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The Legend of Zelda: Platypus Nostalgia

I really did beat it, you know; The Legend of Zelda. -not in 1987, but in 2018. I might blame those old lithium batteries that deleted your game at the worst possible moment. That happened to me in grad school. I guess I've been waiting more than 30 years to see the end of the darn thing. Simple as it was, I liked it.

The Legend of Zelda, the original NES version, will always be the ur-video game for me. If A Link to the Past is Aeschylus, Sophocles is Ocarina of Time, and Twilight Princess is Euripides, then this is the Homer from which they all sprung. There's a magic and a wonder in the raw simplicity of its design, in the inevitability of its limited digital vocabulary, the steady drone of its music, that has as much power to enchant today as it did 30 years ago.

Zelda is now its own Neo-Platonic mythology with endless branches and variations still leading young souls up the ladder of wonder to the primal unity of Virtue. Still, the highest does not stand without the lowest, and the original Legend of Zelda is as firm a foundation to build a modern pop-mythology on as I can think. Currently, I'm about half-way through the original Final Fantasy. It's the sort of game that can also serve as the worthy foundation of a franchise, but while it's delightful, there's something different in its flavor. It's a work of Fantasy, not a work of Myth. The two are by no means mutually exclusive, but The Legend of Zelda is something special. I'm glad that I've finally seen it to the end.

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