Almost 20 Years Later, The Legend Of Zelda’s Saddest Storyline Still Haunts Me

The Legend of Zelda is one of gaming’s most illustrious fantasy franchises. The game’s heroes are typically new iterations of the same legendary figure, a lore-rooted storytelling device that explains why almost every game can be self-contained and reliant on the same core concepts. It’s a clever bit of worldbuilding for the lore, an in-universe explanation for consistent game design that adds to the storytelling depth.

This has also resulted in some thematic elements, like the natural somber tone that comes with lost stories of long ago kingdoms, that have permeated and become refined over time. The series is full of great examples of this tone translating to gameplay, whether it be the surreal silence of Wind Waker‘s frozen castle or the crumbling reality of Lorule. The one that has haunted me the most can be found in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, and a minor character meant to teach you new combat moves. The game casts a spirit in this role, choosing to make it a former player character to make the emotional core of the scene hurt even more.

The Hero’s Shade, Explained

The Hero’s Shade is a minor figure in The Twilight Princess, but his true origins and real identity remain one of the most quietly tragic (and uniquely interesting) elements of The Legend of Zelda franchise. Throughout Twilight Princess, Link encounters a golden wolf that turns into a skeletal warrior. This sets off a series of training challenges where the player learns new abilities through sparring with a skeletal warrior. Dubbed the Hero’s Shade, these encounters steadily tell a story of a hero forgotten by time, whose great deeds have left his unruly spirit with frustration and regret. This spirit appears six times, each session ending in Link learning a move from older titles in the series, like Ocarina of Time. After the completion of the final session, the Hero’s Shade reveals his somber relief at having passed down his skills to a descendant, and finally passes on.

Even before The Twilight Princess was more overtly connected to Ocarina of Time through the Hyrule Historia, fans theorized that the Hero’s Shade could be a representation of the Link who appeared in that N64 title. The splintering of events in the climax of Ocarina created multiple timelines. In the Child Timeline, Link is victorious and returns to the past to prevent Ganondorf from ever taking over Hyrule, thus negating all the death and destruction around them. Even beyond elements like Ganondorf’s imprisonment, the connection between the games was further confirmed by the Hyrule Historia timelines.

It also confirmed that the Link of Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask were the same character as the Shade, who died without passing on his experience and skills to a new generation. The game’s revelation is a clever way to have multiple Links factor into a single game without overshadowing one another. It also reveals just enough clues about the eventual fate of the character (such as a tease that he’s a direct ancestor of the new Link or how he seemingly lost an eye) to draw in fans with a deep love for that iteration of the hero. Beyond that, though, the Hero’s Shade is a perfect representation of the most quietly powerful thematic throughline in Legend of Zelda games.

The Legend Of Zelda Gets To Be Tragic In A Way Most Games Don’t

The Legend of Zelda series has, from the beginning, had an understated, somber edge. The world of the first two games is depicted as barren and scarred by conflict. These themes were only reinforced in A Link to the Past, which depicted a Hyrule across two time-periods that had been in peace or at war. A reflection of failure and tragedy in the past is a consistent theme in the series. It’s Hyrule being swept under the sea in the backstory of Wind Waker, it’s Link being asleep for a century in Breath of the Wild, it’s forcing the player to confront reality in Link’s Awakening, or playing a doomed but necessary role in Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment.

A tragic reality, as the human core of the grandiose epic that is Legend of Zelda, has always been one of the better subtle touches of the series. It gives everything a bittersweet touch that lends itself well to the natural worldbuilding. The Hero’s Shade is one of the best examples of that on the whole, a clever way to turn the player’s victory in a previous game into just another sad chapter in the endless saga of good and evil. That cycle of reinvention and rebirth is core to the lore of the series, and that’s what players get to experience by being a new version of Link.

However, by finding a way to include a former Link in the narrative, Twilight Princess adds a really somber element to the story. It speaks to how the legends that the heroes made have become just that, and the people behind them are forgotten. The Hero’s Shade never found the glory he felt he was owed, which is just a sad but painfully human reflection on what someone who experienced all that would feel. It’s a tragic undercutting of the literal legend of the character that has been built up in the spirit of the fandom that surrounded Ocarina of Time, and a perfectly mythic way to end Link’s story.

Because Legend of Zelda is literally a cycle of rebirth that allows for plenty of structural reimagining, there are countless permutations of Link. That also means that specific versions of Link can have their ending, giving them a mythic quality that other video game characters with more open-ended fates don’t get to experience. The Ocarina of Time Link was a fun game character, but he takes on a classically tragic element as a hero thwarted in his pride until he can finally teach someone the lessons of his life. It’s a sad undercurrent that makes the Hero’s Shade fascinating and speaks to the inherent bittersweet sense of loss and death baked into the very DNA of the series. Encountering the Hero’s Shade was heartbreaking and fascinating when I first did it as a teenager, but I’ve only grown to appreciate the merit of the character and what he says about the series as a whole over time.