Turning Things Around

I've now spent the first two posts in the Breath of the Wild category establishing the relationship between the open world game and the "path" of magic(k) itself; so far, I've done this within the context of BotW's starting area, The Great Plateau, by pointing out a bunch of interesting details that superficially resemble the structure of many of the world's magic(k)al systems; so what? For one, just because I can spot these patterns here doesn't mean they reflect anything meaningful elsewhere in the game, right? Secondly, it's cool and all to see magic(k) symbols in video games, but what can we do with them? This post will answer both questions and will begin to suggest some of the ways in which the ideas of this blog can be put to real use by a students and practitioners of magic(k). The primary lens we will be using in this post is the first big decision with which Link is presented: Hearts or Stamina? Exploring the dilemma will take us all the way back to my own early childhood in ways which will foreshadow some of the other major themes we will be discussing soon enough.

Warning! SPOILERS for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild from here on out!

Green and Red Energy

Just after completing the four Shrine Trials of The Great Plateau—but just before meeting up with The Old Man in the steeple of the Temple of Time—Link has his first scripted encounter with a statue of The Goddess Hylia. I love this feature of the Zelda mythos: We're running around in cathedrals and shit, but the main deity isn't "God," or even a male figure. That single change puts a whole different spin on many of the Christian motifs that arise in the game. Anyhow, these visits to chat with Hylia will become a routine, as Link is about to learn. Every Shrine Link solves will reward him with a Spirit Orb, and every 4 Spirit Orbs can be traded at one of these Goddess Statues for an upgrade to either Link's Hearts or his Stamina. In gaming parlance, Hearts and Stamina are examples of "resources," but this term seems to me to emphasize the more concrete or material aspects of Hearts and Stamina; if we're following through with the connection between games and magic(k), then these are really more like different types of "energy." Spirit Orbs add to Link's overall pool of, well, Spirit. This is then converted into one of two other types of life energy, but each one functions differently and plays a different role:

Hearts: Every 4 Spirit Orbs converts, when offered at a Goddess Statue, to 1 Heart Container. Link starts out with only 3 heart containers. These containers fill with red energy, which is a non-regenerating resource connected to Link's carnal mortality. Being attacked by monsters or frightened animals, as well as falling from greater heights, are things that will deplete Link's health. When Link's heart containers are empty, he dies. The only things that regenerate hearts are: Eating food, bed rest, using or being resurrected upon death by a Fairy in his inventory, or triggering Mipha's Grace.

Stamina: Represented by a circular meter that only shows when it's being actively depleted, Stamina is Link's starting pool of green energy. Only certain actions, such as sprinting, climbing, and paragliding, deplete Link's Stamina. However, Stamina gets depleted quickly. As a plus, it also regenerates even more quickly whenever Link is no longer performing an action that depletes it, so it's (kind of) an infinite resource. One might call it "renewable" with good profit.

Before proceeding, I want to take a moment to acknowledge that this isn't necessarily that big a decision; not a life-or-death one, in any event. You don't even need to commit to a decision on it now. You can switch things up anytime you want. This is a game, and a particularly well-designed one, so no matter what you decide here, you'll be alright. However, for the purposes of this project, it's a consequential decision; when we frame this decision as a magic(k)al one, it becomes clearer how meaningful one's answer is. As a magic(k)al decision, leaning one way or the other can amount to an entire philosophical outlook. It comes down to a matter of prioritizing one way of relating to the world over another. In order to explore this, I'm going to peer back into my childhood, since the roots of my decisions are found there.

Abundance, Scarcity, and the Habits Surrounding Them

The Zelda franchise dates back to my early childhood; The Legend of Zelda was released on February 21st, 1986, meaning it was released when I was just about to turn 3 years old. I received the NES, along with both Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda for Christmas that year.

There is an early memory I have of my father that, looking back, shaped my attitude toward gaming in ways that had deeper consequences. It's really only recently that I've gotten deeply in touch with all of this, and it was through navigating the very decision we're discussing in BotW.

I remember I was in my basement playroom, where my Nintendo was set up, playing Super Mario Bros. with my father. As a 3-or-4-year-old child, I found it humorous when my dad died, especially the way Mario's sprite would pop back up from the pit he'd just fallen into before falling back down. For a few repetitions, I laughed whenever it happened. Finally, my dad got fed up, stood up, tossed down the controller, and yelled at me, "You don't laugh when people die!" He took it very personally. I tried apologizing and I felt really bad, but he wouldn't come back and resume playing...and, in fact, he never played a video game with me ever again after that. I think this had a much stronger influence than I ever thought upon how I would approach games ever after: Dying was to be avoided at all costs. My father's reaction taught me to view video game deaths about as seriously as real-world deaths.

Another memory pertinent to how I approached the Stamina vs. Hearts Dilemma is what happened the very first time I stepped out onto the playground at Daybridge, the first daycare center I attended as a child: I walked into this big, wooden "fort" on the playground to discover there were 3-4 other kids already hanging out in there, and they must have been 4 or 5, making them Older Kids. I didn't even know who they were, but I remember the leader eyeing me with mirth, saying, "Look who's here!" like he knew who I was, pounding his palm with his other fist; the kids roughed me up and sent me on my way just for walking into the wrong fort.

From that day forward, I was a solitary gamer and the world inside the little grey box was where I went to get away from it all. I didn't want video games to be challenging; the world was challenging enough and games were supposed to be fun. In that sacred domain, I needed a fucking break.

A bit of trivia: I have never beaten The Legend of Zelda, nor Super Mario Bros. I finished a couple of dungeons, and I had a subscription to Nintendo Power magazine, so I knew the basic drill; but it all felt like so much work. I do remember the first video game I ever beat, though, and how I did it: It was Konami's Contra, and I was only ever able to beat the game by using the world-famous Konami Code: Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, Start, which awarded something like 30 extra lives. With that bit of help, I could make it through to the end. My very first memory of synchronicity dates to this as well: That Saturday evening, per family tradition, we went out to a restaurant to eat. We went to a Chinese restaurant and the fortune in my cookie said something about how I would make an achievement that day or something.

In 1990, Galoob released The Game Genie, which I had to have as soon as I learned about it. It was a little device called a "Game Enhancer" you would attach to your video game cartridge; you would enter what turned out to be hexadecimal codes before loading the game, and the results were even more powerful than the cheat codes that were built into the game! You could be invincible forever, have infinite money or consumable items: If you could imagine it, it was possible. The rules in any given game hardly mattered if you had a Game Genie. The Game Genie essentially made you God inside the world of the game you were playing. It was also my earliest exposure to hacking, because that's literally all this thing was: A way to hack into your video games and change the programming. This had so much resonance with my earliest draw toward magic(k), as well. It's so weird looking back; the product was aptly named, "Game Genie," like many tales involving djinn or the granting of wishes, the moral of the story is, "Be careful what you wish for." I didn't just use the Game Genie for occasional fun; I eventually refused to buy games until I had the Game Genie codes for them in my hot little hands. Adopting this approach to gaming from such a young age resulted in what I now regard as terrible habits surrounding adversity that touched every part of my life—not just gaming and recreation.

Wandering The Great Plateau and reckoning with large, wooden camps populated with hostile Bokoblins and Moblins with meager weapons and defenses, those old memories and feelings were recalled; I felt the experience viscerally. So new to the game, I felt very vulnerable. I think to some extent the game was designed that way intentionally; that feeling of scarcity and threat is the primary driver in the early part of the game. However, I know my own experiences magnified the intended dramatic effect.

Even for people without such experiences shaping their background, the fact remains that BotW is such a departure from all previous Zelda games that there are many habits longtime Zelda fans are likely to bring with them into this game that don't reward the player as much as they did in the past. As of Breath of the Wild, it is obvious, we are simply doing things differently in the world of Hyrule, and the character customization system in BotW is built with that in mind.

In The Legend of Zelda, button-mashing was, by and large, a viable combat strategy. Combat became much more sophisticated in the sequel, The Adventure of Link, and you would play much better by learning the new combat system. From this point forward, refining your combat skills has always been a viable and rewarding option, but button-mashing has always also been a viable approach. This is much less true in BotW than in any other Zelda game to date, although the game has also been designed to accommodate players who have difficulty embracing the new gameplay paradigm. You won't find this gameplay design to be a barrier to general accessibility, but this game does more than any other in the Zelda franchise to reward a commitment to improving and refining your skill. At the same time, combat is far less necessary in this game than it is in other Zelda games because of how differently it's designed. As an open-world game, BotW is non-linear in its progression; previous Zelda games were so linear, driving Link through such a rigid course that putting monsters in his way was one of the primary ways to add difficulty that varied from solving puzzles. That entire dynamic has been set aside in BotW. Some combat will be absolutely required to beat the game, but all the mechanisms are provided so that almost anyone can hypothetically beat Calamity Ganon even if they rely on dying a lot and the ability to use various ample resources in the game to keep Link's health up. This decision is about how you'd like to go about completing the task ahead.

Not everyone will be in quite the position I was to make use of this game design for magical purposes, but the remainder of this post should prove useful for anyone who is; at the end, I'll wrap this up by discussing how this change works and some of its ramifications for the magical use of video games.

Training for Marathons

My very first fight with a Bokoblin in BotW taught me a few things:

1. Weapons are fragile and thus valuable: The first "weapon" I picked up in the game was a torch. I wouldn't have thought to use it as a weapon at all, except the Old Man made it a point to tell me I could do this; my torch was broken before my first opponent was dead. Now I had no weapon, and an angry Bokoblin running after me.

2. Getting hit really hurts: Link starts with only 3 hearts. As soon as my torch broke on the Bokoblin, I was dead within seconds. I would either need to get more hearts as soon as possible, or I would need to learn not to get hit in fights. This would mean bothering to take the time to learn combat mechanics that have been a part of the Zelda franchise for 24 years already; but I hadn't as of yet. Even if I wanted to learn to play better, hearts would make the process more forgiving.

3. Weapons are a finite resource, so this world is shaped by scarcity. I fared better against the Bokoblins of The Great Plateau after picking up the axe nearby, which is a proper weapon and thus more durable; still, it lasted nowhere near as long as I would have liked. The way things were going, I would need to keep my inventory stocked with weapons all the time. This leads into weapon-hoarding behaviors that are very common for new players: Hanging onto nicer weapons and using your worst ones first because you don't want to "waste" your good weapons on a piddling pig-man when you might need to fight a Hinox.

This was so different from my prior experience of Zelda games that I was actually mad at first. Other Zelda games have leaned so heavily on combat to keep the game exciting that in Legend of Zelda, the first person you meet—that game's "Old Man"—tells you how dangerous it is out there and gives you a sword. The sword will never break and will always be there for you. Here, the first thing you get from the Old Man is advice; then a prank, then a paraglider (which, incidentally, consumes your Stamina meter while in use. Could this be some kind of clue?).

When I stood before Goddess Hylia for the first time, the decision was a no-brainer: I chose the heart. I chose it at my next opportunity, as well. It was only after I had 5 hearts and was managing to survive encounters (that I went out of my way to engage in) that I decided to do some research and see what opinions there were about this. What did I find on the subreddits and whatnot? A general consensus that Stamina > Hearts. However, from the gloating and boastful nature of many of the posts stating this, I deduced that this was the opinion of the hardcore gaming crowd, and I've spent a lifetime ignoring their opinions because my gameplay priorities never had anything in common with theirs. However, there was a subtle pattern that I noticed: I saw a number of people say that they themselves had gone for hearts first, then later changed their minds and wished they had chosen Stamina first. I didn't see anyone saying the opposite, that they went with Stamina first, but really wished they'd chosen Hearts instead.

Interesting. I might have to give those cyber-jocks the benefit of the doubt.

After spending more time weighing different opinions, something really annoying happened: I found myself agreeing with the Stamina crowd, in theory, but with the caveat that it would mean changing my entire approach. "Stamina would be the better option," I thought to myself, "if I were actually good at gaming."

Granted, aside from raw combat skill—we're talking manual dexterity and hand-eye-coordination here—there are a number of other factors that alter the weight of this decision, chief among them on that first playthrough being that I didn't yet know where to reliably source good weapons, and now I do. That is, to make a lame dad joke, a game-changer. Still, that matter of sucking at fights and generally getting my ass kicked, winning through soaking up damage and repeatedly healing with food, swayed the course of things for me. In my situation, upon first learning this game, the decision at Hylia's shrine revolved most of all around one thing:

The Master Sword.

Blade of Evil's Bane

It has been a staple of Zelda tradition since 1991's The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past: Link needs The Master Sword to defeat Ganon. It is this game's "Sword in the Stone." In most Zelda games, it is objectively more powerful against all monsters than standard swords, and gets an even bigger damage boost against the Big G himself, Ganon; much the same holds true in this game. However, The Master Sword gets one all-important distinguishing feature: It is BotW's "adamantine blade," and is the only melee weapon in the entire game that cannot break. It has a limited pool of "energy" that gets whittled down with use, and it does "break" (according to the animation) when you use it up, but after 10 in-game minutes of recharging, it's ready to use again. Once you get The Master Sword, you will always have a sword at your side; notably, its power is doubled against Guardians, among the more threatening opponents in Hyrule. What's that got to do with hearts?

Without exploiting glitches (in other words, cheating), there's only one way to get The Master Sword: You need to have at least 13 Heart Containers.

For someone who lusts after the promise of security and enduring power that comes with possessing The Master Sword, that requirement becomes a powerful influence in how one spends their Spirit Orbs. It changes the approach to the Main Quest of the game, as well; I'll be covering them in greater depth in posts to come, but the heart of Link's quest involves the four Divine Beasts, which are likely to turn the head of anyone familiar with tarot cards, astrology, or certain books of The Bible—to grossly understate things, since this symbology finds mythic resonance in cultures all throughout human history). The Divine Beasts were built as "weapons" to use in the prophesied battle with Ganon, but as of our quest have been possessed by him instead, each one now terrorizing its respective corner of the world and possessed by a different elemental aspect of Ganon. Link is eventually tasked with defeating the "Blight Ganons" within each of the Divine Beasts, thus restoring them to the control of their respective Champion (I introduce them briefly in The World Is Yours, as well). If he does this, they will be of great help when he confronts Ganon.

On my first playthrough, even after deciding that Stamina upgrades were objectively more desirable in the long run, I decided that my strategy would be to get The Master Sword as quickly as possible. Not only did this mean choosing Hearts over Stamina at Goddess Statues after clearing Shrines, but it meant rushing through the Main Quest to conquer all of the Divine Beasts, because as a bonus, Link is awarded a Heart Container for each Divine Beast he frees: I needed 13 hearts to successfully pull the Master Sword (if you don't have enough, you will literally die trying), I started with 3, and freeing the Divine Beasts would leave me with 7, just over halfway to the goal. Aside from that, I would only need to solve 24 Shrines and I could go for the sword. That's what I did. Boy, was I disappointed with the result.

For starters, there were some catches to all of this that I wasn't really appreciating until I experienced them for myself: For one, the Master Sword isn't really all that powerful a weapon; plenty of swords do as much damage or more. It gets a boost against intimidating foes, sure, but it's also possible to upgrade the sword so that it always does the same 60 damage that it does against opponents that are infected with Ganon's "malice." Second, the fact that the sword can break is more limiting than it seems. Since you get that nice damage boost only against certain foes until you upgrade the sword, you find yourself saving the sword for those same foes, not wanting to waste it on lesser monsters. I ended up hoarding it just like I did all my other weapons!

Finally, for someone like me, who really loves getting immersed in the game world itself, there was something very anti-climactic about rushing through the Main Quest of the game and defeating the Blight Ganons with mundane weaponry; by the time I got the Master Sword, there was only one thing left to do with it: Go defeat Ganon. I still had most of the content of the game to explore! I had really deprived myself of a more gradual and intentional experience of working through the Divine Beasts. This is a special loss for someone who is also a magician; I have a game sitting here with Divine Beasts and Four Elements as core themes and I'd blown right through it; what a missed opportunity!

So far, all of this is purely subjective. I want to spend a section examining some details of the way the Spirit Orb/Master Sword/Statue system is set up that also seem to hint at there being some purpose behind building Stamina first in this game.

A Beautiful Symmetry

Before even leaving The Great Plateau, King Rhoam sends Link to find his way to Kakariko Village; from there, however, he is soon sent to another village that sheds some light of its own on the way Link spends his Spirit Orbs: Hateno Village.

Right near the entrance to the village, depending on your timing, Link is likely to meet Teebo, a little kid who asks Link if he wants to see something he's found; if Link says yes, Teebo takes him to The Horned Statue.

This statue bears a striking resemblance to the Hylia Statues...except a bit more sinister. If you speak to him (this is a Horned God, in contrast with Hylia as Goddess), he'll snatch either a Heart Container or Stamina Vessel from Link (the equivalent of 4 Spirit Orbs). Following some dialogue, Link demands that the Horned Statue return what he stole, and the statue offers to let Link choose if it's returned in the same form in which it was taken, or if he wants to swap it out with its opposite; that's right, the Horned Statue can exchange Link's Hearts for Stamina and vice versa. From now on, the Statue will buy 4 Spirit Orbs from Link for 100 Rupees, and will sell them back to him in either form for 120 Rupees; the extra 20 Rupees are thus essentially a "convenience fee" for swapping out containers.

So, what? Makes sense if they want to accommodate different playstyles, right? This way, no one gets penalized for preferring Stamina; they can visit this statue and pull the sword just as early as players who prefer Heart Containers. No big deal and no need to read into this; open-world game, freedom of choice, yadda yadda yadda. Yes, quite so; quite so. If you want.

But let's think about this for a second:

13 Hearts required to pull the Master Sword (nice, magic(k)al number, by the way), and you start out with 3. This means you need 10 more hearts to pull the sword. That's a nice, round, balanced number. Getting the Hearts from freeing the Divine Beasts cuts this down to 6; not as appealing a number. I just think most brains similar to mine would "like" 10s better. More aesthetically pleasing. But there's another thing to consider:

The Master Sword is really meant to fight Ganon in all his forms; it's called "The Sword that Seals Evil" and even the Deku Tree himself tells Link, when the sword is pulled (wait, what's that? The Master Sword is another gift under another tree?), that it should really be conserved for its intended use. This would suggest Link pull the sword before facing any of the Blight Ganons. This means we still need 10 Heart Containers first. Let's take a look at the math of Spirit Orbs if we take that approach as a given:

1 Heart Container = 4 Spirit Orbs, so all 10 containers comes out to 40 Spirit Orbs. This is interesting because it would fall in line with the Jesus symbolism established in the first post (Jesus spent 40 days and 40 nights fasting in the desert while being tempted). Even with the Horned Statue, that will take a while, but if you have to fill out all your Stamina Wheels first and then fill out your hearts, now you're talking 80 Spirit Orbs—twice as many. However, there are also drawbacks to waiting through 40 whole Shrines before you build any Stamina; they're the reason most people look back and say they wish they'd focused more on Stamina: Getting around efficiently and having the most fun exploring the world requires more Stamina. There's more:

Link starts out with 1 full Stamina Wheel; from there, 4 Spirit Orbs = 1/5th of a Stamina Wheel. Link can earn up to two additional Stamina Wheels for a total of 3. This means that earning the 10 additional hearts (a mere fraction of all the Heart Containers Link can potentially have) is equivalent, in terms of Spirit Orbs, to completely filling out your Stamina Wheels.

With The Horned Statue, this means that if you aim to fill out Stamina first, then the moment you fill it out completely is your signal to go visit The Horned Statue, swap out all of your added Stamina Vessels for the corresponding number of Heart Containers, which will bring your Heart total up to exactly the necessary 13 Heart containers; then, you can go back, swap them back out for Stamina, and devote all of your Spirit Orbs to building your Heart Meter from that point forward. It all lines up very neatly.

Another little clue is that, again, to accommodate all play styles, there are artificial means of gaining both temporary Stamina Wheels and temporary Hearts, so that leaves plenty of wiggle-room; however, there are far more opportunities for extra Hearts than there are for extra Stamina.

To help drive this all home, there's one more thing in Hateno that I want to point out; it will build on the theme from the previous post of learning lessons from the world around us. Check out this view from just behind Hateno Ancient Tech Lab:

See those two Sheikah Shrines—one in the middle of the bay, the other atop a jutting cliff (circled, above)? So technically, you can get to them without building Stamina. You can take a raft out there; that will take quite a while and a lot of pressing the Y button, though. The other way out there is to paraglide, but for that, you do need plenty of Stamina.

Both Shrines are Combat Shrines; the Shrine more easily accessible without added Stamina, the one on the cliff, is "A Moderate Test of Strength." The Shrine in the middle of the bay is "A Major Test of Strength." The cliff surrounding the Moderate test is the closest paragliding surface to the Major Shrine. Even the progression here suggests you get your Stamina lined up before your Hearts, because you need them just to reach the Shrines naturally with a paraglider.

I only played the game for a while longer after I pulled the sword on my first playthrough; after rushing through so much of the scenery just to get that weapon, I was so bored and the subsequent victories were so hollow that I soon aborted this playthrough and started over again, resolving to take the Path of Stamina, or The Green Way. Looking at the game as a symbol for the magic(k)al path, this seemed fitting to me and it deepened the game, imbuing it with new layers of meaning. On the magic(k) path, there are quick and easy solutions, but taking that road comes with consequences similar to the ones faced in Hyrule. Likewise, the longer-term objectives are better reached by taking the long view and enjoying the ride: Stamina symbolized commitment. Learning to play the game well without relying on a large pool of hearts takes practice and consistent effort, but rewards you with the ability to fly off of higher mountaintops and reach places in faster, more satisfying ways. It also imbues The Master Sword—one of the game's few inherently limitless resources—with greater meaning. It's more satisfying using the Master Sword against the Blight Ganons, and the sword's power is better respected when the player has to do more to earn it, delaying the gratification of checking off those Main Quest objectives.

A Turning Point

The essence of effecting a deeper and more important change in one's life using this (or another) video game depends on the convergence of a number of factors, and isn't for just anyone. This is just like any religion or specific magic(k)al path. Zelda, going back to my very early childhood, is linked via memory and association with a nostalgic time in my life. The things that remind us fondly of our childhoods, being so nostalgic and emotionally charged, are sources of considerable psychic energy; they're magic(k)ally powerful for us. For me, playing this game not only activates those circuits, but also activates the circuits I built around my father refusing to game with me, the ones that sent me down the path of cheating that parallels in many ways the Red Path, or Path of Hearts, which in turn led to a lifetime of other, similar bad habits that have, incidentally, also impeded my magical growth. Because of all of this activation of deep, primal, neural circuitry (the increased vigilance around in-game "survival" involves the amygdala, which resides in the oldest and most primitive parts of our brains associated with survival), going into Hyrule and learning to play in the opposite play style is also changing some of that very old neural circuitry.

It is building new foundations. It's worth doing for any gamer to whom it doesn't come naturally. That is pure magic.