The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword HD

[scottcr]

1 hour ago, Mr. Gerbik said:

I'm really enjoying this! It looks way better than I expected, properly beautiful in places even. The normal (non-motion) controls work extremely well, the right stick sword takes a bit getting used to but after that it's very precise and quick. Zero frustration this time around, it all works surprisingly well!

 

Most of all I'm loving the game itself. It's good being back in a proper Zelda, exploring dungeons. I really missed that I guess. Playing this makes me wish and hope Nintendo doesn't focus on sandbox Zelda exclusively from now on. It would be great if they alternated. 

 

In short: this is really good! 

 

It took 10 years, but I knew you'd come home....

[Mr. Gerbik]

8 minutes ago, scottcr said:

 

It took 10 years, but I knew you'd come home....

That's my secret, Scott: I never left

 

 

[Mr. Gerbik]

I never finished Twilight Princess either and with how much I'm enjoying SS, I'm hoping they do that one next. Gimme dat Zelda!

 

(I played all the way through the Wii U HD version of WW, so not really interested in that one myself - loved it though!)

[CheekyLee]

Deku Babas can sod off. I'm way too impatient!

[scottcr]

5 minutes ago, CheekyLee said:

Deku Babas can sod off. I'm way too impatient!

 

Spoiler

shield bash the golden ones

 

[nakamura]

6 hours ago, Kevvy Metal said:

I strongly disagree with John Lineman’s comments on the controls here, while agreeing that yes, you need to calibrate the centering on the Switch version MORE than you do on the Wii version. Which makes me actually like the Switch motion controls LESS! 
 

The Right stick camera control is absolutely not important - or at least isn’t for me - and the game was designed with Z-targeting camera placement in mind. I use that then let the camera follow link just like in the original and it works just as well as ever. 
The right stick camera option I only use when surveying a room, it’s totally not necessary to be engaged all of the time and the sword actions on the buttons work SO much better… so much better! 
 

Ive noted that if you engage the L button right stick camera, then disengage it won’t automatically start following link again. You have to do a further Z reset.  

I've played the Wii version for probably 100 hours. Never once thought it needed a camera. 

[Vorgot]

4 hours ago, Darhkwing said:

Managed to get the first dungeon finished. Motion controls mostly okay, but those rope walking sections are a nightmare. Maybe im just not getting it.

 

That Ghirahim boss fight was a pain as well. 

You might be doing the same thing I was on the ropes. I was twisting the right joycon. You just point it left or right. Is a breeze after that

[DarhkFox]

16 minutes ago, Vorgot said:

You might be doing the same thing I was on the ropes. I was twisting the right joycon. You just point it left or right. Is a breeze after that

I'll give it a go in a bit! 😁

[Hulot]

On 19/02/2021 at 09:56, Majora said:

 

Skyward Sword is the most restrictive 3D Zelda ever made, Breath of the Wild is the most open. Skyward Sword focussed so much on puzzles it had no sense of place, in Breath of the Wild the sense of place arguably came at the expense of some puzzle, and especially dungeon, focus. 

 

A few isolated elements being in both games does not a throughline make when the games are so completely opposite in approach. 'Collecting things to upgrade equipment' is so broad you could apply it to practically every action adventure or RPG ever made, including most Zeldas. I forgot Skyward Sword even had a glider, so limited was its usage compared to BOTW. I'll give you the stamina meter but even the pulling puzzles out of the dungeons bit is contestable. In Skyward Sword, the puzzles were the world. In Breath of the Wild the puzzles were a very small part of the world. Again, completely opposite approaches to world design.

 

This whole 'Skyward Sword was Breath of the Wild 0.5' type argument doesn't really work for me and feels like more of a way for them to try to flog this remaster to people who jumped into the franchise after BOTW.

I’m sure this will prove a wounding experience for me – all the more so because the length of what’s to follow invites ridicule, if not outright dismissal – but here goes: I profoundly disagree with your assessment of Skyward Sword in general, and this assertion about its environments in particular. Far from being attenuated and vestigial – serving as a mere container for otherwise isolated setpieces – the world of Skyward Sword is replete, sophisticated, and holistically integrates with the game’s themes and motifs to dazzling effect. In this category, it’s an exemplar of the medium. Furthermore, its treatment of setting was best in class for its series prior to Breath of the Wild, well, widening our horizons.

 

Provocative declarations perhaps, but no more so than the harshest judgements found in this thread. I love this game to bits and wish to offer a partisan’s interpretation of its environments in order to help widen the discussion. Although I had planned a different post to this one, covering far more ground, I realised that the subjects I most wished to speak about could all be found in closely examining the Ancient Cistern, the game’s fourth dungeon.

 

I have two reasons for selecting this specific locale. The first is in response to your assertion that this game favours “puzzles” at the expense of “place”. The Ancient Cistern challenges this perspective: within it, puzzles are place. Interestingly, they distinguish themselves in a dungeon context by serving as part of an ensemble of challenges and activities – they are excellent, but not domineering. This area has a marvellous evenness to it that is achieved through its constituent parts flowing together, passing freely and fluidly from one element to the next, in sympathy with its (mostly) tranquil ambience. By immersing oneself within the puzzles’ forms, a wealth of subtextual detail about the wider environment can be gleaned, along with the narrative it hosts.

 

A collection of Akutagawa’s shorter works – no prizes for

guessing the story featured on the cover

 

Which brings me on to my second reason for choosing the Ancient Cistern: this section of the game famously draws upon The Spider Thread, a parable by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, one of Japan’s most cherished authors. The tale’s denouement receives a treatment in SS that is as perfectly matched with its surroundings as it is an exhilarating disruption of them – a consummate tour de force, and seminal demonstration of Nintendo’s mastery of the form. However, for all the (fully earned) praise heaped at the feet of this episode, scant attention has been paid to the fact that the scope of the adaptation extends well beyond it: most of The Spider Thread’s major plot points are touched upon elsewhere, with even a specific simile approximated at one juncture. (Indeed, the game is so respectful of the text that it defers to it in commencing its retelling outside of and prior to the Ancient Cistern itself.) It’s a singular meeting between literature and videogames, and I would like to delve into its underexplored aspects, highlighting the artistry of the game’s design as I go. I don’t really know what to call the following – a travelogue and critical commentary, I suppose. I hope it proves interesting.

 

And yes, I am perfectly aware of how absurd this gargantuan, metastasized post is. Perfectly aware. Mortified about it.

 

Familiarity with the entire game is assumed – spoilers range the length and breadth of Skyward Sword.

 

All Spider Thread excerpts and quotations featured below are taken from the superb translation by Jay Rubin, whose notes also proved invaluable in writing this post. I recommend his collection of Akutagawa’s short fiction published by Penguin; in lieu of that, this translation conveys the gist of the story well enough.

 

Preamble and the return to Skyview Temple

Spoiler

Before getting into the thick of it, I’d like to comment on the general character of Skyward Sword, at least as I perceive it. To that end, here’s a comparison of the worlds of Breath of the Wild and Skyward Sword, and how each informs the temper of their respective game.

 

In BotW, the environment is a consistent, self-contained entity, and it completely overawes as a living landscape. Rivers meander as the force of their currents and the inclines they travel permit; rich loam gives way to spartan scrubland, that then segues into barren mountain slopes; ecosystems observe the strictures of topography and climate to accommodate life in its correct measure. Everything, from frogs to snowbanks to volcanic plumes, feels as if it is the sum of an integrated, coherent natural history, and so the earth and its treasures (ostensibly) enjoy a regal independence from such game system vulgarities as ‘function’ or ‘utility’. Even man’s grandest designs are but bagatelles here: the Divine Beasts, for all their thunderous thudding and stomping, can only claim the dignity of tin toys; the ruins dotting the world, less still than that.

 

Satori Mountain

 

Unsurprisingly, the relationship between the player and all this inviolate magnificence is marked by a certain distance. BotW’s adventurer is placed at a remove from a world which grants nothing save an opportunity to participate. You won’t be kept from scaling cliff faces, nor are there any prohibitions on bear hunting – but rainfall and the beast’s claws have the same licence. Nature picks no favourites. The brilliance of this teeming, exuberant, responsive, tight-spun Hyrule resides, curiously, in a discreet indifference on the part of that world to its protagonist. Not that an estrangement makes itself felt; rather, what value there is to be found in foraging, gliding, fighting, and so on is left exclusively to the player’s unprompted judgement. Breath of the Wild leaves the general impression of two factors operating in strict parallel, with the player’s free-ranging will and resourcefulness being set-off by an aloof, studiedly neutral backdrop.

 

The Lanayru Sand Sea

 

Skyward Sword takes the opposite tack: in this adventure, there is the closest possible intimacy between the player and the world they inhabit. In fact, to speak of a ‘between’ at all is somewhat misleading as SS does its utmost to confound those distinctions – the world is an extension of Link, and Link a microcosm of the whole. Through severity and guile, the motivated landscapes structure the player’s awareness, cultivating a cluster of precepts which beautifully undergird the immediate business of combat, traversal, and puzzling, and which by their very deliberateness confer a richness upon those limited activities.

 

If all of this sounds quite abstract that’s because the game’s concerns very much are – whereas BotW may be labelled a work of materialism, SS is a study in idealism. (A game of mandalas over maps, as we will see.) Locales and their contents ought to be chiefly viewed through a psychogeographical lens: metaphor, concatenation, allusion, juxtaposition, affect, displacement, symbolism, reification and allegory are to the fore, and with them a reflexive quality which makes playing the game so delicious – not only is it a matter of ‘what’s the next thing?’ but also ‘what’s the next thing going to be about? And what will that be like in relation to this?’ Not that it’s a one-way street, as the player’s progress alters the fabric of SS in ways ranging from the unassumingly slight (opening a shortcut with a rolled log, after much huffing and puffing) to the demiurgically decisive (blooming stone flowers on rivers of fire with a magician’s nonchalant sword flick). Places are regulated by the contours of a subjective, internal landscape – whole complexes of rooms and expanses of terrain may hinge on the tiniest of cues or slightest of actions.¹ The experience of this charmed and dialectical world’s unfolding is that of a warm conversation which gains its zest from never being completely one-sided, either in pandering to the player, or by having the environments suborn one’s will – reciprocity is paramount. ‘Thoughtfulness’, in the fullest and most humanly generous sense, is an attribute that comes to mind whenever I look back on SS and how it arranges itself.

 

Of course, opinions differ: one of the most frequent complaints is that the game is mind-numbingly padded out, with the revisiting of Skyview Temple – the first dungeon – cited as a prime example of the game lapsing into purposelessness, of its tendency to insist upon wearisome detours and recapitulations. With this trip prefacing the Ancient Cistern, let’s take a closer look at both it and the naysaying it’s engendered.

 

 

Never the liveliest of dungeons, its gloom and dreariness weigh more heavily than ever upon your return. Weeds and fungi have colonised the margins. A subterranean tree licks the masonry with a tongue of bark. Dust motes idle in the air. The score drags its feet, lurching from a sustained note to the hurried completion of its main phrase. Nothing new except (ironically) the tinge of staleness. In retracing your steps, the area now seems a castoff, a moated grange of blackest moss and rounding grays. What use is there for a completed dungeon? An errand to fetch a healing water serves as the immediate pretext for coming here, but there must surely be a deeper reason for this particular place at this point in the adventure. Already, at the threshold of the area, an important conceptual shift has been effected that decouples the repeat engagement from the initial experience: in passing through the space at leisure rather than under the driving excitement of conquest, the player is prompted to consciously dwell upon it, interrogate it at a newfound distance – “OK, I’m here again. Why?” Teasing out any hidden meaning necessitates an analytical, sober frame of mind which departs from the chipper pragmatism that is Zelda dungeoneering’s habitual mode. A certain reserved attentiveness is called for which nicely complements the prevailing calm.

 

 

Not that your visit will be entirely without incident. A short way in and one of the burrowing mogma creatures from the volcanic region makes an unexpected appearance. As cagey and avaricious as ever, he asserts – despite your protestations to the contrary – that you're a fellow ransacker, before scrabbling away to stake his own claim on the loot. Cheeky git, branding you light-fingered – you’re the destined hero, and whatever appropriations you make in your quest are a result of exigencies beyond your control (if those requisitions happen to include cool gadgets and piles of rupees, you can hardly demur). Continuing on, you’re stymied by a locked door; whilst you're searching for a key, who should pop back up but Mr Libel. He says he swiped the key from a monster but can't remember now where he buried it. A spot of digging after the pair of you part and, gosh, you now have a brand new, one-of-a-kind, custom fit lock loosener. Onwards.

 

Before concluding your dealings with the mogma, a few things you (re)encounter on this flying visit must be noted for future reference:

 

 

• The round central chamber of Skyview Temple, reached after passing through a series of dark, dank anterooms. It features a lightwell, with a biomorphic structure occupying pride of place (its lines are reminiscent of your flying beetle, or a nesting bird).

 

 

• The abyss separating the boss chamber from the rest of the dungeon, its two sides spanned by a tightrope. Your crossing was imperilled the first time by a pair of daredevils who advanced out to accost you midway, whilst this second one involves some sniping archers. In any event, whether it be by hand or arrow, funambulism and physical contact don’t mix.

 

 

• A trio of stalfos who have taken up residence in Ghirahim’s old boss chamber. There are six swords between them.

 

Between those last two items you have your final meeting with the mogma. Disappointed and empty-handed, he’s had his fill of treasure hunting and is going to return home. Your attention is seized, strangely enough, by the following sentence:

 

 

Odd that this should feel so pers– oh. I understand now. He’s talking about you. You’re the thief. Your attention was seized because you’re guilty. He’s probably alluding to the key, or if not that then the artefacts which once resided here, but either way, you did it. From a certain point of view, you are indeed a ransacker, and you definitely took what was – again, from a certain point of view – his key. Hmm.

 

Still, he’s a fine one to talk, isn’t he? Nought but hypocrisy from this rodent. Let this be a lesson to him that there’s no honour amongst thieves. Yes, you’re sort of, arguably, robbing, but it’s all for the greater good. Now that you’ve thoroughly ambiguated the matter to your satisfaction you can move on, secure in a righteousness that is all the stronger for having been lightly challenged.

 

Stand aside, allow that fatheaded mindset to proceed – we’ll resume contact with it when we reach the Ancient Cistern. Reverting back momentarily to the cogitations arising from the ‘why’ of this irregular, repeated dungeon: one senses that this business with the key and its theft is of some importance. It hasn’t been included merely to freshen up this retread as it’s altogether too slight to serve as sufficient distraction from the recycling. No, it’s more like the game is urging you to focus on the essential elements and interplays of this little narrative by having them take place in an area that, because it’s familiar if not exhausted, won’t get in the way. What’s the deal with this microstory? It has the concision and ethical profile of a fable, yet there’s no particular conclusion or discernible moral to be drawn from it. Puzzling. One will just have to put it to the side for now, despite suspecting that there’s more to it than meets the eye.

 

That was the drift of my thinking when I originally played this section. The subsequent dungeon does provide a capper to the story here, as I guessed it might, but what I didn’t have the slightest inkling of at the time was that the belting short story I recognised as being integral to the Ancient Cistern first slips into the game here, in Skyview Temple, and in such an intelligent and witty fashion that to know it is to marvel at it. Let’s start addressing The Spider Thread and how Skyward Sword adapts it to its own ends.

 

 

Whilst bearing in mind everything gleaned thus far, rewind to this point, where you first met the mogma. The conduit in the top-centre of the picture was something of a loose end or curiosity when first exploring here: upon opening, it offers a shortcut between the entrance (where Link is standing) and a major hub room. Quite why you would want such a thing is a bit of a mystery as only a single, tiny chamber separates entrance from hub, and there’s no need to travel backwards anyway.

 

On your return, with the curve of the staircase drawing your eye to its recess, the purpose of the conduit – as an expedient for this second tour – becomes clear. Following the chat with the mogma (complete with those plundering allegations), the majority of players will make use of the shortcut and be on their merry way. An archer in the hub room monopolises you when you enter, hastily pulling you forwards and away from the wall you’ve just leapt down. (It should be noted here that this is the most arboreal part of Skyview Temple, with trunks and branches dominating the upper half of the space.) What are present on the wall, and afforded only a moment’s diversion when creating the shortcut two dungeons and several hours prior:

 

 

Spiders. Negligible, nuisance grade spiders. When using the shortcut, jumping over their heads and into the room, they are literally beneath your notice. Later, in searching for the key, you’re likely to cast a glance their way without paying them any mind. There’s nothing to be gained by killing them, not even the sport of it.

 

A lateral move is necessary here in order to introduce The Spider Thread. The story begins one morning in the garden of Paradise; the Buddha is strolling through it with perfect equanimity. From his supreme metaphysical vantage point, the Buddha peers down through the garden’s pond and across an unfathomable distance to behold the grisly spectacle of Hell (aka Naraka). He regards Kandata, a robber and murderer in his former life now subject to endless drownings in the Pond of Blood, Hell’s deepest and worst region. “But it seems that Kandata had performed one single act of goodness”:

 

Passing through a deep wood one day, he had noticed a tiny spider creeping along the wayside. His first thought was to stamp it to death, but as he raised his foot, he told himself, “No, no. Even this puny creature is a living thing. To take its life for no reason would be too cruel.” And so he had let it pass unharmed.

 

The “deep wood” is, of course, what surrounds you in this hub room. You are a murderer (understanding it in your bones, thanks to the sword’s motion controls) and a thief. The game even replicates – within the constraints of its language – Kandata’s foot pausing above the spider, by having yours sail overhead. Without the player being fully aware of it, Skyward Sword is inducting them into the role of this sinner, steering them towards the moment where they grasp the thread of salvation and start to climb. (The theme of destiny receives from SS its most complete and emotionally perceptive treatment in the medium, with the ensnaring of the player here a choice instance.)

 

Aside from the exceptional elegance and startling cogency achieved here, what absolutely thrills me is how appreciating that this reheated dungeon has been woven into the plot of Akutagawa’s work radically recontextualises and enriches it. If interpreted as a world of vanities, as the transient realm of the unenlightened degraded by the likes of Kandata, its flyblown, withered qualities gain a new currency as proofs of a wider spiritual corruption, which is intriguingly offset by it also being the game’s forest dungeon (with its connotations of vitality and wholesome growth).² Similarly, there being no explicit resolution to the (tawdry?) mogma storyline is in keeping with our naïve experience of this life; it is not the way of the world for things to be tied up neatly. Any catharsis or apprehension of solace must be provided by something beyond the everyday. By an afterlife, perhaps. Skyview Temple being both a seat of worship and in the throes of terminal decay, it doubly anticipates that undiscovered country, points the way to the ultimate: it makes an inevitability of its successor, the Ancient Cistern.

 

Notes

 

¹ This subjectivised, psychological formula is highly unusual for a Zelda title, though not without precedent in the wider medium. Honestly, I believe it’s more productive to approach SS with the notion that it’s closer to the pensive and nuanced interiority of Silent Hill 2 than to the phlegmatic simplicity of, say, A Link to the Past.

 

² A union of opposites which also figures prominently in Ocarina of Time’s two woodland dungeons, the Deku Tree and the Forest Temple. A spiral motif further links the pair with Skyview Temple, furnishing us with a subtle example of how SS echoes its predecessors in both symbol and substance, advancing the game’s discourse outwards, past its own borders.

 

‘Padding’

Spoiler

Oh, yes, ‘padding’ – I did say I’d look at it, and this is a good place to do so, between dungeons. I think the above is sufficient to get this part of the game off the hook, but I’ll go further and say the charge strikes me as completely untenable against SS in general. Although not each and every one of the most harumphed sections is as slyly bountiful as the return to Skyview Temple, all of them can claim a distinction of their own and a suitable place in the overall firmament (especially the tadtones). The extended and delightful opening makes perfectly clear, in both feeling and form, by alternating between The Breakfast Club and Beowulf, that the forthcoming adventure will be one of divertissements and frivolities as much as it is of epiphanies and grandeur, and this admixture ethos produces some rather wonderful things when the two extremes are forced to cohabit.

 

Take that old bugbear, the Imprisoned: Calashnikov is right about the first battle, it can be a (bracing) slog hacking away at the toes, darting between redwood-trunk legs as it laboriously slouches towards the top to be reborn – but there’s also the germ of the absurd, the humorously grotesque in its lolloping and your hurrying. That comedy is iterated upon to the point where you find yourself, during the third and final clash, frenziedly circus cannoning out from a zippy, jury-rigged contraption built by your new mensch and weapons researcher Groose, aiming to bop the head of a creature which has now sprouted a cartoon halo that's hoisting it upwards – a Quetzalcoatl by way of Abner Dean, or possibly Tex Avery’s Leviathan. Don’t get me wrong, it’s all still very much a stern contest betwixt good and evil, it’s just that there’s now a buddy comedy, model railway, acrobatics and shooting gallery involved. Somehow. This progression doesn’t come across as hollowly repetitious because the respective tones, tempos, intensities, scales and framings of each bout are too unalike for that. The ‘congestion’ angle doesn’t bear scrutiny either, there being a dozen hours or so separating the first encounter from the second, while the single one between the second and third lets the endearing Groose storyline clip along very punchily. No, pleasure argues decisively against this idea of padding.³ Rather than being vacantly drawn out, SS is whipsmart in marshalling its resources with the frugallest economy and greatest poise.

 

 

³ Which isn’t to say that SS is without its longueurs. The retrieval of the pinwheel, for instance, is a needless chore, whilst the first part of the volcanic dousing quest feels tedious. Such errata add up to perhaps thirty minutes in a game tens of hours long and so must be considered like they are here – as footnotes. Even Homer nods.

 

The Ancient Cistern – Paradise in mind

Spoiler

 

The opening of the Ancient Cistern and its ambience are a case in point. Coming from a space that had, in every sense, been emptied out, you arrive here to find abundance and lushness – indeed, you’re almost actively greeted by them, such is the vitality enveloping you.

 

 

Instead of dust, a crimson fenghuang is in the air. The camera can’t help itself, it flies along with the bird, taking in the doors (where do they lead to?) and ledges (how do you reach them?) of the surrounding wall before coming to rest on this artificial waterfall, which descends like silk on marble to the lilting music. Lotuses blossom like “perfect white pearls”, wafting forth a “never-ending fragrance wonderful beyond description”, sumptuous in the golden rays oozing from their glass facsimile in the ceiling above. The round space, central structure, flora and yellowish hues invite comparison straight away with Skyview Temple’s main room, though it’s really not fair to do so: there, you staggered from darkness into the drab light of sunset; here, it’s “morning in Paradise”, passed into with the assurance of the blessed (or fatheaded).

 

Whilst preserving the ghost of the earlier temple as a contrapunt, SS places the player in one of the primary settings of The Spider Thread, the garden of Paradise, and lavishly lays on what an adventurer would deem heavenly: doors, advantageous ledges, treasure chests, switches – all possibilities to be explored and exploited. It leaves a good first impression, and restores back to the player that dungeoneering yen. Still, not content with juggling two discrete areas of its own and an external short story, the opening room adds another layer of reference. In the picture above, there is a large metal cog; together with the wall switches, pipes and general salutary character of the place, it suggests something like a municipal waterworks (the faux organic decor even puts me in mind of Bazalgette and Paxton’s great industrial cathedrals). The ‘Ancient Cistern’ title by itself indicates a degree of straddling high and low, announcing a dynamic of headbutting between the sacred and profane that will work itself out over the course of the dungeon.

 

It’s a locale filled to bursting with personality and freighted with meaning. To talk of the game having no sense of place: I think quite the contrary is in evidence, which is to say SS maximises its spaces by braiding various subjects, conceits and styles, all whilst being disciplined enough to allow each component to come through clearly and inflect the overall arrangement, as they do here.⁴ (The Lanayru Desert, with its time-shift stones, constitutes the acme of this approach.) However much this mode may jar with a sensibility insisting things not overlap and remain essentialised, it seems thoroughly perverse to hold that SS’s environments are without any flavour because they elect to offer many.

 

 

The dungeon’s star attraction underlines my argument. Again, it’s very multum in parvo, being equal parts monumental religious statue, pavilion and Mechanical Turk. I would like to concentrate for the time being on that first attribute: those acquainted with The Spider Thread and alert to its influence in SS will recognise Akutagawa’s Shakyamuni Buddha, who compassionately extends the titular strand to Kandata. In due course this equivalent will do the same for you – and therein lies a problem for the game.

 

As it proceeds, the Ancient Cistern splits itself in two, polarising around a heavenly realm of lotuses and light at one extreme, an infernal cavern of blood and damned souls at the other. Your rescue from the latter is at the discretion of a gracious actor, with this Buddha the only plausible one to be found in the aftermath of your escape. Naturally, one would appreciate something of their goodness by that act alone, yet to have this virtue demonstrated all in one burst would seem a tad pat, too bluntly deus ex machina-ish. Association with a welcoming space only goes so far: the wisdom and benevolence of this Buddha need to be actively vouched for ahead of time so as to lend ripeness and internal logic to the act of mercy. How does SS achieve this?

 

In this instance, it pursues a strategy of characterisation by guided inference. An orthodox puzzle is adapted to an unusual end by having it illuminate a state of mind, and bridge the gap between two beings through a shared “eureka!” Though dense in its cultural allusions, its best parts can nonetheless be understood without prior knowledge of either The Spider Thread or Buddhism, as the game lucidly expresses itself in immediate formal terms (for example, the sense of ‘transference’ I outline below is readily intuited via gameplay alone).

 

The cultural sphere enlisted to help flesh things out here is, predictably, the religious one: the positioning of the statue amalgam at the heart of a circular room (and, indeed, the entire dungeon), combined with its, er, Buddha-ness, recalls South Asian cosmograms. An immense and complex body of tradition(s), these cosmograms include both illustrative visualizations (such as mandalas, varieties of which do centre on Buddhas) and psycho-corporal practices (e.g. yoga) which aim to accomplish a “move from subtle, hidden, and potential space into external, visible space”⁵ as a means of parsing the universe and comprehending one's place within it. Your first task here finds you making use of these schemas in order to access and conceptualise not the universe but a sacralised model of it – the Ancient Cistern.

 

After the opening cutscene, you begin exploring the dungeon. In a room leading off from the central chamber, your progress is halted by:

 

 

A combination lock, removed by hitting its jewelled petals in the correct sequence. If you choose to consult it, an adjacent stele mentions the temple possesses a “secret order”, knowledge of which is required to advance further. Either way, it’s back to the main room in search of a solution.

 

 

From the entrance, a couple of quick hops bring you to the base of the Frankenbuddha and another stele. It reads (emphases in original):

 

Carved into the great statue are inscriptions of gratitude. They reveal the secret order of this temple.

 

An itinerary of points on the statue’s body follows. The spiritual (“gratitude”) and mystical (“secret order”) import of these sentences helps bed in the tone of the Ancient Cistern. A hierarchy is also established, with the environment – the construct containing and divulging the esoteric whatsits – in a senior position to the player/initiate. (The air of tutelage and idea of orderliness fixed upon the Buddha should be borne in mind for later.) Touring the “great statue”, you come across these emblems –

 

 

The consonance with the jewelled lock is obvious, and so too is the homage paid to venerated artistic forms by these roundels. They range from the interreligious dharmachakra to works like this:

 

A Buddhist cosmic mural from Punakha, Bhutan (photograph by Eric Huntington)

 

Simple though they are in comparison, the roundels are definitely derived from Dharmic geometricizations. So far as purpose is concerned, there is an appreciable correspondence between the two groupings, with mandalas and other devices chiefly serving as aids to unlocking inner knowledge, or orienting the individual within an interfolded, multiplanar space (broadly defined) – puzzle clues stake out the same territory within their smaller domain. Furthermore, the emblems’ symmetrical placements on the Buddha’s body calls to mind related mystical frameworks such as chakra, wherein a noncorporeal physiognomy may be affected by exercises directed towards focal points of the human anatomy. For unassuming textures, their semiotic reach is gargantuan. Those with an eye for such details may consider it a shame – bathetic, actually – to squeeze them for information and move on, but needs must. It’s exceedingly rare for a videogame to deploy such dense symbols as appositely as this, and one should be content in enjoying the fleeting harmonisation of a mere adventure title with several world religions.⁶

 

 

A brief check that you’ve got the emblems in the right order (i.e. committing them to memory) and then you return to the lock. Four swift slices and you'll see what lies ahead. A one and a — it’s here, in the rumbling afterquake of the first blow struck, that it dawns on you, all at once, just what’s happened. Sighted on the Buddha, then carried in the mind back to this door, now entering into your own person through the labour of your muscles and the reverberation in your hand – those cosmograms have synaesthetically leapt from visual geometries to ordinal abstractions to ritualised physical acts, preserving their essence whilst flashing through their conventional religious expressions. (Yet not beholden to them. The continuity in the play of form is eminently intelligible without giving a moment’s thought to the nondiegetic world.) You weren’t moving away from a puzzle but internalising it in the most palpable way, ensorcelling your body and decentring your consciousness within an infinity as near as it is far. One word captures the mental and sensational rush, the entire sweep of the sequence: transcendent.

 

Racing back from the puzzle’s climax to its beginning, you can see that what ended in a body also started on one. If your being can be said to incarnate the ‘journey’ of this episode, the same holds for the Buddha; the difference is only one of serene anticipation versus fresh realisation. Whether subliminally or catching all the details, the player becomes simpatico with the resident luminary – after all, they grant passage and assist you towards insight. Shorn of an everyday personality and depicted through a graven image, they seem to be goodness itself. This may lead adventurers with a high opinion of themselves to feel a deeper connection, that they are one and the same…

 

Airily breaking down barriers and fostering novel connections between disparate things is a high-minded, syncretic way of manifesting the multiplicity discussed earlier. A Gothic alternative approach towards the same ends is dualism, whereby internal divisions are erected and items swing violently between opposed, morally-charged aspects of themselves. These syncretic and dualistic modes together form a schema that underlies the structure and organisation of the Ancient Cistern. During the preceding cosmogram puzzle, dualistic elements are also introduced, allowing the dynamics of the schema to commence operating at the very start of the dungeon. As a couple of minor occurrences intimate, not all is holy light and beatific smiles.

 

When first entering the room with the jewelled lock, you come to a drop. Boldly leaping down –

 

 

– you expect the wide lotus foliage to support your weight. Jumping forth and skydiving are common actions in the game, usually conjoined with opportunities to demonstrate your heroism and strength (‘death from above’ combat, threading past hazards to land on a miniscule target, etc).

 

 

But not here. The pad gives way from the force of the impact and…

 

 

… flips to reveal a previously unseen system of spiky tendrils and hooked roots…

 

 

… whilst leaving you in the drink, encircled by the same prickly plant matter. You’ll do yourself a mischief swimming into them; at the same time, there’s no hope of punching through the leaf above – it has closed over you like an oubliette’s trapdoor. Chastened, you circumspectly dive under and out from the organic barbwire.

 

Chalk up the misadventure to overlooking the laws of physics, not anything untoward from the locale. Minutes later, you’re surveying the great statue, collating the roundels for the lock. Two of them are located on the idol’s submerged hands.

 

 

Nothing on the open palm. Is there a way to see the back of the hand? Perhaps if you were to remove that rupee…

 

 

Too slow a pass by and the fingers curl, trapping you within a fist. Writhing and flailing, you do manage to break loose, though not without a scare at the sudden violence, which is unnervingly heightened by the placid atmosphere. This one you can also take the blame for: interfering with a balanced system of pulleys and counterweights is sure to invite disaster. It’s what you’d expect to happen if you were to look at all the elemen– wait. Why would the Buddha be holding on to cold, hard cash, crushing anyone who dares to relieve him of such worldly dross?

 

Elevating you heavenwards to meet with the divine, SS simultaneously thrusts out from below to tug you back down and fill your ears with innuendo of trickery, seediness and charlatanism – the Buddha yoked with the Mechanical Turk. Yes, yes, perhaps you can discount the unseemlier stuff because there's a presiding sense of probity and religion – but aren’t nine tenths of that racket the suggestion of virtue? If it’s a matter of picking up on cues, one shouldn’t be selective, so shove to one side the cosmograms and insight and all that vaporous piety – what is brought to mind by your visceral experiences of drowning, pain and entrapment? Something vaguely threatening for the ingenuous player; for Spider Thread readers, however, there is one obvious, specific answer: Kandata, who at this point in the story is afflicted by the posthumous agonies of the Pond of Blood. In the same way that Akutagawa’s Buddha gazes down into the Lotus Pond and witnesses the murderer’s degradation, your immersion in its videogame counterpart have brought you to apprehend the damned man’s suffering without placing you directly within Hell itself. (This deftly handled and innovative vicariousness will be returned to.) Clearly it is not only the dungeon that has a lot going on: perhaps ten minutes or so in, the player is a bodhisattva, fire-and-brimstone fodder, and cognitive dissonance personified.

 

Notes

 

⁴ This eclectic yet slightly noncommittal world building/environmental design tendency is shared by Link’s Awakening and Majora’s Mask. Together with SS, they form the core grouping of philosophical Zeldas (for want of a better collective term).

 

⁵ David Shulman, ‘Buddhist Baedekers’ – The New York Review of Books, 26 March 2020.

 

⁶ Serendipitously, the David Shulman review I quoted above contains a description of Himalayan mandalas that would serve as a fantastic precis for the Zelda series – I include it here only because the coincidence is delightful:

 

A Himalayan mandala is usually a crowded space: there are godly and demonic spheres, labyrinths, palaces, gateways guarded by terrifying gatekeepers, mantric buzzes and hums, disorienting temporal rhythms, and hosts of deities, some ominous, others benign. With persistence, a meditator learns to create in open (mental) space the entire three- or four-dimensional universe with all its objects and living beings.

 

 

Eyes, mouths and keys

Spoiler

Moving on, with the understanding that the Ancient Cistern is an uplifting place possessing a dark undercurrent: the room past the jewelled lock has you sending giant arachnids to watery graves and learning to take advantage of the lotus flipping mechanic (falling on one turns it over and stops its roots from blocking an exit). A small key is the reward, allowing you to open a door into the great statue. Upon entering this (slightly austere) silo, a brief cutscene plays. Above –

 

 

– a reaffirmation of the providential ordering of the dungeon, centred on this lotus flower/boss room door (note the brief reprise of Skyview Temple’s spiral motif). Below, where you drop down after the cutscene finishes –

 

 

– a four-armed skeleton in golden armour. Huh. Well, the Ancient Cistern is a Zelda dungeon after all: notably vicious adversaries are to be expected. What enemies there are here must be gatecrashers, in the dungeon but not of it (restoring dungeons to their prelapsarian dignity is a series staple). In fact, it doesn’t detract from the peaceful splendour at all. No, this is obviously an allegorical enemy: a mouldering bag of bones, bitterly clinging to life and treasure, dwarfed by the grand monument to nirvana imprisoning it? If that isn’t an authoritative statement on the superiority of the ascending spirit to the recalcitrant flesh then I don’t know what is. Fell this vice figure and move on.

 

It puts up fierce resistance, though, keeping you on your toes and at the limit of your swordsmanship. Part way through, it brings out an axe and another sword to supplement its existing two. Thrusts, swipes, the clanging of metal on metal, shield bashes, limbs strewn everywhere, gold plate clattering to the ground, bedlam. Towards the end the skeleton’s helmet is lost, so move in for the kill, another flurry of blows and – there! Done!

 

Exulting in your hard-fought victory, it would be easy, all too easy to overlook something that only came into view at the frenetic climax of the battle, and which vanishes with the disintegration of the skeleton moments after it concludes.

 

 

A third eye in the middle of the forehead. The most ominous sign yet of the Ancient Cistern’s intrinsic two-facedness, its introduction here is so very cunning. Blink-and-you’ll-miss-it to the letter, it arrives when your assumptions about the justice of your battle (and, by extension, the wider environment) are at their zenith, blinding you with action and its triumphant hangover to let this slip past. It really borders on a visual joke – only those who know what they’re looking for will be able to catch sight of a higher consciousness.⁷ (A further structural grace note: the third eye is another motif from Skyview Temple, leading to the top and bottom of the statue interior having matched second-hand symbols.)

 

Let’s assume you saw nothing markedly sinister in the fight and that you’re still enjoying this fool’s paradise. Good news, you’re about to like it even more as it’s time to collect the dungeon item, your new plaything. The holy ritual of the chest opening, that tune, a burst of light and —

 

 

Ooo, a whip! It’s brilliant fun, and really the, erm, whippiest to be found in videogames by virtue of the motion controls. Using it feels liberating, adroitly swinging, cracking and curling it round things through natural arm and hand movements. Whilst it’s a near iron law of games that new equipment and powerups let you do more and with greater latitude, the degree of emphasis placed here upon freedom, in both action and as a concept, is noteworthy. The sense of licence it affords is enhanced first by what the game asks you to do with it (brushing aside one of the series’ oldest conventions, as we will see shortly), then by coupling it with the dungeon’s foremost token of emancipation, the spider thread (their forms resemble one another; you hang from both; they appear to be gifts of the Buddha).

 

But all that in due time. At the base of the statue interior, a new type of valve presents itself. Latching on with the whip and pulling it like a spinning top cord turns on a water spout, which lifts you back to the statue's entrance. In the central room again, you can now swing across a gap, leading you to the chest with the dungeon map (reinforcing, in passing, the space’s cosmogrammatic connections). Down on the pond, your new whip helps you to flip a lotus pad, providing you with a platform to activate a previously unreachable switch using that same item. It closes a sluice, stopping the artificial waterfall; now you can dive down to enter –

 

 

The maw of this stone fish. Although innocuous enough in itself, it also instantiates one of SS’s more macabre leitmotifs: the gulping down of prey by beasts, Jonah style.⁸ A nightmare early in the game codifies it quite forcefully:

 

 

Tread warily – that is, if you can avoid distractions. At the other end of the gullet/pipe, you exit from the mouth of an even larger fish. You dispatch a scuttling spider and are then checked by a barred doorway. Anything else in the room? Save for a small rupee chest behind the fish’s head, no. What about the ceiling? Nada. Maybe you weren’t meant to come this way yet, better consult the map… argh, no, this is the only path forward. Let’s have a closer look at those bars, perhaps one of them is loose (really hoping against hope here). Wait, there’s a switch on the other side! You just have to go round – shit, you can’t! OK, there must be a way to flip it… Oh! Will it work?

 

 

It does! Against all expectations, you can yank that sucker down from where you stand, raising the gate. Quaint now in an age of systems-driven games boasting refined, subtle physics engines, this reaching through the bars struck me at the time as a significant departure, even if only in the context of the series. (Projectiles making their way past a barrier, maybe, but a held item? I don’t recall that happening in a Zelda before, though I’m open to correction.) In any event, it’s unprecedented in SS, and very satisfying to effect. Found close to the Buddha, the whip might be taken (albeit with a measure of fancy) as a gift from him, and its role here in crossing boundaries and freeing up space is congruous with the themes explored by the cosmogrammatic puzzle that is tied to the figure. Taking it all into consideration, this appears to be another occasion that subconsciously encourages you to treat the Ancient Cistern as your own: you needn't feel constrained by such things as gates and locks, for you can make them disappear like so. Going by the cheeky impunity with which you’ve violated age-old dungeon norms here, laws of all stripes likely don’t apply to you. If the Buddha’s influence pervades the tranquil ambience, yours is a presence that falls only a hair’s breadth short of his, being the chosen hero and next best thing to a divinity. An additional factor buttressing that fatheaded, smug sense of self is that – aside from the minor perils of drowning and the skeleton warrior – this has been a remarkably easygoing dungeon thus far, more stroll than struggle. Such is life in Paradise, where the lotuses flower radiantly and all things are as one…

 

The next space is seemingly a dead-end, containing only a pool, a bottomless pit, and some raised platforms. After making your way past the obstacles around the sides of the room (which include a prayer wheel-like roller), you reach another valve. Pulling it opens a drainage hole at the bottom of the pool, creating a sucking vortex.

 

 

It can scarcely be considered inviting, and the context doesn’t allay any fears (that premonitory fish; the neighbouring abyss; drowning as a recurrent fright). Sensing that you’re venturing into a threatening unknown, you step from the ledge, dive, and are tugged down, down, down…

 

 

Transitioning between areas, the music slows – infarcted, torpidly warped. A copper pipe spits you out into a purplish half-light. It’s your imagination but this water seems brackish, or even poisonous. Perhaps it's because of the bruised colour it has. Bars array the near horizon again, though now there’s the stench of the sewer and misery of the jail cell hanging about them. Paddling towards a lotus pad, a great spider descends to assert jealous ownership. The trappings of the dungeon above are present, their warmth and welcome absent. Such is life… where, exactly?

 

A small landing permits access to dry land. Using your flying beetle to sever its thread, you can have the spider emulate you earlier, crashing down on to the lotus pad and flipping it over. That there is a continuity of puzzle logic above and below is strongly reassuring. This might actually prove tolerable. The lotus roots now out of the way, you can swim through a small opening and follow the waterway. More bars, but also a locked door. A goblin patrols the far side, with something on its belt catching the light.

 

 

One instant, from inspiration to culmination:

 

 

Reach out –

 

 

– and pull back! Yes, this is more like it: another smart extension of what you learned above and a casual display of your limitless, shining hero-of-the-game prowess. An offkey couple of minutes there but now you’re back in sync with the Geist of the Ancient Cistern. The goblin squeals in frustration at having been whip-pocketed by a master. Open the door and deliver your apologies in short, sharp order.

 

Hold on a moment though, some things are amiss. Why is the dungeon giving you the cold shoulder, near enough imprisoning you in fact, and then letting you completely shrug that off in ecstatic freedom? It’s all too convenient, too calculated to please. When it does knock you down, it lifts you up afterwards to an even greater height than before, with the cycle then repeating itself. True, it didn’t feel that strange upstairs, but down here in the murk it sits differently.

 

Also, why do you have this whip? It doesn’t so much aid in solving the puzzles as it mockingly dispenses with them altogether. Come down from the dopamine high, look at things in the cold light of day, and realise that you’ve had a cheat code pressed into your eager, addled hands. It seems wrong to so blithely violate established dungeon procedures – sure, new items always turn the tide in your favour when advancing through these catacombs and mazes, but this is, well, facile. Come to think of it, didn’t this whip turn up far earlier than is normal? Before the dungeon map, even. In the Ancient Cistern, mastery precedes understanding.

 

Consider this latest incident, where you eschew confronting the monster, instead just reaching into the depth of the space and extracting what you need. Really, that doesn’t seem in character for a noble adventurer, cowardly stealing a key and – no, no, no, not that thought, not those memories stepping into focus, not that place in this one. The past is over, gone, dead, and it never really applied to you anyway. Go through the door, now. Now.

 

Notes

 

⁷ It would be remiss of me not to insert a caveat here, namely that the third eye is rather difficult to make out as a result of SS being an SD game, and a visually diffuse one at that. (It will be interesting to see whether it’s more prominent in the HD release, and how that colours interpretations.) Similarly, the timing of the helmet coming off may be looser than my account implies. Nonetheless, I feel my characterisation of the dynamics involved is substantially correct.

 

⁸ Incidentally, this conceit is combined with the leaping/skydiving action for their shared ‘conclusion’ in the Fire Sanctuary, the sixth dungeon, where you fall from a high gantry onto the invisible tongue of a yawning giant.

 

This post will be continued in a separate entry below.

[Kevvy Metal]

1 hour ago, Hulot said:

I’m sure this will prove a wounding experience for me – all the more so because the length of what’s to follow invites ridicule, if not outright dismissal – but here goes: I profoundly disagree with your assessment of Skyward Sword in general, and this assertion about its environments in particular. Far from being attenuated and vestigial – serving as a mere container for otherwise isolated setpieces – the world of Skyward Sword is replete, sophisticated, and holistically integrates with the game’s themes and motifs to dazzling effect. In this category, it’s an exemplar of the medium. Furthermore, its treatment of setting was best in class for its series prior to Breath of the Wild, well, widening our horizons.

 

Provocative declarations perhaps, but no more so than the harshest judgements found in this thread. I love this game to bits and wish to offer a partisan’s interpretation of its environments in order to help widen the discussion. Although I had planned a different post to this one, covering far more ground, I realised that the subjects I most wished to speak about could all be found in closely examining the Ancient Cistern, the game’s fourth dungeon.

 

I have two reasons for selecting this specific locale. The first is in response to your assertion that this game favours “puzzles” at the expense of “place”. The Ancient Cistern challenges this perspective: within it, puzzles are place. Interestingly, they distinguish themselves in a dungeon context by serving as part of an ensemble of challenges and activities – they are excellent, but not domineering. This area has a marvellous evenness to it that is achieved through its constituent parts flowing together, from one element to the next, in sympathy with its (mostly) tranquil ambience. By immersing oneself within the puzzles’ forms, a wealth of subtextual detail about the wider environment can be gleaned, along with the narrative it hosts.

 

A collection of Akutagawa’s shorter works – no prizes for

guessing the story featured on the cover

 

Which brings me on to my second reason for choosing the Ancient Cistern: this section of the game famously draws upon The Spider Thread, a parable by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, one of Japan’s most cherished authors. The tale’s dénouement receives a treatment in SS that is as perfectly matched with its surroundings as it is an exhilarating disruption of them – a consummate tour de force, and seminal demonstration of Nintendo’s mastery of the form. However, for all the (fully earned) praise heaped at the feet of this episode, scant attention has been paid to the fact that the scope of the adaptation extends well beyond it: most of The Spider Thread’s major plot points are touched upon elsewhere, with even a specific simile approximated at one juncture. (Indeed, the game is so respectful of the text that it defers to it in commencing its retelling outside of and prior to the Ancient Cistern itself.) It’s a singular meeting between literature and videogames, and I would like to delve into its underexplored aspects, highlighting the artistry of the game’s design as I go. I don’t really know what to call the following – a travelogue and critical commentary, I suppose. I hope it proves interesting.

 

And yes, I am perfectly aware of how absurd this gargantuan, metastasized post is. Perfectly aware. Mortified about it.

 

Familiarity with the entire game is assumed – spoilers range the length and breadth of Skyward Sword.

 

All Spider Thread excerpts and quotations featured below are taken from the superb translation by Jay Rubin, whose notes also proved invaluable in writing this post. I recommend his collection of Akutagawa’s short fiction published by Penguin; in lieu of that, this translation conveys the gist of the story well enough.

 

Preamble and the return to Skyview Temple

  Reveal hidden contents

Before getting into the thick of it, I’d like to comment on the general character of Skyward Sword, at least as I perceive it. To that end, here’s a comparison of the worlds of Breath of the Wild and Skyward Sword, and how each informs the temper of their respective game.

 

In BotW, the environment is a consistent, self-contained entity, and it overawes as a landscape. Rivers meander as the force of their currents and inclines permit; rich loam gives way to spartan scrubland that segues into barren mountain slopes; ecosystems observe the strictures of topography and climate to accommodate life in its correct measure. Everything, from frogs to snowbanks to volcanic plumes, feels as if it is the sum of an integrated, coherent natural history, and so the earth and its treasures (ostensibly) enjoy a regal independence from such game system vulgarities as ‘function’ or ‘utility’. Even man’s grandest designs are but bagatelles here: the Divine Beasts, for all their thunderous thudding and stomping, can only claim the dignity of tin toys; the ruins dotting the world, less still than that.

 

Satori Mountain

 

Unsurprisingly, the relationship between the player and all this inviolate magnificence is marked by a certain distance. BotW’s adventurer is placed at a remove from a world which grants nothing save an opportunity to participate. You won’t be kept from scaling cliff faces, nor are there any prohibitions on bear hunting – but rainfall and the beast’s claws have the same licence. Nature picks no favourites. The brilliance of this teeming, exuberant, responsive, tight-spun Hyrule resides, curiously, in a discreet indifference on the part of that world to its protagonist. Not that an estrangement makes itself felt; rather, what value there is to be found in foraging, gliding, fighting, and so on is left exclusively to the player’s unprompted judgement. Breath of the Wild leaves the general impression of two factors operating in strict parallel, with the player’s free-ranging will and resourcefulness being set-off by an aloof, studiedly neutral backdrop.

 

The Lanayru Sand Sea

 

Skyward Sword takes the opposite tack: in this adventure, there is the closest possible intimacy between the player and the world they inhabit. In fact, to speak of a ‘between’ at all is somewhat misleading as SS does its utmost to confound those distinctions – the world is an extension of Link, and Link a microcosm of the whole. Through severity and guile, the motivated landscapes structure the player’s awareness, cultivating a cluster of precepts which beautifully undergird the immediate business of combat, traversal, and puzzling, and which by their very deliberateness confer a richness upon those limited activities.

 

If all of this sounds quite abstract that’s because the game’s concerns very much are – whereas BotW may be labelled a work of materialism, SS is a study in idealism. (A game of mandalas over maps, as we will see.) Locales and their contents ought to be chiefly viewed through a psychogeographical lens: metaphor, concatenation, allusion, juxtaposition, affect, displacement, symbolism, reification and allegory are to the fore, and with them a reflexive quality which makes playing the game so delicious – not only is it a matter of ‘what’s the next thing?’ but also ‘what’s the next thing going to be about? And what will that be like in relation to this?’ Not that it’s a one-way street, as the player’s progress alters the fabric of SS in ways ranging from the unassumingly slight (opening a shortcut with a rolled log, after much huffing and puffing) to the demiurgically decisive (blooming stone flowers on rivers of fire with a magician’s nonchalant sword flick). Places are regulated by the contours of a subjective, internal landscape – whole complexes of rooms and expanses of terrain may hinge on the tiniest of cues or slightest of actions.¹ The experience of this charmed and dialectical world’s unfolding is that of a warm conversation which gains its zest from never being completely one-sided, either in pandering to the player, or by having the environments suborn one’s will – reciprocity is paramount. ‘Thoughtfulness’, in the fullest and most humanly generous sense, is an attribute that comes to mind whenever I look back on SS and how it arranges itself.

 

Of course, opinions differ: one of the most frequent complaints is that the game is mind-numbingly padded out, with the revisiting of Skyview Temple, the first dungeon, cited as a prime example of the game’s purposeless and wearisome detours and recapitulations. With this trip prefacing the Ancient Cistern, let’s take a closer look at both it and the naysaying it’s engendered.

 

 

Never the liveliest of dungeons, its gloom and dreariness seem heavier than ever upon your return. Weeds and fungi have colonised the margins. A subterranean tree licks the masonry with a tongue of bark. Dust motes idle in the air. The score drags its feet, lurching from a sustained note to the hurried completion of its main phrase. Nothing new except (ironically) the tinge of staleness. In retracing your steps, the area now seems a castoff, a moated grange of blackest moss and rounding grays. What use is there for a completed dungeon? An errand to fetch water serves as the immediate pretext for coming here, but there must surely be a deeper reason for this particular place at this moment in time. Already, at the threshold, an important conceptual shift has been effected that decouples the repeat engagement from the initial experience: in passing through the space at leisure rather than under the driving excitement of conquest, the player is prompted to consciously dwell upon it, interrogate it at a newfound distance – “OK, I’m here again. Why?” Teasing out any hidden meaning necessitates an analytical, sober frame of mind which departs from the chipper pragmatism that is Zelda dungeoneering’s habitual mode. A certain reserved attentiveness is called for which nicely complements the prevailing calm.

 

 

Not that your visit will be entirely without incident. A short way in and one of the burrowing mogma creatures from the volcanic region makes an unexpected appearance. Avaricious and cagey as ever, he asserts, in spite of protestations to the contrary, that you’re a fellow ransacker, before scrabbling away to stake his own claim on the loot. Cheeky git, branding you light-fingered – you’re the destined hero, and whatever appropriations you make in your quest are a result of exigencies beyond your control (if those requisitions happen to include cool gadgets and piles of rupees you can hardly demur). Continuing on, you’re stymied by a locked door; whilst you're searching for a key, who should pop back up but Mr Libel. He says he swiped the key from a monster but now can’t remember where he buried it. A diligent spot of digging after the pair of you part and, gosh, you have a brand new, one-of-a-kind, custom fit lock loosener. Onwards.

 

Before concluding your dealings with the mogma, a few things you (re)encounter on this flying visit must be noted for future reference:

 

 

• The round central chamber of Skyview Temple, reached after passing through a series of dark, dank anterooms. It features a lightwell, with a biomorphic structure occupying pride of place (its lines are reminiscent of your flying beetle, or a nesting bird).

 

 

• The abyss separating the boss chamber from the rest of the dungeon, its two sides spanned by a tightrope. Your crossing was imperilled the first time by a pair of daredevils who advanced out to accost you midway, whilst this second one involves some sniping archers. In any event, whether it be by hand or arrow, funambulism and physical contact don’t mix.

 

 

• A trio of stalfos who have taken up residence in Ghirahim’s old boss chamber. There are six swords between them.

 

Between those last two items we have our final meeting with the mogma. Dissapointingly empty handed, he’s had his fill of treasure hunting and is going to return home. Your attention is seized, strangely enough, by the following sentence:

 

 

Odd that this should feel so pers– oh. I understand now. He’s talking about you. You’re the thief. Your attention was seized because you’re guilty. He’s probably alluding to the key, or if not that then the artefacts which once resided here, but either way, you did it. From a certain point of view, you are indeed a ransacker, and you definitely took what was – again, from a certain point of view – his key. Hmm.

 

Still, he’s a fine one to talk, isn’t he? Nought but hypocrisy from this rodent. Let this be a lesson to him that there’s no honour amongst thieves. Yes, you’re sort of, arguably, robbing, but it’s all for the greater good. Now that you’ve thoroughly ambiguated the matter to your satisfaction you can move on, secure in a righteousness that is all the stronger for having been lightly challenged.

 

Stand aside, allow that fatheaded mindset to proceed – we’ll resume contact with it when we reach the Ancient Cistern. Reverting back momentarily to the cogitating arising from the ‘why’ of this irregular, repeated dungeon: one senses that this business with the key and the stealing is of some importance. It hasn’t been included merely to freshen up this retread as it’s altogether too slight to serve as sufficient distraction from the recycling. No, it’s more like the game is urging you to focus on the essential elements and interplays of this little narrative by having them take place in an area that, because it’s familiar if not exhausted, won’t get in the way. What’s the deal with this microstory? It has the concision and ethical profile of a fable, yet there’s no particular conclusion or discernible moral to be drawn from it. Puzzling. One will just have to put it to the side for now, despite suspecting that there’s more to it than meets the eye.

 

That was the drift of my thinking when I originally played this section. The subsequent dungeon does provide a capper to the story here, as I guessed it might, but what I didn’t have the slightest inkling of at the time was that the belting short story I recognised as being integral to the Ancient Cistern first slips into the game here, in Skyview Temple, and in such an intelligent and witty fashion that to know it is to marvel at it. Let’s start addressing The Spider Thread and how Skyward Sword adapts it to its own ends.

 

 

Whilst bearing in mind everything gleaned thus far, rewind to this point, where you first met the mogma. The conduit in the top-centre of the picture was something of a loose end or curiosity when initially exploring here: when opened, it offers a shortcut between the entrance (where Link is standing) and a major hub room. Quite why you would want such a thing is a bit of a mystery as only a single, tiny chamber separates entrance and hub, and there’s no need to travel backwards anyway.

 

On your return, with the curve of the staircase drawing your eye to its recess, the purpose of the conduit – as an expedient for this second tour – becomes clear. Following that chat with the mogma (plundering allegations and all), the majority of players will make use of the shortcut and be on their merry way. An archer in the hub room monopolises you when you enter, hastily pulling you forwards from the wall you’ve just leapt down. (It should be noted here that this is the most arboreal part of Skyview Temple, with trunks and branches dominating the upper half of the space.) What are present on the wall, and afforded only a moment’s diversion when creating the shortcut two dungeons and several hours prior:

 

 

Spiders. Negligible, nuisance grade spiders. When using the shortcut, jumping over their heads and into the room, they are literally beneath your notice. Later, in searching for the key, you’re likely to cast a glance their way without paying them any mind. There’s nothing to be gained by killing them, not even the sport of it.

 

A lateral move is necessary here in order to introduce The Spider Thread. The story begins one morning in the garden of Paradise; the Buddha is strolling through it with perfect equanimity. From his supreme metaphysical vantage point, the Buddha peers down through the garden’s pond and across an unfathomable distance to behold the grisly spectacle of Hell (aka Naraka). He regards Kandata, a robber and murderer in his former life now subject to endless drownings in the Pond of Blood, Hell’s deepest and worst region. “But it seems that Kandata had performed one single act of goodness”:

 

Passing through a deep wood one day, he had noticed a tiny spider creeping along the wayside. His first thought was to stamp it to death, but as he raised his foot, he told himself, “No, no. Even this puny creature is a living thing. To take its life for no reason would be too cruel.” And so he had let it pass unharmed.

 

The “deep wood” is, of course, what surrounds you in this hub room. You are a murderer (understanding it in your bones, thanks to the sword’s motion controls) and a thief. The game even replicates – within the constraints of its language – Kandata’s foot pausing above the spider, by having yours sail overhead. Without the player being fully aware of it, Skyward Sword is inducting them into the role of this sinner, steering them towards the moment where they grasp the thread of salvation and start to climb. (The theme of destiny receives from SS its most complete and emotionally perceptive treatment in the medium, with the ensnaring of the player here a choice instance.)

 

Aside from the exceptional elegance and startling cogency achieved here, what absolutely thrills me is how appreciating that this reheated dungeon has been woven into the plot of Akutagawa’s work radically recontextualises and enriches it. If interpreted as a world of vanities, as the transient realm of the unenlightened degraded by the likes of Kandata, its flyblown, withered qualities gain a new currency as proofs of a wider spiritual corruption, intriguingly offset by it also being the game’s forest dungeon (with connotations of vitality and wholesome growth).² Similarly, there being no explicit resolution to the (tawdry?) mogma storyline is in keeping with our naïve experience of this life; it is not the way of the world for things to be tied up neatly. Any catharsis or apprehension of solace must be provided by something beyond the everyday. By an afterlife, perhaps. Skyview Temple being both a seat of worship and in the throes of terminal decay, it doubly anticipates that undiscovered country, points the way to the ultimate: it makes an inevitability of its successor, the Ancient Cistern.

 

Notes

 

¹ This subjectivised, psychological formula is highly unusual for a Zelda title, though not without precedent in the wider medium. Honestly, I believe it’s more productive to approach SS with the notion that it’s closer to the pensive and nuanced interiority of Silent Hill 2 than to the phlegmatic simplicity of, say, A Link to the Past.

 

² This union of opposites also figures prominently in Ocarina of Time’s two woodland dungeons, the Deku Tree and the Forest Temple. A spiral motif further links the pair with Skyview Temple, furnishing us with a subtle example of how SS echoes its predecessors in both symbol and substance, advancing the game’s discourse beyond its own borders.

 

‘Padding’

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Oh, yes, ‘padding’ – I did say I’d look at it, and this is a good place to do so, between dungeons. I think the above is sufficient to get this part of the game off the hook, but I’ll go further and say it strikes me as completely untenable as a charge against SS in general. Although not each and every one of the most harumphed sections is as slyly bountiful as the return to Skyview Temple, all of them can claim a distinction of their own and a suitable place in the overall firmament (especially the tadtones). The extended and delightful opening makes perfectly clear, in both feeling and form, by alternating between The Breakfast Club and Beowulf, that the forthcoming adventure will be one of divertissements and frivolities as much as it is of epiphanies and grandeur, and this admixture ethos produces some rather wonderful things when the two extremes are forced to cohabit.

 

Take that old bugbear, the Imprisoned: Calashnikov is right about the first battle, it can be a (bracing) slog hacking away at the toes, darting between redwood-trunk legs as it laboriously slouches towards the top to be reborn – but there’s also the germ of the absurd, the humorously grotesque in its lolloping and your hurrying. That comedy is iterated upon to the point where you find yourself, during the third and final clash, frenziedly circus cannoning out from a zippy, jury-rigged contraption by your new mensch and weapons researcher Groose, aiming to bop the head of a creature which has now sprouted a cartoon halo hoisting it upwards – a Quetzalcoatl by way of Abner Dean, or possibly Tex Avery’s Leviathan. Don’t get me wrong, it’s all still very much a stern contest betwixt good and evil, it’s just that there’s now a buddy comedy, model railway, acrobatics and shooting gallery involved. Somehow. This progression doesn’t come across as hollowly repetitious because the respective tones, tempos, intensities, scales and framings of each bout are too unalike for that. The ‘congestion’ angle doesn’t bear scrutiny either, there being a dozen hours or so separating the first encounter from the second, while the single one between the second and third lets the endearing Groose storyline clip along very punchily. No, pleasure argues decisively against this idea of padding.³ Rather than being vacantly drawn out, SS is whipsmart in marshalling its resources with the frugallest economy and greatest poise.

 

 

³ Which isn’t to say that SS is without its longueurs. The retrieval of the pinwheel, for instance, is a needless chore, whilst the first part of the volcanic dousing quest feels tedious. Such errata add up to perhaps thirty minutes in a game tens of hours long and so must be considered like they are here – as footnotes. Even Homer nods.

 

The Ancient Cistern – Paradise in mind

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The opening of the Ancient Cistern and its ambience are a case in point. Coming from a space that had, in every sense, been emptied out, you arrive here to find abundance and lushness – indeed, you’re almost actively greeted by them, such is the vitality enveloping you.

 

 

Instead of dust, a crimson fenghuang is in the air. The camera can’t help itself, it flies along with the bird, taking in the doors (where do they lead to?) and ledges (how do you reach them?) of the surrounding wall before coming to rest on this artificial waterfall, which descends like silk on marble to the lilting music. Lotuses blossom like “perfect white pearls”, wafting forth a “never-ending fragrance wonderful beyond description”, sumptuous in the golden rays oozing from their glass facsimile in the ceiling above. The round space, central structure, flora and yellowish hues invite comparison straight away with Skyview Temple’s main room, though it’s really not fair to do so: there, you staggered from darkness into the drab light of sunset; here, it’s “morning in Paradise”, passed into with the assurance of the blessed (or fatheaded).

 

Whilst preserving the ghost of the earlier temple as a contrapunt, SS places the player in one of the primary settings of The Spider Thread, the garden of Paradise, and lavishly lays on what an adventurer would deem heavenly: doors, advantageous ledges, treasure chests, switches – all possibilities to be explored and exploited. It leaves a good first impression, and restores back to the player that dungeoneering yen. Still, not content with juggling two discrete areas of its own and an external short story, the opening room adds another layer of reference. In the picture above, there is a large metal cog; together with the wall switches, pipes and general salutary character of the place, it suggests something like a municipal waterworks (the faux organic decor even puts me in mind of Bazalgette and Paxton’s great industrial cathedrals). The ‘Ancient Cistern’ title by itself indicates a degree of straddling high and low, announcing a dynamic of headbutting between the sacred and profane that will work itself out over the course of the dungeon.

 

It’s a locale filled to bursting with personality and freighted with meaning. To talk of the game having no sense of place: I think quite the contrary is in evidence, which is to say SS maximises its spaces by braiding various subjects, conceits and styles, all whilst being disciplined enough to allow each component to come through clearly and inflect the overall arrangement, as they do here.⁴ (The Lanayru Desert, with its time-shift stones, constitutes the acme of this approach.) However much this mode may jar with a sensibility insisting things not overlap and remain essentialised, it seems thoroughly perverse to hold that SS’s environments are without any flavour because they elect to offer many.

 

 

The dungeon’s star attraction underlines my argument. Again, it’s very multum in parvo, being equal parts monumental religious statue, pavilion and Mechanical Turk. I would like to concentrate for the time being on that first attribute: those acquainted with The Spider Thread and alert to its influence in SS will recognise Akutagawa’s Shakyamuni Buddha, who compassionately extends the titular strand to Kandata. In due course this equivalent will do the same for you – and therein lies a problem for the game.

 

As it proceeds, the Ancient Cistern splits itself in two, polarising around a heavenly realm of lotuses and light at one extreme, an infernal cavern of blood and damned souls at the other. Your rescue from the latter is at the discretion of a gracious actor, with this Buddha the only plausible one to be found in the aftermath. Naturally, one would appreciate something of their goodness by that act alone, yet to have this virtue demonstrated all in one burst would seem a tad pat, too bluntly deus ex machina-ish. Association with a welcoming space only goes so far: the wisdom and benevolence of this Buddha need to be actively vouched for ahead of time so as to lend ripeness and internal logic to the act of mercy. How does SS achieve this?

 

In this instance, it pursues a strategy of characterisation by guided inference. An orthodox puzzle is adapted to an unusual end by having it illuminate a state of mind, and bridge the gap between two beings through a shared “eureka!” Though dense in its cultural allusions, its best parts can nonetheless be understood without prior knowledge of either The Spider Thread or Buddhism, as the game lucidly expresses itself in immediate formal terms (for example, the sense of ‘transference’ I outline below is readily intuited via gameplay alone).

 

The cultural sphere enlisted here to help flesh things out is, predictably, the religious one: the positioning of the statue amalgam at the heart of a circular room (and, indeed, the entire dungeon), combined with its, er, Buddha-ness, recalls South Asian cosmograms. An immense and complex body of tradition(s), these cosmograms include both illustrative visualizations (such as mandalas, varieties of which do centre on Buddhas) and psycho-corporal practices (e.g. yoga) which aim to accomplish a “move from subtle, hidden, and potential space into external, visible space”⁵ as a means of parsing the universe and one’s place within it. Your first task here finds you making use of these schemas in order to access and conceptualise not the universe but a sacralised model of it – the Ancient Cistern.

 

After the opening cutscene, you begin exploring the dungeon. In a room leading off from the central chamber, your progress is halted by:

 

 

A combination lock, removed by hitting its jewelled petals in the correct sequence. If you choose to consult it, an adjacent stele mentions the temple possesses a “secret order”, knowledge of which is required to advance further. Either way, it’s back to the main room in search of a solution.

 

 

From the entrance, a couple of quick hops bring you to the base of the Frankenbuddha and another stele. It reads (emphases in original):

 

Carved into the great statue are inscriptions of gratitude. They reveal the secret order of this temple.

 

An itinerary of points on the statue’s body follows. The spiritual (“gratitude”) and mystical (“secret order”) import of these sentences helps bed in the tone of the Ancient Cistern. A hierarchy is also established, with the environment – the construct containing and divulging the esoteric whatsits – in a senior position to the player/initiate. (The air of tutelage and idea of orderliness fixed upon the Buddha should be borne in mind for later.) Touring the “great statue”, you come across these emblems –

 

 

The consonance with the jewelled lock is obvious, and so too is the homage paid to venerated artistic forms by these roundels. They range from the interreligious dharmachakra to works like this:

 

A Buddhist cosmic mural from Punakha, Bhutan (photograph by Eric Huntington)

 

Simple though they are in comparison, the roundels are definitely derived from Dharmic geometricizations. So far as purpose is concerned, there is an appreciable correspondence between the two groupings, with mandalas and other devices chiefly serving as aids to unlocking inner knowledge, or orienting the individual within an interfolded, multiplanar space (broadly defined) – puzzle clues stake out the same territory within their smaller domain. Furthermore, the emblems’ symmetrical placements on the Buddha’s body calls to mind related mystical frameworks such as chakra, wherein a noncorporeal physiognomy may be affected by exercises directed towards focal points of the human anatomy. For unassuming textures, their semiotic reach is gargantuan. Those with an eye for such details may consider it a shame – bathetic, actually – to squeeze them for information and move on, but needs must. It’s exceedingly rare for a videogame to deploy such dense symbols as appositely as this, and one should be content in enjoying the fleeting harmonisation of a mere adventure title with several world religions.⁶

 

 

A brief check that you’ve got the emblems in the right order (i.e. committing them to memory) and then you return to the lock. Four swift slices and we’ll see what lies ahead. A one and a — it’s here, in the rumbling afterquake of the first blow struck, that it dawns on you, all at once, just what’s happened. Sighted on the Buddha, then carried in the mind back to this door, now entering into your own person through the labour of your muscles and the reverberation in your hand – those cosmograms have synaesthetically leapt from visual geometries to ordinal abstractions to ritualised physical acts, preserving their essence whilst flashing through their conventional religious expressions. (Yet not beholden to them. The continuity in the play of form is eminently intelligible without giving a moment’s thought to the nondiegetic world.) You weren’t moving away from a puzzle but internalising it in the most palpable way, ensorcelling your body and decentring your consciousness within an infinity as near as it is far. One word captures the mental and sensational rush, the entire sweep of the sequence: transcendent.

 

Racing back from the puzzle’s climax to its beginning, you can see that what ended in a body also started on one. If your being can be said to incarnate the ‘journey’ of this episode, the same holds for the Buddha; the difference is only one of serene anticipation versus fresh realisation. Whether subliminally or catching all the details, the player becomes simpatico with the resident luminary – after all, they grant passage and assist you towards insight. Shorn of an everyday personality and depicted through a graven image, they seem to be goodness itself. This may lead adventurers with a high opinion of themselves to feel a deeper connection, that they are one and the same…

 

Airily breaking down barriers and fostering novel connections between disparate things is a high-minded, syncretic way of manifesting that multiplicity discussed earlier. A Gothic alternative approach towards the same ends is dualism, whereby internal divisions are erected and items swing violently between opposed, morally-charged aspects of themselves. These syncretic and dualistic modes together form a schema that underlies the structure and organisation of the Ancient Cistern. During the preceding cosmogram puzzle, dualistic elements of the dungeon are also introduced, allowing the dynamics of the schema to commence operating from the get-go. As a couple of minor occurrences intimate, not all is holy light and beatific smiles.

 

When first entering the room with the jewelled lock, you come to a drop. Boldly leaping down –

 

 

– you expect the wide lotus foliage to support your weight. Leaping down and skydiving are common actions in the game, usually conjoined with opportunities to demonstrate your heroism and strength (‘death from above’, threading past hazards to land on a miniscule target, etc).

 

 

But not here. The pad gives way from the force of the impact and…

 

 

… flips to reveal a previously unseen system of spiky tendrils and hooked roots…

 

 

… whilst leaving you in the drink, encircled by the same prickly plant matter. You’ll do yourself a mischief swimming into them; at the same time, there’s no hope of punching through the leaf above – it has closed over you like an oubliette’s trapdoor. Chastened, you circumspectly dive under and out from the organic barbwire.

 

Chalk up the misadventure to overlooking the laws of physics, not anything untoward from the locale. Minutes later, you’re surveying the great statue, collating the roundels for the lock. Two of them are located on the idol’s submerged hands.

 

 

Nothing on the open palm. Is there a way to see the back of the hand? Perhaps if you were to remove that rupee…

 

 

Too slow a pass by and the fingers curl, trapping you within a fist. Writhing and flailing you do manage to get loose but not without a scare at the violence, which is heightened by the placid atmosphere. This one you can also take the blame for: interfering with a balanced system of pulleys and counterweights is sure to invite disaster. It’s what you’d expect to happen if you were to look at all the elemen– wait. Why would the Buddha be holding on to cold, hard cash, crushing anyone who dares to relieve him of such worldly dross?

 

Elevating you heavenwards to meet with the divine, SS simultaneously thrusts out from below to tug you back down and fill your ears with innuendo of trickery, seediness and charlatanism – the Buddha yoked with the Mechanical Turk. Yes, yes, perhaps you can discount the unseemlier stuff because there’s the smack of probity and religion – but aren’t nine tenths of that racket the suggestion of virtue? If it’s a matter of picking up on cues, one shouldn’t be selective, so shove to one side the cosmograms and insight and all that vaporous piety – what is brought to mind by your visceral experiences of drowning, pain and entrapment? Something vaguely unnerving for the ingenuous player; for Spider Thread readers, however, there is one obvious, specific answer: Kandata, who at this point in the story is afflicted by the posthumous agonies of the Pond of Blood. In the same way that Akutagawa’s Buddha gazes down into the Lotus Pond and witnesses the murderer’s degradation, your immersion in its videogame counterpart have brought you to apprehend the damned man’s suffering without placing you directly within Hell itself. (This deftly handled and innovative vicariousness will be returned to.) Clearly it is not only the dungeon that has a lot going on: perhaps ten minutes or so in, the player is a bodhisattva, fire-and-brimstone fodder, and cognitive dissonance personified.

 

Notes

 

⁴ This eclectic yet slightly noncommittal world building/environmental design orientation is shared by Link’s Awakening and Majora’s Mask. Along with SS, they form the core grouping of philosophical Zeldas (for want of a better collective term).

 

⁵ David Shulman, ‘Buddhist Baedekers’ – The New York Review of Books, 26 March 2020.

 

⁶ Serendipitously, the David Shulman review I quoted above contains a description of Himalayan mandalas that would serve as a fantastic précis for the Zelda series – I include it here only because the coincidence is delightful:

 

A Himalayan mandala is usually a crowded space: there are godly and demonic spheres, labyrinths, palaces, gateways guarded by terrifying gatekeepers, mantric buzzes and hums, disorienting temporal rhythms, and hosts of deities, some ominous, others benign. With persistence, a meditator learns to create in open (mental) space the entire three- or four-dimensional universe with all its objects and living beings.

 

 

Eyes, mouths and keys

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Moving on, with the understanding that the Ancient Cistern is an uplifting place possessing a dark undercurrent: the room past the jewelled lock has you sending giant arachnids to watery graves and learning to take advantage of the lotus flipping mechanic (falling on one turns it over and stops its roots from blocking an exit). A small key is the reward, allowing you to open a door into the great statue. On entering this (slightly austere) silo, a brief cutscene plays. Above –

 

 

– a reaffirmation of the providential ordering of the dungeon, centred on this lotus flower/boss room door (note the brief reprise of Skyview Temple’s spiral motif). Below, where you drop down to after the cutscene finishes –

 

 

– a four-armed skeleton in golden armour. Huh. Well, the Ancient Cistern is a Zelda dungeon after all; notably vicious adversaries are to be expected. What enemies there are here must be gatecrashers, in the dungeon but not of it (restoring dungeons to their prelapsarian dignity is a series staple). In fact, it doesn’t detract from the peaceful splendour at all. No, this is obviously an allegorical enemy: a mouldering bag of bones, bitterly clinging to life and treasure, dwarfed by the grand monument to nirvana imprisoning it? If that isn’t an authoritative statement on the superiority of the ascending spirit to the recalcitrant flesh then I don’t know what is. Fell this vice figure and move on.

 

It puts up fierce resistance, though, keeping you on your toes and at the limit of your swordsmanship. Part way through, it brings out an axe and another sword to supplement its existing two. Thrusts, swipes, the clanging of metal on metal, shield bashes, limbs strewn everywhere, gold plate clattering to the ground, bedlam. Towards the end the skeleton’s helmet is lost, so move in for the kill, another flurry of blows and – there! Done!

 

Exulting in your hard-fought victory, it would be easy, all too easy to overlook something that only came into view at the frenetic climax of the battle, and which vanishes with the disintegration of the skeleton moments after it concludes.

 

 

A third eye in the middle of the forehead. The most ominous sign yet of the Ancient Cistern’s intrinsic two-facedness, its introduction here is so very cunning. Blink-and-you’ll-miss-it to the letter, it arrives when your assumptions about the justice of your battle (and, by extension, the wider environment) are at their zenith, blinding you with action and its triumphant hangover to let this slip past. It really borders on a visual joke – only those who know what they’re looking for will be able to catch sight of a higher consciousness.⁷ (A further structural grace note: the third eye is another motif from Skyview Temple, leading to the top and bottom of the statue interior having matched second-hand symbols.)

 

Let’s assume you saw nothing markedly sinister in the fight and that you’re still enjoying this fool’s paradise. Good news, you’re about to like it even more as it’s time to collect the dungeon item, your new plaything. The holy ritual of the chest opening, that tune, a burst of light and —

 

 

Ooo, a whip! It’s brilliant fun, and really the, erm, whippiest to be found in videogames by virtue of the motion controls. Using it feels liberating, adroitly swinging, cracking and curling it round things through natural arm and hand movements. Whilst it’s a near iron law of games that new equipment and powerups let you do more and with greater latitude, the degree of emphasis placed here upon freedom, in both action and as a concept, is noteworthy. The sense of licence it affords is enhanced first by what the game asks you to do with it (brushing aside one of the series’ oldest conventions, as we will see shortly), then by coupling it with the dungeon’s foremost token of emancipation, the spider thread (their forms resemble one another; you hang from both; they appear to be gifts of the Buddha).

 

But all that in due time. At the base of the statue interior, a new type of valve presents itself. Latching on with the whip and pulling it like a spinning top cord turns on a water spout, which lifts you back to the entrance. In the central room again, you can now swing across a gap, leading you to the chest with the dungeon map (reinforcing, in passing, the space’s cosmogrammatic connections). Down on the pond, your new whip helps you to flip a lotus pad, providing you with a platform to activate a previously unreachable switch using that same gear. It closes a sluice, stopping the artificial waterfall; now you can dive down to enter –

 

 

The maw of this stone fish. Although innocuous by itself, it also instantiates one of SS’s more macabre leitmotifs: the gulping down of prey by beasts, Jonah style.⁸ An early prophetic nightmare codifies it quite forcefully:

 

 

Tread warily – if you can avoid distractions, that is. At the other end of the conduit, you exit from the mouth of an even larger fish. A scuttling spider you dispatch in a moment and then a barred doorway. Anything else in the room? Save for a small rupee chest behind the fish’s head, no. The ceiling? Nada. Maybe you weren’t meant to come this way yet, better consult the map… argh, no, this is the only path forward. Let’s have a closer look at those bars, perhaps one of them is loose (really hoping against hope here). Wait, there’s a switch on the other side! You just have to go round – shit, you can’t! OK, there must be a means to flip it… Oh! Will it work?

 

 

It does! Against all expectations, you can yank that sucker down from where you stand, raising the gate. Quaint now in an age of systems-driven games boasting refined, subtle physics engines, this transgression of norms struck me at the time as a significant departure, if only in the context of the series. (Projectiles making their way past a barrier, maybe, but a held item? I don’t recall that happening in a Zelda before, though I’m open to correction.) In any event, it’s unprecedented in SS, and very satisfying to effect. Found close to the Buddha, the whip might be taken (albeit with a measure of fancy) as a gift from him, and its role here in crossing boundaries and freeing up space is congruous with the themes explored by the cosmogrammatic puzzle that is tied to the figure. Taking it all into consideration, this appears to be another occasion that subconsciously encourages you to treat the Ancient Cistern as your own: you needn’t feel constrained by such things as bars and locks, for you can make them disappear like so. Going by the cheeky impunity with which you’ve violated age-old dungeon etiquette here, laws of all stripes likely don’t apply to you. If the Buddha’s influence pervades the tranquil ambience, yours is a presence that only falls a hair’s breadth short of ubiquity, being the chosen hero and next best thing to a divinity. An additional factor buttressing that fatheaded, smug sense of self is that – aside from the minor perils of drowning and the skeleton warrior – this has been a remarkably easygoing dungeon thus far, more stroll than struggle. Such is life in Paradise, where the lotuses flower radiantly and all things are as one…

 

The next space is seemingly a dead-end, containing only a pool, a bottomless pit, and some raised platforms. After making your way past the obstacles around the sides of the room (which include a prayer wheel-like roller), you reach another valve. Pulling it opens a drainage hole at the bottom of the pond, creating a sucking vortex.

 

 

It can scarcely be considered inviting, and the context doesn’t allay any fears (that premonitory fish; the neighbouring abyss; drowning as a recurrent fright). Sensing that you’re venturing into a threatening unknown, you step from the ledge, dive, and are tugged down, down, down…

 

 

Transitioning between areas, the music slows – infarcted, torpidly warped. A copper pipe spits you out into a purplish half-light. It’s your imagination but this water seems brackish, or even poisonous. It must be the bruised colour it has. Bars array the near horizon again, but now there’s the stench of the sewer and misery of the jail cell hanging about them. Paddling towards a lotus pad, a great spider descends to assert jealous ownership. The trappings of the dungeon above are present, their warmth and welcome absent. Such is life… where, exactly?

 

A small landing permits access to dry land. Using your flying beetle to sever its thread, you can have the spider emulate you earlier, crashing down on to the lotus pad and flipping it over. That there is a continuity of puzzle logic above and below is strongly reassuring. This might actually prove tolerable. The lotus roots now out of the way, you can swim through a small opening and follow the waterway. More bars, but also a locked door. A goblin patrols the other side, with something on its belt catching the light.

 

 

One instant, from inspiration to culmination:

 

 

Reach out –

 

 

– and pull back! Yes, this is more like it: another smart extension of what you learned above and a casual display of your limitless, superlative crushing, shining hero-of-the-game prowess. An offkey couple of minutes there but now you’re back in sync with the Geist of the Ancient Cistern. The goblin squeals in frustration at having been whip-pocketed by a master. Open the door and deliver your apologies in short, sharp order.

 

Hold on a moment though, some things are amiss. Why is the dungeon giving you the cold shoulder, near enough imprisoning you in fact, and then letting you completely shrug that off in ecstatic freedom? It’s all too convenient, too calculated to please. When it does knock you down, it lifts you up afterwards to an even greater height than before, with the cycle then repeating itself. True, it didn’t feel that strange upstairs, but down here in the murk it sits differently.

 

Also, why do you have this whip? It doesn’t so much aid in solving the puzzles as it mockingly dispenses with them altogether. Come down from the dopamine rush, look at things in the cold light of day, and realise that you’ve had a cheat code pressed into your eager, addled hands. It seems wrong to so blithely violate established dungeon procedures – sure, new items always turn the tide in your favour when advancing through these catacombs and mazes, but this is, well, facile. Come to think of it, didn’t this whip turn up far earlier than is normal? Before the dungeon map, even. In this dungeon, mastery precedes understanding.

 

Consider this latest incident, where you eschew confronting the monster, instead just reaching into the depth of the space and extracting what you need. Really, that doesn’t seem in character for a noble adventurer, cowardly stealing a key and – no, no, no, not that thought, not those memories stepping into focus, not that place in this one. The past is over, gone, dead, and it never really applied to you anyway. Go through the door, now. Now.

 

Notes

 

⁷ It would be remiss of me not to insert a caveat here, namely that the third eye is rather difficult to make out as a result of SS being an SD game, and a visually diffuse one at that. (It will be interesting to see whether it’s more prominent in the HD release, and how that colours interpretations.) Similarly, the timing of the helmet coming off may be looser than my account implies. Nonetheless, I feel my characterisation of the dynamics involved is substantially correct.

 

⁸ Incidentally, this conceit is combined with the leaping/skydiving action for their shared ‘conclusion’ in the Fire Sanctuary, the sixth dungeon, where you fall from a high gantry on to the invisible tongue of a yawning giant.

 

This post will be continued in a separate entry below.

I think I just cummed! 

[scottcr]

About 16 hours in. I loved this on the Wii… but the improvements and just how utterly amazing it looks has pushed this right up into second place on my Zelda list. 
 

yes. I’m constantly doing stuff. There’s very little ‘space’ - but it’s just such a rewarding and enjoyable place to spend time in. It’s a game and I t knows it’s a game.

 

the perfect Zelda is a combo of this and BotW

[Let us measure]

What a great post @Hulot

 

I teach Buddhism as part of the OCR GCSE RS spec, and it's always surprising the number of kids (the geeky ones, though there seems to be some strong weird correlation between choosing RS for GCSE and being a Nintendo fan) who will draw links between Buddhist concepts they learn about and Zelda - the Three Jewels, Mara personified as a giant blue pig, the spider's thread and the Ancient Cistern, the BotW shrine arhats with their mudra hand gestures... If nothing else it helps with revision. 

[CheekyLee]

I never really got Zelda games in the way many others have. I started with Link to the Past, and thought it amazing. I also liked Link's Awakening, and even Monish Cap. But Ocarina didn't grab me anywhere near the same. I did enjoy Majora's Mask, but not enough to finish it before something else on the 64 took over.

 

Wind Waker? Halfway. Twilight Princess? Next to nowhere. Skyward Sword? Not sure I did anything beyond reach the surface. It wasn't until Link Between Worlds that I once more made it to the end of any of the games, so I just figured that the 3D ones weren't for me.

 

Breath of the Wild, then, actually changed me. It consumed me, if I'm honest, and I don't think that what it bought to the table can be overstated. It's an astonishing achievement, which gave me insight into what everyone else was always raving about. At least, that's what I thought at the time. I now know just how special it is, being the best game of all time that just happens to wear a Zelda skin.

 

I bought this because I had a spare voucher, and some time to kill over the weekend. My assumption was that I'd give it a few hours, then stop caring, and leave it for my son to play next time he comes round. 

 

That's not what happened. I'm now 3 key parts out of 5 towards getting into what I assume is the 2nd temple. That I have had to actually work out for myself so much of how I've gotten even this far is eye-opening. I'm sure I've gotten to where I am by doing a couple of things unlike what the actual programmed way was, but BotW taught me that the end justifies any means.

 

I'm loving it, frankly. And I wish I'd given it longer back on the Wii, because it would have been my favourite game of all time if I had. I can't know for sure that I'm not just wish-fulfilling, but for the first time I actually feel like I'm really doing a Zelda game, and understand the adulation the series gets.

 

Nintendo truly are bloody good!

[scottcr]

I would never have realised just how massive a difference camera controls make to 

 

Spoiler

The imprisoned

Fight 

[Hulot]

This examination of the Ancient Cistern, the game's fourth dungeon, follows on from an earlier post  – new readers are advised to start with that one. Spoilers for the entirety of  Skyward Sword feature prominently in both this post and its predecessor.

 

Peep show

Spoiler

 

A cutscene begins as soon as you enter this section of the sewer. Link steps towards this long, transverse opening.

 

 

The camera pushes forward and rises, pressing up against the bars and canting downwards to show a hazy stretch of open terrain past some jutting rocks. The framing of the distant scene by these outcroppings, together with the foregrounded bars, lend the arrangement a quality not dissimilar to peering into a spyhole or zoetrope. The mediated, restricted properties of this perspective are stressed.

 

 

There is a cut to this far wider, freer view. The subject is also rather more cheering: crowning a ridge of stalactites, a disc of white light. You recognise its purity and sanctity. Alas, the camera begins to tilt downwards…

 

 

… removing the light from view. Chained, angular arrangements of rock are now fully seen, standing on pediments. By themselves they resemble crooked fingers, or perhaps the cruel metalwork of a gauntlet covering the same; combined with the stalactites they form a disconcerting mishmash of teeth, the upper row a ruin of fractured shards, the lower a vicious line of spiked, artificial gnashers. The camera continues down…

 

 

… to rest on the sight of a chest, with a plague pit’s worth of bones encircling it. Fi makes her second and final appearance in the dungeon to confirm that it holds the boss key. Evidently, this is the reason why you’ve been ushered down here: to reconnoitre what is quite obviously Hell, and understand the ultimate objective of any foray into it. The terrain and its appearance are drastically different from what you’ve seen heretofore, although the puce shading is in line with the sewer; putting two and two together, you realise that where you are now is an interstitial area, and that it therefore has characteristics of both the heavens and the underworld. You haven’t been thrown in at the deep end after all! Instead, a little orientation exercise, steeling you for the expedition. Most benevolent and propitious.

 

At the start of this post, I mentioned that the Ancient Cistern transposes a simile from The Spider Thread; the passage containing it is the template for this brief cutscene. Returning to the opening of the story, and immediately prior to the section relating Kandata’s history:

 

Lord Shakyamuni [i.e. the Buddha] stepped to the edge of the pond, where He glanced down through the spreading lotus leaves to the spectacle below. Directly beneath the Lotus Pond of Paradise lay the lower depths of Hell, and as He peered through the crystalline waters, He could see the River of Three Crossings and the Mountain of Needles as clearly as if He were viewing pictures in a peep-box.

 

The concurrence between this passage and the cutscene is obvious, with both introducing and framing their respective Hells. Although the player doesn’t espy the underworld from the Lotus Pond (i.e. the opening central room), their first view of it is from a space that is manifestly under the authority of the Buddha, thereby aligning them with a divinity’s on high perspective all the same. (Yet another instance of the Ancient Cistern casting the player into the Buddha’s psychological orbit, this is also a recurrence of the vicarious, allusive mode seen earlier with the Kandata-inflected drownings.)

 

Viewing is likewise stressed in both works. In presenting a cutscene, SS engages with an auxiliary function of its medium that invariably accentuates looking. Akutagawa’s means of emphasis are less formally disruptive though equally visual: his narrator likens the strength of the Buddha’s sight to the miniaturised clarity afforded by a ‘peep-box’, conveying the near omniscient quality of that gaze in familiar terms whilst affirming its otherworldly superiority. A fourfold sighting is broached, in which the reader apprehends the Buddha, the Buddha looking, what is perceived by that act, and the concrete metaphor bringing these items within a human compass. This last item, the peep-box simile, survives the enormous jump between dissimilar artforms to be integrated within the game’s cutscene; however, before entering into the manner and significance of its adaptation, its full role within its original work needs to be ascertained.

 

First things first: what is a ‘peep-box’? The noun phrase used in The Spider Thread is nozoki megane (覗き眼鏡; ‘peeping glasses’), denoting an antique optical novelty by which prints, viewed through the device’s lens, gain an immersive, pseudo three-dimensional character.

 

Nozoki megane and print, 18th century (collection of the Kobe City Museum)

 

European in origin, these optiques reached East Asia in the seventeenth century, becoming synonymous with the linear perspective of the veduta that accompanied them, which demonstrated the illusionistic capabilities of the devices to best effect. In Japan, various aesthetic and socio-economic factors combined to restrict the pictorial conventions of Western perspective to prints produced either for use in these optiques, or in the adjacent field of uki-e (‘floating pictures’, not to be confused with the wider category of ukiyo-e, ‘floating world pictures’). Although reasonably popular in the country’s urban areas for approximately a century, from the 1750s on, nozoki megane works were held in only moderate artistic regard by a Japanese image culture that considered them disposable, and limited to the gimmickry of an alien visual idiom.

 

A variant of the print featured above. Note the extreme recession of the one-point perspective.

 

The prestige of the nozoki megane was further undermined by close association with its more widespread derivation, the nozoki karakuri (‘peeping contraption’). Whereas the former was a domestic entertainment, handheld and private –

 

Young woman with a nozoki megane – Utamaro

 

– the latter was a public attraction, largescale and built for multiple punters to look within simultaneously.

 

A page from Here’s a Story of Some Pretty Remarkable Displays (1801), depicting

a nozoki karakuri – Santo Kyoden, ill. Kitao Shigemasa

 

To judge from contemporary accounts, a typical karakuri show would have the operator cycle through a series of views, with their colourful commentary performed as much to drum up business as to elucidate the actual pictures. (These showmen unsurprisingly gained a reputation in comic literature for being curt, hustling figures.) The illustration above is representative of the design of these attractions, with audience members sacrificing a measure of dignity in squatting down, cheek by jowl with their fellows, to glimpse the wonders on offer. Both types of nozoki apparatus were considered preserves of low culture, redolent of distortion and the erratic. Timon Screech, a leading authority on these Japanese optiques and their historical background, writes:

 

The sets replaced each other in the [karakuri] box with proverbial rapidity, as the [showman] tugged away at his cords. The speed and frequency of the change-overs in fact was the stuff of legend. [Author and artist Santo] Kyoden used the peeping-karakuri as a metaphor for all changeability, and he warned his readers that the human heart (particularly, he says, woman’s) is just like a booth in its protean fickleness,

 

"Just when you think you see Pusan Harbour [in Korea], there it goes, and it’s changed to a view of Miyajima in Aki. “Now it’s a picture of Paradise!” you say to yourself, but then it shifts to Hell."

 

The vue-d’optique is a flibberty-jibbett that offers no vision of any substance. Kyoden sums up: “People’s hearts change as fast as autumn skies. Let each be on his guard.” […] This anthropomorphic booth occludes real distinctions, whether between right and wrong or heaven and hell, and by jumbling all together in an unstable slew, it erodes the authority of difference.⁹

 

These trivial, louche and mutable qualities all weigh upon the nozoki megane’s metonymic deployment in The Spider Thread, and adumbrate later plot developments. For instance, the Buddha seemingly elects to save Kandata on a whim (“He decided to reward [Kandata] for [his compassion] by delivering him from Hell if possible. By happy chance, He turned to see a heavenly spider spinning a beautiful silver thread …”), indicating a frivolous attitude to both the endeavour itself and the wider moral ordering of the cosmos (in Buddhism, the duration of a being’s residence in any particular Hell stratum is strictly prescribed, and not in the gift of anyone – no matter how enlightened – to curtail). At the other end of the tale, the instantaneous severing of the thread is as swift as one print replacing another in a karakuri show. Shifting from light-hearted fancy to uneasy regret,¹⁰ and told through a parable form that condenses the universe – the trajectory and scale of Akutagawa’s story are those of a peep-box.

 

Skyward Sword imports the metaphor like so:

 

 

Depth-in-space and triviality – two essential characteristics of the nozoki megane – are evinced here, through gameplay. These prime the pump.

 

 

A cutscene begins – the player surrogate is sidelined whilst the camera-eye adopts their role. The aperture is approached. A dark frame lies beyond, policing the sight towards the illuminated scene on view. The initial set-up is uncomfortable, more conscious of the mechanism than the prospect.

 

 

Cut to an ersatz point-of-view shot. The eye has adjusted to the limitations imposed by the device and may freely range across the interior tableau of the peep-box. It begins to swivel downwards, the diorama-like scenery shown in a linear perspective that falls away.

 

Reading the foregoing as an optique simulacrum complements the later impression of this Hell as a petty excursion: implicitly assured by this cutscene of its inferiority to the (generous, clever, soothing) upper level, it seems a mere shadow of it. You enter it armed with foreknowledge of your goal (i.e. the chest), meeting only the feeblest resistance by shambling revenants, whom you mow down with swaggering might. Beholding it here for the first time, all it has to offer is on display to a lordly eye that occupies – by dint of the mise en scène – a central position, the landscape symmetrically arranged and progressively receding to flatteringly inculcate a sense of mastery in the observer. As with a peep-box, the pleasure is there for the taking. And with it the poison: it’s all on display, including the very ground where, in a trice, the Ancient Cistern will show its true face and upend your understanding of it altogether. Inconstancy is, after all, a shared trait of both the nozoki megane viewpoint and this dungeon. Exploiting the full range of the metaphor, the Ancient Cistern does a tremendous job here of hinting at the skull beneath the skin.

 

In addition to bringing The Spider Thread and the Ancient Cistern into closer narrative alignment, this peep-box conceit bears upon a separate strand of the dungeon concerning the visual arts. As I outlined earlier, cosmograms figure prominently within the Paradise section; considered as graphic works, they form a fascinating contrast with this phantasmal peep-box. Symbolic and transfigurative in nature, cosmograms are outward-facing art, aiming to deracinate the self and stimulate mental expansion using imagery that resists the labels of ‘representational’ and ‘abstract’. Edification is their chief purpose, and those who engage with them on that basis can be considered practitioners – working observers. Contrariwise, the peep-box is the domain of cheap thrills and illusory pleasures. Exiling the wider world by putting their eye – but not necessarily their mind – to the lens, a peep-box enthusiast ensconces themself within an insular, decidedly figurative reality governed by the anarchy of sybaritic caprice. Don’t like the view? Pull the print from the apparatus. Out of sight, out of– oh, look, it’s Mount Fuji! Sorry, what were we talking about again?¹¹

 

A simple distinction, both brilliant and trenchant: the Ancient Cistern has one artform for Paradise, another for the Underworld. Each 'type' is a distillation of their host locale, and both are outstandingly juxtaposed as antithetical renderings of space, slotting neatly within and bolstering the presiding syncretic-dualistic scheme. In regards to craftsmanship, the lightness of touch in summoning them is exquisitely judged: ephemerality is in the nature of both image types; respecting that fragility, the game approaches each in a careful fashion, having them flit through the Ancient Cistern without clipping their wings. They arrive by light invocation (as opposed to blunt manifestation), enhance the scene, then gracefully depart.

 

At the other end of the spectrum, SS makes a great fuss over certain symbols. Keys, for example, have lately acquired a highly portentous character, with you twice stealing them in short timeframe. That second theft involves you sullying the whip; yet moments later, you’re given marching orders and divine dispensation to grab the biggest key of the lot. The bracketing of the two is as concerning as it is overt. With raw and ambivalent feelings about the last key ‘retrieval’, what is one to make of this new quest, where the same dubious MO now has divine sanction? Are you being lulled into a false sense of security? A tension arises over which way it will go. The Ancient Cistern has yet to tip its hand but let's note an ominous divergence here from The Spider Thread: the tale comes to focus upon a sentient being in Hell; the game, an inert object.

 

But enough of this. A pipe at the end of the waterway pulls you in and upwards.

 

Notes

 

⁹ ‘The Meaning of Western Perspective in Edo Popular Culture’ – Archives of Asian Art, Vol. 47 (1994).

 

¹⁰ The tonal-conceptual patterning of The Spider Thread closely matches the Ancient Cistern’s, with the syncretic (extending a strand from Paradise to Hell, tentatively linking the two) displaced by the dualistic (the snapping of the thread and the reassertion of boundaries).

 

¹¹ Tellingly, the peep-box viewpoint dematerialises along with the cutscene. All idle entertainments must pass…

 

Up and down

Spoiler

 

Back in friendlier waters. By this point, yo-yoing between the various floors of the Ancient Cistern is becoming routine.

 

 

A polished, synoptic beaut, this room is a choice ‘puzzle is place’ affair. Focusing on a lotus pad once again, you must alter its state and placement multiple times; in so doing, you range across the room. The first thing is to get above it, which involves corkscrewing out of the water and climbing some vines on the right side of the space. Dropping onto the pad flips it and stops its roots from blocking an underwater tunnel; wending your way past some surly blowfish brings you to a valve on the chamber’s left side. Turning it releases the waterjet shown above. Head back to the raised walkway and flip the lotus pad again – returned to its original orientation, it now serves a stepping stone to the exit.

 

After the cramped gloom of the interstitial layer, the variety of objectives to work through and the crafty utilisation of the entire space are refreshing – no confines and inner quandaries here, only bursts of motion and a splendid sense of freeflowing connectedness. The puzzle itself sets the tempo: the lotus pad is an obstacle and a support by turns, its shifts creating little phases that pleasingly regiment your progress. Furthermore, its up-and-down movement mirrors your own both within this room and through the dungeon as a whole. On the ideational level, it incorporates the two thematic poles of the dungeon, with the puzzle being both dualistic (the binary of the lotus pad, face-up or face-down) and syncretic (the wider circumstances determining whether the pad’s current state makes it help or hindrance).

 

This space is something of a farewell to Paradise: leaving it and returning to the central chamber, you quickly reach a new platform, hosting a large switch. Pulling it down –

 

 

– causes the great Buddha to begin descending. The purpose of the door on the face now becomes apparent.

 

 

A cut to what’s going on below. Colossal feet plunge downwards –

 

 

– blocking off the boss key chest, and creating a headache for you in turn. There has to be another switch in the underworld that reverts the statue to its original position – at least, you hope there is. Entering the statue interior and falling to its bottom, you prepare yourself for what lies ahead.

 

 

Suitably inimical. A swarm of undead goblins set upon you almost the very instant you step through the door, diverting your attention from the devilish rock carving. A few things make it worth closer consideration. Clasping eyes on it for the first time, the open-mouthed, swallowing leitmotif is readily apparent; however, at no point is it necessary to pass through, into its maw. Meanwhile, in order to reach the underworld, you must have walked through the door on the Buddha that is almost slap-bang over his mouth (this 'feature' is cunningly obscured by the pavilion when entering). Interesting that this disquieting idea should be surreptitiously displaced from the saint on to the sinner, so to speak.

 

Another incongruity presents itself in the form of those bars at the top. Yes, what you can see is the peep-box outlook, occupying the place where the demon’s brain – or third eye – would be. What’s an extension of the Buddha’s realm doing there? What does it mean that the plan to retrieve the boss key was formulated within the head of a demon, their very horns literally having framed your view of the situation? Is the Buddha– no, surely that can’t be the case. Better to step away from this line of thinking and look at what’s being done intertextually: missing its lower jaw, the carving loosely riffs on the skull topography of the original Legend of Zelda’s final dungeon,¹² a notably treacherous example of the breed.

 

 

Whatever nastiness may be afoot, it doesn’t seem to have much bearing on a Hell that comes across as rather tame and diminished, doing nothing to alter your condescending initial impression. Slaughtering the damned and stopping a river of blood bring you to the section pictured above; it has you reverse then re-reverse the travel direction of a prayer wheel gauntlet. Chiefly recapitulating the up/down lotus pad room’s ideas, what’s thrown into the mix here are implacable forces (via those gargantuan rollers) and cyclicality (ditto). Handsomely done, though the Ancient Cistern is just on the verge here of getting too caught up in its intellectual noodling and overdoing it. This near redundancy contributes to the sense of this Hell being a weary, etiolated one. No sign yet of a mechanism to raise the Frankenbuddha – will its advent shake-up this sleepy Tartarus?

 

Notes

 

¹² A more precise homage is found in the death's-head bokoblin shelters littering Breath of the Wild’s Hyrule.

 

On the line

Spoiler

 

Aha! A sign from above. Something thin and pearlescent hangs above a boneyard. I remember starting at the first sight of it, incredulous. Audacious enough for Nintendo to unambiguously broach the subject of religion in the Ancient Cistern, but I couldn’t imagine they’d go further still and fuse their game with a literary work. I rushed Link ahead to confirm where things stood.

 

 

No denying it: a spider thread, lowered into Hell. The camera shifts to offer a panorama, capturing both the miracle and the menace of the situation – patently a trap, yet the filament innocently dangles in the light, “slender and delicate”. The token of a promise, but as yet only the token. The notion of a ‘test of faith’ has become such a stultifying cliche of rollercoaster action games that it gives one pause to be confronted by the genuine article, positioned unabashedly as a momentous event in the life of the spirit. One reason for my exacting descriptions of the Ancient Cistern up to this juncture has been to habituate this episode, in which the sum of the dungeon – its intricate panoply of rooms, setpieces, puzzles, battles, storytelling, decors, moods and concepts – is held in the balance. How strange for a game (but typical of Skyward Sword) that evaluating a cord’s strength should incur so much introspection, hinging on the relationship of the self to a structure. Ultimately, can you trust the presence beyond the light?

 

It’s a moot concern for the adventurer and the reader: a cutting at the side of the pit brings you back to the Buddha; you’ve made a full-circle of Hell and haven’t discovered any means of raising him again. A new area might have what’s required. For those who’ve twigged that The Spider Thread has (openly) arrived in the game, inflamed aesthetic curiosity and trepidation compel you to grasp the offering (at least, they did so for me). Will the game do justice to Akutagawa’s tale? How will SS dramatize the various elements? What kind of scale will be employed? Will the thread snap? What significance is there in you assuming the role of a sinner? Why is this the first videogame to attempt something like this?

 

 

The most urgent, mouth-watering question: what’s going to happen? You begin to climb, wriggling up hand-over-hand.

 

 

Far down on the spider thread, countless sinners had followed after him, and they were clambering up the thread with all their might like a column of ants!

 

 

If the dungeon has done its job, the player shouldn’t hesitate even momentarily over whether to continue upwards, or to jump off and vanquish the pursuers – no going back, only onwards into the light. As a final flourish and warning, pounding music that blends percussive sounds with repulsive grunts strikes up, driving the mood of the scene. (Spider Thread readers, meanwhile, would consider looking below a Bad Idea in itself: Kandata’s downfall partially stems from him reviewing his progress.) Alarmingly, the undead are speedier climbers than expected, drawing closer and closer to you with each lunge and spasm.

 

 

Just as you approach the corona of light, the horde finally catches up. Swinging the Wiimote from side to side shakes them off. On the border separating the two realms of the dungeon, the controls bifurcate: the analogue stick is rigidly pushed forward, following the vertical line of the thread towards Paradise, corresponding with Link’s firm hold on the strand. The Wiimote, however, is imprecisely waved in a horizontal arc, affording a sense of the tussling, wild abandon needed to spurn the clutches of Hell’s captives, even at the risk of flying back down into the pit oneself. Genius to have thought and emotion sublimated into motion controls; far exceeding that to limn place and spatial relationships through a dialogue between those motion controls and conventional inputs. In each hand, the weight of a world.

 

 

Extricating yourself, you continue the ascent. Now a dark semicircle, tasselled by god rays, Hell shrinks away. A transition will begin any moment now.

 

 

Any moment now.

 

 

Nothing. Doubt chokes the heart in an instant. Perhaps the cruellest of acts is the extermination of hope – has the depleted Hell actually been dissimulating in preparation for this, setting you up to become a climbing Tantalus, the rim of Paradise forever a hand’s breadth out of reach? No break in the music, nor any respite from the enemies nipping at your heels. Keep calm, keep calm: a great distance may lie between Hell and Paradise (“untold thousands of leagues”, according to one storyteller). Persevere.

 

A dungeon of nigh-fanatical signifying and meaning-spinning between duelling halves suddenly absents itself. It brings to mind a verse by Emily Dickinson:

 

        The Flesh – Surrendered – Cancelled –

        The Bodiless – begun –

        Two Worlds – like Audiences – disperse –

        And leave the Soul – alone –¹³

 

 

 

Kandata laughed aloud as he had not in all the years since he had come to this place: “I’ve done it! I’ve done it!”

 

* * * * *

 

You have escaped. Bravo. Above, I touched upon the question of what SS means by putting you in Kandata’s shoes here. Taking this episode purely at face value, it actually seems to be a deliberate effort to dissociate the player/Link from Akutagawa’s character. A distinctive trait of the literature of moral instruction is its recourse to cautionary examples, with characters’ transgressions leading them to sorry (but educational!) ends: the idle grasshopper rebuffed by its ant neighbour; Veruca Salt being judged a bad nut; the sinner forfeiting his passage from Hell, and so on. Keeping faith with the dungeon and trusting in the guiding light, you emerge from this experience as quite a different figure – the anti-Kandata.

 

Managing the escape represents a great departure from the letter of the tale, but not its spirit. Parables mount direct appeals to their audience, positing their morals as rules for conduct; enacting what Kandata should have done, you generate the desired sequel to the story and thereby fulfil its purpose. On this (virtuosic) occasion, Akutagawa is more honoured in the breach than the observance.

 

However, despite the feeling of joyous release induced by this sequence, a subtextual friction is detectable. The design of this remarkable, single-cord showstopper is haunted by a prior construct. Way back in Skyview Temple, I highlighted a tightrope spanning the bottomless chasm outside of the boss chamber. In the sequencing of that dungeon, it occupies roughly the same position as the spider thread does in its own.

 

 

Comparing the two, it’s evident that the later sequence is a calculated inversion of its predecessor: the direction of movement is vertical rather than horizontal; you securely hold the ‘rope’ you travel along versus nervously teetering on it; enemies are fought at close quarters, not at a distance; you enter into the void instead of passing above it. Skyview Temple keeps subliminally popping up in the Ancient Cistern, directing the mind back to what occurred there and its unfinished business. To a certain extent, this is to be expected: each rebirth in the cycle of samsara is determined by the life prior to it, hence the Buddha lowering the spider thread down to you in the Ancient Cistern in recognition of a deed performed in Skyview Temple. Yet to have the scene in which your wrongs fall away as bygones so archly parallel the locale where you committed them strikes an equivocal note – is this a settling of the past or its sardonic continuation?

 

 

Either way, you’re up and out of Hell, scaling into Paradise shaken and elated. The cosmogram puzzle that opened the dungeon reaps its harvest here: thank you, wise one, for the mercy shown to a miserable (mock) sinner. What now? Just to the left is a switch; activating it extends a spur out to meet with the lever that controls the Buddha’s elevation – ah, of course! It’s a case of looking at the same thing in a different way, not a different thing in the same way. (This completes a triad of syncretic-dualistic pieces, alongside the lotus pad room and the subterranean rollers. First in Paradise, then Hell, and finally the border between them – the respective strata are encapsulated quite nicely by each puzzle, and aggregating them gives a sense of the dungeon in toto.) A whip flick later and the Buddha rises, exposing the boss key chest again.

 

The remainder of this section concerns the stele shown above, which anchors the spider thread. It’s really a matter of minutiae, a tangent primarily addressing a minor complaint, which is included here for the sake of thoroughness. Those who’d rather cut to the chase should skip ahead.

 

The stele reads (emphasis in original):

 

Return the stone giant to its original form, and descend below the earth again along the thread. There you will find the key to the path ahead.

 

This stone has become a bone of contention for many of Skyward Sword's critics, emblematic – it is claimed – of the game’s pathological impulse to either short-circuit its puzzles and dungeons, or to needlessly baby the player with patronising prompts. It is hard to entertain these opinions – in this instance, basic logic militates against them.

 

Of the two, the argument that there’s a spoiler here is marginally more intellectually coherent. It’s possible that a player may have done all of the following: completely misunderstood or forgotten the nozoki megane cutscene, which flatly states that the chest on view contains the boss key; ditto with the cutscene showing the Buddha’s descent, covering that chest; overlooked the discrete goal of the Hell trip, whilst failing to figure out that what’s needed lies upstairs; and, finally, read this hint stele ahead of moving the switch to raise the Buddha. To this addled, deeply strange, wholly fictitious category of player, the game owes an apology – and them alone.

 

Well, then: if it’s so obvious where matters stand, what’s written here is redundant, right? Making this an overbearing oversight – an inanity, no? I wholeheartedly agree on the first count: there’s no critical new information here. I might also concur with the latter point too, were it not for the glaring fact that there is no requirement to read the stele whatsoever. No mechanism forces it upon the player – engagement is voluntary. And informed, too: these stelae are firmly established as hint dispensers in the first dungeon, so taking umbrage at this one following suit seems disingenuous. (Admittedly, the Buddha-neighbour which outlines the ordering of the roundels is mandatory and therefore an exception, though not one in any danger of voiding the general rule.) I have no earthly idea what it is about this game that incites tendentious, non-sequitur cavilling and obtuse complaints; what I do know is that everyone, whether for or against SS, can well forego indulging such broken-backed nonsense.

 

A nearby bird statue provides ample justification for the conspicuous stationing of the sign and its “well, duh!”-level message. Bird statues are save points; as you would expect, when loading the game, the player is deposited at the one they last used. After an interval of days, weeks, or perhaps even months, the stele offers an innocuous aide-mémoire for anyone wishing to swiftly reacclimate. “Oh, yes, that’s where I left things,” is the response sought. The sign is a helpmeet. It also happens to be bloody devious, too.

 

The fact of it, sighted as you pull yourself from the lip of the underworld, is a narrative point in itself: from tumult and absurdity, you reach a marker of order and equanimity. The familiar and didactic act to stabilize a dungeon that has just flirted with chaos. Reading it resumes contact with the sense of tutelage forming part of the aura surrounding the Buddha statue, located in the background as a benign presence whilst you shift back to the analytical from the alarmed. Same old, same old? Let’s compare the stele on the Buddha’s body with this one. The one at the start of the dungeon:

 

Carved into the great statue are inscriptions of gratitude. They reveal the secret order of this temple.

 

Its counterpart at the end:

 

Return the stone giant to its original form, and descend below the earth again along the thread. There you will find the key to the path ahead.

 

The first has an air of indifference about it: flat statements; no fixed addressee; intimations of the mystic and revelatory. The mind of the writer appears to be elsewhere, focussed on a ‘beyond’. The second inscription is completely at odds with all that. The imperative mood, use of the second-person pronoun, a multipart plan of action. You have their attention now. In fact, you’re in cahoots. Reading between the lines, there's a certain importunateness about you snatching the goods – not quite “bring me the red pages,” but getting there. In the period between these stelae, a crudeness has taken root, with pretensions to the numinous sloughed off to swipe at pettier goals (those rupees in the hands come to mind as prefiguring this shift). An erstwhile “great statue” is now a vaguely monstrous “stone giant" – the dungeon's mask is starting to slip. Capping it, in bold: the key. Always with the keys...

 

One last, ghoulish touch to set it all off: this freestanding stele is the spitting image of a gravestone.

 

Notes

 

¹³ Poem 524 in the Johnson chronology; first line: “Departed – to the Judgment –”

 

Falling towards the centre

Spoiler

Your friends have deserted you: there isn’t a sniff of them as you slide down the thread. What a shame.

 

 

A hop, skip and a jump away, the dungeon’s trophy. Bones crunch under your feet like so much heaped confetti.

 

 

A “blessed idol” sitting in the lotus position on a stylised pad. The figure in place of the flower is most readily interpreted as one who has either achieved enlightenment, or entered into the Pure Land of Amitabha. The Ancient Cistern’s final item is a signifier of the spiritual growth you have achieved through tackling it, with your mastery of —

 

 

Ah, look who’s here. Well, you’ve time to spare for some sword practice. Just a mome–

 

 

Unannounced, someone has changed the peep box’s print – the camera travels upwards, a sour inversion of the cutscene which introduced the chest. Enjoying the show, the demon leers over the rim of the bowl, the array of spiny fingers cupping their optique. Accompanied by the grinding of stone on stone, a dark shape starts to enter from the top of the frame, blotting out the sacred light. The arcs and swoops of the mandala double back, hurtling towards the centre with an evil gravity.

 

In this instant, between blows, Zelda’s love of the rule of three cackles into your brain. So: a theft in Skyview Temple, another above this pit – you can see where you did it! – one more just now… looks like we have the full set.

 

 

Why on earth did you imagine that there was anything of goodness to be found in a dungeon? Really, are you a complete moron? You do realise that spider threads make spiderwebs, right? Y’know, fucking traps, dimwit. Abject chumpification on display here. The juiciest part of it is that you being squashed under the heel of this ‘Buddha’ is a righteous betrayal – who knows how many other things you’d nick if left to run loose. Just desserts, as your guilty conscience will attest.

 

 

Be that as it may, there’s no way the adventure concludes with you being pulverized by a sham idol. Forward, to the rim and away from the impending doom. But what a difference from the spider thread: there you only had to push forward on the analogue stick, steadfast in the knowledge that somebody up there liked you. The present finds you having to wend round the undead, with multiple dubious paths on offer instead of a single, certain direction for both body and soul. Don’t flick the Wiimote to pull your sword, there really isn’t enough time to hack them down; this isn’t the spider thread and you can’t shake the controller willy-nilly – the pitiless advance of the statue’s feet imposes a negatory discipline on your movements that is a foretaste of the grave, if not the perdition thereafter. Perhaps uniquely amongst videogame Hells, this one brushes up against the tachlis of the damn thing: an icy horror at the loss of your freedoms, at the unyielding, inhuman constraints imposed whilst you're reduced from a subject to an object.

 

This charged refocussing on the corporeal as opposed to the intellectual is further heightened by the influx of bodies across every level of game element: the key you carry has a human form; the enemies you confront are infinitely more substantial than before (letting them grab you will prove fatal); skulls and ribcages are strewn across the ground texture; looming as part of the dungeon’s architecture, a grotesque face. Dominating the whole scene, both fixture and mechanism, those incomprehensibly heavy feet. And then, of course, there’s you, with your comparatively tiny frame now under mortal threat. Through anatomical fragments and clashing scales, a pandemonium is created where all is flesh and force and fury.

 

 

More or less by the skin of your teeth, you escape.¹⁴ The statue comes to its rest point and halts. All is stillness once again.

 

Suffice it to say, you’ve been played for a fool. Following a prolonged charm offensive from the Ancient Cistern, and with the newly acquired sense that, by scaling the spider thread, you’ve won divine sanction, this all comes as rather a shock. Weren’t you and the big cheese allies? Not so nearly as you liked to imagine – the warning signs spread throughout the preceding sections are testament to that. Complacency, that old fat-headedness, had been propagated and reinforced bit by bit, from your first meeting with the mogma until just now. In tandem, a countervailing neuroticism and unease about both the environment and your actions within it has needled at your conscience. It is a masterly feat of the game that these two attitudes have been shepherded together to this point, with each swelling and shrinking in accordance with the course of events rather than remaining fixed and static. This incident serves as the decider, though with a curiously ambivalent outcome in that both mindsets buckle and give way: complete self-assuredness can no longer be justified (particularly about your role as the hero¹⁵), nor is there any sense in gnawing anxiety now that the truth of things has come out. Messy as it may be, it feels right: the resolution achieved here is cathartic in a way that is beyond the spider thread, which did not synthesise these feelings but instead compartmentalised them (the sense of destiny and exultation versus that sliver of doubt and the echo of Skyview Temple). Truth of self has been found, and with it a very human knowledge of belonging to both the damned and the divine.

 

Lancing the boil of egotism also returns the game to Akutagawa’s parable. When we were last in contact with Kandata, he was overjoyed at having reached a footing so far above Hell that “the Pond of Blood was hidden […] in the depths of the darkness.” Moments later, he sees the “column of ants” advancing up. Panic-stricken at the prospect (the “slim thread seemed likely to snap from his weight alone: how could it possibly hold so many people?”), he shouts below:

 

“Listen to me, you sinners! This spider thread is mine! Who said you could climb it? Get off! Get off!”

 

At that very instant the spider thread, which until then had been perfectly fine, broke with a “snap!” just where Kandata was hanging from it.

 

There is a dark humour here: shooing away his fellow members of the damned, a robber defends his property rights in an outburst of brazen hypocrisy. Kandata has already acclimated to the thread (indeed, he had “plenty of practice at […] hand-over-hand rope climbing” as a great robber), and is therefore reverting to type. In addition to his selfishness, he is karmically punished for his complacency, for being a man drunk on moral solipsism and wielding a weaponized self-righteousness. Through having the great statue move to entomb you, whilst you’re flush with proprietorial smugness at gaining the big prize (thereby resuming, like Kandata, a type of thieving lifestyle), the Ancient Cistern rounds off its adaptation of The Spider Thread by likewise knocking you down a peg and removing a supporting structure (i.e. the ‘good’ part of the Ancient Cistern). Different means, same end.

 

This acidic conclusion in no way detracts from the affirmative character of the prior spider thread sequence; rather, by lightly reshuffling plot/scenario and theme, respect is paid to both Akutagawa the hopeful moralist (with the spider thread) and Akutagawa the despairing, macabre storyteller (through the descending statue), with neither diminished for being separated from one another. One of the most exciting qualities of this style of adaptation is that it opens up texts to allow individual parts to breathe more freely, whilst the dungeon superstructure is delegated the task of coordinating these vignettes to create a wider narrative. First, you get to delight in your deliverance from Hell; then, a little later, you learn what it’s like to have it all come tumbling down. The ‘sensations’ of both are amplified and elongated from their literary source, yet they still form a salient whole despite their separation from one another in time and space. (Naturally, the same can be said for the other parts of the tale the game includes.)

 

Yes, forming a whole – when I said that the statue’s fall rounds off the adaptation, it might have been more accurate to say that it brings it full circle. A mighty foot is raised above a defenceless creature – at the conclusion of the narrative, we’re simultaneously thrown back to the very wellspring of the plot, the inciting incident where Kandata and Link forego killing the small spider underfoot. By some working of samsara or foible of irony, you have swapped places with the puny arachnid, although you won’t be sharing in its good fortune: down come the feet of the stone giant with counterfactual malice. The looping is brilliant, being comic, tragic and wise, all at once: laugh at the reversal, cry at the perfidy, and understand that one’s situation is in constant flux. Tautly expressed, powerfully rendered, thematically rich, ravishingly imaginative, outrageously clever – this last conceit is the exquisite finishing touch that ties together all these qualities of the adaptation with breathtaking aplomb.

 

No less accomplished is what SS pulls off here with respect to its overarching plot machinations and symbolism. Returning to the syncretic-dualistic framework that the dungeon hangs upon: in and of its moment, this display of main force and hostility amounts to a rout of the syncretic and the victory of the dualistic – the Ancient Cistern is not a locale balanced between Paradise and Hell but one where the latter puts on the mask of the former. At the same time, aside from anything relating to The Spider Thread, what is most likely to be brought to mind by the statue’s ‘stamping’ down on you is the similar foot-mashing behaviour of the Imprisoned, which is first encountered in the lead up to this dungeon. Much later events provide an altogether different gloss for this situation.

 

 

This is the exterior of Sky Keep, the final dungeon. A sort of inverted Tower of Babel, it rests underneath a giant depiction of the goddess Hylia.

 

 

Upon your completing the dungeon, the island hosting it breaks loose from its fellows and begins plummeting towards the earth.

 

 

Below, the Imprisoned breaks free again – but in vain.

 

 

Rapidly bearing down from above, Sky Keep and Hylia. The contours of the dungeon perfectly match the spiral-cliffed pit the great evil one is trapped within. The key enters its lock –

 

 

Sealing the Imprisoned with earthquaking finality.

 

Placing this sequence side-by-side with the climax of the Ancient Cistern, it’s clear that the latter is operating as prophecy. A holy statue descends from the heavens to crush the evil of the underworld, with its form split between a human figure and a conical base (the boss key closely resembles Hylia-Sky Keep in this respect). What the dungeon presents is at once an echo of the Imprisoned’s malevolence, and a preview of its defeat. By the same token, the setpiece is a turning point in the symbolic treatment of keys – the low business of stealing them concludes, whilst their final divine form, Sky Keep, is foreshadowed in a movement from on high. In the long run, it’s the syncretic, not the dualistic, that wins out. That tricksy inscription was spot on: by descending the spider thread, you really do find the “path ahead”.

 

Now, it’s worth remembering here that the Ancient Cistern is SS’s fourth dungeon, situated at the halfway mark of the game. As keystones go, saying it’s of the finest would be selling it grievously short: it trusses the first dungeon with the last; it alternates between paradises and peepshows, and melds the sinister with the sublime; it probes your guilt and powers your glory; it injects feeling into frigid, recursive structuralism whilst suturing the heart with reason’s filament; it conducts music for faith to dance with fiction, and leads the arts around the maypole; its puzzles fire up the body and locate you within space, and its hazards make your muscles think their way past their surroundings and towards the truth. It collects together all of Skyward Sword’s myriad polarities, then condenses them with a neutron star’s force. From this impossible pressurization, a surging light – few games can boast this Zelda’s formal eloquence, and absolutely none surpasses it. The very centre of the centre-point dungeon is this sequence, where the statue descends – as a masterpiece of summation and aesthetic totalization, of bringing an entire work within a single instance, it is no less consequential to the medium and soaring in its genius than the final chamber of Ico, Final Fantasy VI’s opera house, or the jail cell in Riven. It is supreme.

 

This episode also represents the finale of the Ancient Cistern as a dungeon, making this an opportune time to review the matter of puzzle vs place. In the catalogue of features and preoccupations above, it can’t be denied that puzzling simpliciter doesn’t really feature. Puzzles there are, undoubtedly; puzzles that partake of or interface with narrative, thematic, spatial, decorative and intellectual currents leading away from them. A critical flaw of the argument that SS diminishes its locales by being puzzle-heavy is that the offending headscratchers are anything but hermetically isolated from their surroundings: puzzles are repositories of meaning for their environments; residents of spaces, not invaders imposing extraneous brainwork upon a given scene. I would hope that what I have written about the Ancient Cistern shows up puzzle vs place as a false dichotomy; moreover, if that holds true within a dungeon setting – the supposedly sovereign domain of puzzles – then it goes double for environs outside the category.¹⁶

 

It could hardly be otherwise: Skyward Sword is a game that blends its elements, impressionistically fuzzing edges to create a unified world of softly interlocking, concordant experiences – adversaries offer up their heads like puzzle boards, mountains pivot from formidable redoubts to play slides, and magic stones wed the present to the past. Arguably the greatest accomplishment of Skyward Sword as a boundary-dissolving, structure hybridising, tone shifting, synecdochizing force is its very own form – an idealistic work in full possession of a fantastically manifested world that can give substance to its patterns and concepts. For a great mind, a mighty body – a perfect match, and one that I couldn’t even begin to pick apart.

 

Notes

 

¹⁴ OK, another caveat: it’s really very easy to make it past the undead. It’s more the scenario and implied harm that are of interest than the actual threat level.

 

¹⁵ SS is at pains throughout to humble the adventurer, to point out that grappling with obligation, chagrin and the spectre of futility are as much aspects of the quest as freedom, self-affirmation and triumph. This dungeon’s linkage of heroism with theft is one such assay of the former. (The testing of roles is another shared trait of the philosophical Zeldas.)

 

¹⁶ Irrespective, I might add, of however much dungeon-like material makes its way into SS’s external spaces.

 

Epilogue – Koloktos

Spoiler

Dusting yourself down, you remember that there’s still a boss to be vanquished. As is de rigueur in Zelda, it sums up its home dungeon – there’s nothing astoundingly novel here with respect to the Ancient Cistern’s narrative and thematic concerns, just a wonderfully realised scrap and send-off for the locale. Still, even in winding down, the Ancient Cistern foists riches upon the player – here’s one last section, for the road.

 

Starting from the floor of Hell: a series of water spouts inside the statue bring you to the boss door; once it’s open, you step on to the top of the idol’s head. Releasing some bolts causes that head to rise –

 

 

– to the top of the central chamber, supported by a creepy stovepipe neck. This travesty of the human form is a timely reminder that one’s been dealing not with a ‘man’ but a mechanism, one which can be filed alongside the other lifelike devices and automata populating the game (Fi, Ghirahim, the desert robots, and so on). Linking or conflating the organic with the mechanical is something SS does a great deal; the enveloping garden of ‘paradise’, with its conspicuous plumbing and logistical artifice, is a fine example of this tendency. (In retrospect, the business of the Sky Keep key entering the ground seems to be the game’s valediction for a ‘world as mechanism’ principle which suffuses it.)¹⁷ In any case, these shades of the Mechanical Turk augur quite the boss battle.

 

 

Speak of the devil. He voices his displeasure at your continued progress before leaving you to tackle –

 

 

Koloktos, a robotic asura possessed by a malign energy. The parallels with the great statue and its skeleton mini boss are readily apparent. A further nice touch are the imbricated lotus petals forming the vault of the boss chamber, closed against the world because the inhabitant has yet to attain purity of being.

 

 

The automaton is rooted to the ground. When it isn’t throwing double-bladed discs, Koloktos moves to smash you with its metal limbs. This presents you with a window of opportunity to disassemble the offensive arms at their elbow joints, tugging them off with your whip like a spider would the wings of a fly. No love lost here, but you wince all the same; it’s a minor encore for the dungeon’s prodding at an uneasy conscience. Eventually, you whittle down its stock of arms until it can no longer shield the pulsating weak point on its torso, allowing you to move in with your sword.

 

 

Another lovely detail: every so often, the arms of Koloktos click back into a default position, as is the wont of programmed devices. The markedly deliberate and varied positioning of the arms and hands recall a mudra; from a (mindless?) murder machine aping such exalted poses, a scintilla of irony flashes forth.

 

 

A couple of cycles of limb-twisting and torso-slashing later, matters take a turn. Palms pushed against the ground, Koloktos takes the form of an invertebrate (you can guess which sort). Straining, straining, straining…

 

 

Breaking out and rising up, Koloktos reveals a further two limbs, in the form of a pair of legs.

 

 

Here we have the grand synthesis: Akutagawa’s man, spider and Buddha are all accounted for, nestled within a circle of falchions. The final callback to Skyview Temple, too, with the six swords of its three stalfos now in the hands of a single figure. You definitely get a beautiful sense of the oneness of creation, an all-in-all which, incidentally, is hellbent on eviscerating you.

 

The newly mobile juggernaut is content to continue its tactic of swiping down at you with all its strength; for your part, the whip still does its amputational business nicely. Where things get trickier is in reaching the (now grill-protected) core following Koloktos’s growth spurt. The Master Sword isn’t cutting it…

 

 

Ah. If the boss is going to elide roles in such a showy way, it’s only fair for you to resume your moonlighting as a thief. If this entire experience has taught you anything, it’s flexibility.

 

 

‘Your’ sword slices through Koloktos’s legs like butter, and the grill as though it were tissue paper. Another few go-arounds and you’ll be done here.

 

 

Oh ho ho! At Koloktos’s invitation, some old friends make a guest appearance. With sentimental affection, you mow them down. It’s time to end this.

 

 

In its dying moments, the automaton strikes an uncanny pose, mirroring the stone giant with its giraffe neck and alien smile. (The development of its body throughout the fight echoes your ‘discovery’ of that statue’s various parts.) The expression does not catalyse sympathy, stir hatred or – and this least of all – prompt understanding. A grin from the void.

 

 

It is done. Clean light floods the room, as if the petals were on the cusp of unfurling to greet the day. First arriving in the Ancient Cistern, you misplaced your faith in the luminance that poured forth so freely. Following your trials, you can now claim some (tentative) confidence about your spot in the sun. Let the lotus blossom – you’ve been purified. New prospects and forms of being await.

 

I’ve said all I can on the subject of the Ancient Cistern. I sincerely hope that I’ve provided some morsels of interest in all my longwinded expounding. (Or, failing that, a chuckleworthy disasterpiece.) I said at the outset that thoughtfulness is a chief attribute of Skyward Sword; if I’ve done anything here to convey how that sparkling quality manifests itself in the game, I’d consider this a job well done. Thank you for reading this post.

 

Notes

 

¹⁷ The matter might even be considered to subtly encompass the extra-diegetic: what are motion controls if not an emphatic convergence of the biological and the electromechanical?

 

Thanks and an acknowledgement: a good friend utilised every scrap of patience they possess to read through the tosh above, across multiple drafts. Whatever virtues this travelogue-commentary possesses are solely attributable to their sage editorial advice and critical expertise. I am completely indebted to them for their kindness and wisdom.

 

All of the Skyward Sword screenshots featured in these two posts are taken from this playthrough of the game.

 

[Strafe]

I’ve certainly clicked with this a lot more once I went into handheld mode and used buttons. Not sure if my joycon gyros aren’t that good (I don’t see why they wouldn’t be) or more likely I’m just crack handed and don’t like the waggle.

[Sarlaccfood]

Sorry guys I think there’s been a mistake. You were actually supposed to realise how shit it was remember?

[Popo]

Did anyone say it’s shit?

[Sarlaccfood]

9 hours ago, Popo said:

Did anyone say it’s shit?

Just a bit mate.

[Popo]

I skimmed the thread - I'm waiting until after 17:00 to start a piece of work, a poor excuse for such a questionable act perhaps, but there it is - 3 people said they hated it, and 1 of those now says he likes it.  2 people said it's just nostalgia and you'll snap out of it once you see it again.

 

There are people who said it's not as good as some of its predecessors, and there are some people who had bad memories of the motion controls - but then that's a well documented complaint about the Wii generation in general, and I agree with you when you said such concerns can be discounted for those of us who take no issue with it.

 

What there definitely is not, is a large cohort of people who said the game is/was shit.  It might have felt like that, and you've certainly sprung to the defense of the game on several occasions in this thread, but most people posted with supportive comments (even if sometimes those came with caveats about the premium price or the motion controls).

[Sarlaccfood]

45 minutes ago, Popo said:

I skimmed the thread - I'm waiting until after 17:00 to start a piece of work, a poor excuse for such a questionable act perhaps, but there it is - 3 people said they hated it, and 1 of those now says he likes it.  2 people said it's just nostalgia and you'll snap out of it once you see it again.

 

There are people who said it's not as good as some of its predecessors, and there are some people who had bad memories of the motion controls - but then that's a well documented complaint about the Wii generation in general, and I agree with you when you said such concerns can be discounted for those of us who take no issue with it.

 

What there definitely is not, is a large cohort of people who said the game is/was shit.  It might have felt like that, and you've certainly sprung to the defense of the game on several occasions in this thread, but most people posted with supportive comments (even if sometimes those came with caveats about the premium price or the motion controls).

Up until the remake it was a pretty maligned Zelda game, not just here but other places too, so I’ve got no qualms defending it as I think it’s great.  Especially as some people seemed genuinely pissed off by this game for some reason. 
 

Not really sure what the numbers have to do with anything though. Can’t my post just be in reference to one or two posts on here? Where did the threshold come from suddenly?

[Jolly]

Yeah, it's definitely been widely derided and the reaction surely goes some way to explain why Breath of the Wild is so drastically different. 

 

Of course, those of us who loved it on the Wii are painfully aware anyway because we've spent the last decade being told how wrong we are and how tired the format was and how motion controls don't work and how the text is a bit slow and how it repeats itself and how the text is a bit slow. 

[Popo]

7 minutes ago, Sarlaccfood said:

Up until the remake it was a pretty maligned Zelda game, not just here but other places too, so I’ve got no qualms defending it as I think it’s great.  Especially as some people seemed genuinely pissed off by this game for some reason. 
 

Not really sure what the numbers have to do with anything though. Can’t my post just be in reference to one or two posts on here? Where did the threshold come from suddenly?

When I asked if people had really said the game was shit (they hadn’t - not in this thread), you said “just a bit”, insinuating that  a lo to of people had, which is why I referenced the numbers of comments that veered towards harsh. 
 

If a cavalcade of people had made repeated attempts to dump on the game, banging on about how it’s all just nostalgia and Nintendo have got one round you at £50 yet again, then I could see your point, but thats not what happened. 
 

I said I had no intention of playing it again back in February, and in the end I bought it. And I’m playing it. So, you know, fuck me and fuck my opinions. 

[yakumo]

Man these controls are funky, started playing but using the right stick to fight is making my head go???. Also is this the most wubby dubby I seen Zelda and Link?. I kind of want my boy Groose to win.

[scottcr]

The Ancient Cistern is absolute pinnacle of dungeon design. It’s wonderful. Beautiful. Amazing. 

[Alex W.]

FYI for 400 Platinum Points + a couple quid postage you can now get a Skyward Sword XL postcard set and a display easel:*

 

https://my.nintendo.com/news/90998df702ae2a90
 

*Which I now recognise from the Nintendo 2021 Calendar - it’s folded black card so don’t get excited about that bit.

[Jarik]

I’d forgotten how good the music in this is, especially the way the Bazaar theme changes depending on which vendor you are near.

 

I’ve given up on the motion controls I’m afraid.  All it took was one very frustrating session with the Beetle where it always started off miscalibrated causing Link to turn away from where I wanted to send it & the damn thing would just not fly straight.  Flying the Loftwing using the stick & tapping A to flap the wings was also just so much more relaxing, & now that I’m more settled into the controls I can enjoy the actual game.

[Paulando]

I’m absolutely loving this, about 9 hours in and I’ve just ‘unlocked’ the second dungeon, taking a very leisurely pace. It’s so much better without the motion controls, which were always too imprecise and take too much effort to use. Like, I just want to lounge there and play some Zelda y’know? Not get a full body workout.

 

The ‘hold L’ camera movement was a pain at first, but I’m strangely ok with it now. Kind of do it without thinking, and it’s quite similar to the slightly odd camera controls in Metroid Prime. You adjust to it, and actually having any control of the camera is a huge improvement.

 

And I just love the overworld, the puzzles, the flying around (again, made better by button control). Such a lovely, relaxing game to play.

[Paulando]

41 minutes ago, Jarik said:

I’d forgotten how good the music in this is

I ❤️ the Skyloft theme:

 

 

[Stanley]

So refreshing to see a positive reappraisal of the game all these years later, and yeah I realise the new version has many quality of life improvements which have no doubt improved it immeasurably for many. 
 

I’m yet to start it but the original game is one of my favourites, so it will be interesting to see how I feel post BoTW.