnoxious smart aleck than a noble knight, or the recent animated movie adaptation of Super Mario Bros., and agree Link shouldn’t speak. Adding dialogue to Link means stamping him with a potentially annoying personality, as in the ’80s, or with only the broadest, dullest strokes of one, as in the Mario movie.
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Now Playing: History of The Legend of Zelda
Either way, everyone is wrong. It doesn’t matter if Link talks, because who cares about Link? The series isn’t called “The Legend of Link.” The Legend of Zelda movie should be about the games’ only real, interesting character, and her name is right there in the title.
Unlike Link, Zelda does speak in the games, and she does have personality. In fact, there are lots of Zelda personalities over the years, marked by a few underlying important traits, so anybody making an adaptation has their pick. She’s been a wise sage, a duty-driven benevolent monarch, and a time-traveling sorceress. She was a precocious child forced to endure visions of calamity, and she’s been a spooky supernatural voice invading Link’s dreams. She was an archaeologist and the leader of a band of heroes tasked with using giant robots to save the world. She was a secret ninja. She was a damn pirate captain.
It can sound like all the different iterations of her mean she’s constantly in flux as a character, which would make her like Link. After all, if you can choose between ninja, archaeologist, pirate, and divine instrument, how is that all that different from just adding a personality to Link for the sake of drama? But even with the various takes on Zelda, they’re all united by the underlying elements of her personality that mean a movie wouldn’t just have to invent her out of whole cloth, like it would with Link. Zelda is always a natural leader, always pursuing knowledge, always marked by a sad and self-sacrificing wisdom, and always empathetic and driven by her sense of duty to others. Even though there are a lot of versions of Zelda, she’s still a pretty defined and recognizable character. And she’s usually the one making stuff happen–the one with the knowledge of how to defeat evil and the one telling Link where to go and what to do.
Honestly, I shouldn’t have had to say more than “secret ninja” or “pirate captain” to convince you that any Legend of Zelda movie should be about the Zelda of legend, but if you need more persuading, direct your attention toward the two most recent mainline Zelda games. Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom are about Link in their gameplay, but both are Zelda games in every narrative way that counts, and tell the best, most character-driven stories the series has ever had as a result. The trouble is, you have to work hard to track down and assemble that story yourself.
Breath of the Wild focuses on Zelda as she struggles with her apparent destiny. Apocalypse-in-human-form Ganon is expected to wake up any time after being defeated millennia earlier, and it’ll be Zelda’s job to seal him away with magic before ravages Hyrule yet again. Zelda needs to unlock her hereditary magical power, which is not going well, and the failure she feels bleeds into her relationships. When she meets Link, who’s appointed to be her bodyguard, she doesn’t particularly like him–largely because he doesn’t speak and seems to have no character or motivation, but also because he’s clear of purpose where she’s conflicted. She eventually travels the world to track down, unite, and lead heroes who can stand against Ganon. And then those heroes completely and totally fail, bringing about what is basically the end of the world, with Zelda and Link on the run as they struggle to avoid getting annihilated by the ancient evil Zelda has been told her entire life that it’ll be her job to stop.
It’s actually a pretty great story if you can dredge it out of the muck where Nintendo has buried it. Zelda struggles with the weight placed on her shoulders as a princess, responsible for all of Hyrule, and as a figure of legend, saddled with generations of baggage and the job of preventing the literal apocalypse. You see her frustration as she struggles to unlock the magic she’s supposedly destined to wield and battles the inadequacy she feels when she can’t seem to unlock it. She eventually grows as a person to overcome her own self-doubt, finding strength in herself as a leader, not because someone told her that’s what she is, but because she proves those things to herself. And then Tears of the Kingdom builds on that foundation by throwing Zelda into a time-travel story where she makes incredible sacrifices for the good of everyone else.
By contrast, Link’s story in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom is mostly that he is present for the previously discussed events. He refuses to die at a few key moments, to his credit, and he is brave and swings a sword well.
It’s just no contest, and what’s more, we’ve gotten plenty of games about Link wandering the world, awakening sages and pulling swords out of rocks and beating down monsters and bullying chickens. There’s not a lot a movie could really add to that story regardless of the personality it adds or doesn’t to Link, and there’s even less reason to bring that tale into another medium. You have the Legend of Zelda stories that feature Link already, and you get to play them. What’s the use of watching someone else act them out?
But a movie can bypass Link altogether to focus on the person who is always at the center of the story and is, quite frankly, done dirty by the games. However, if you insist on including Link, you don’t have to cut him out altogether by shifting the focus off him–keep him around as Zelda’s faithful bodyguard, who she finds annoying because he never answers any questions, until she starts to understand the unwavering sense of duty and commitment that animates him. That’s what happens in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, and it actually turns into a decent-ish romance (by the standards of Zelda games, anyway) that adds even more dimension to Zelda’s character. Plus, you can still have him stabbing monsters in the head. Everybody wins.
However, it doesn’t matter if Link speaks or, as we’ve discussed, is even present because Link isn’t really a character; he’s a sword and a bag of bombs you steer around the Zelda games. He doesn’t add much to the actual story, so it doesn’t really matter that much whether he’s around at all. The whole movie should be about Zelda learning magic and doing archaeology and managing pirates, and every so often, we cut to 20 seconds of Link hacking his way through a forest or something to remind us that he still exists. Then he shows up at the end to bounce one of Zelda’s Light arrows off his shield into Ganon’s face so the two can finish him off.
If you want a good Legend of Zelda movie, you want a Zelda movie, that’s just straight facts. Pirates, ninjas, sorcery, time travel–she can do it all. You could do a fantasy Indiana Jones like Breath of the Wild or a monster-filled Waterworld like Wind Waker or a post-apocalyptic freedom fighter story like Ocarina of Time, or anything in between. The Legend of Zelda movie should be Zelda’s time to shine.
