This month, Nintendo released its latest title in the series, Tears of the Kingdom, to great enthusiasm and critical acclaim.
“When you play the game and when you understand the game, there’s an ownership that the player takes away from the adventure,” Gene Park, video game reporter at the Washington Post, told the PBS NewsHour. His review called it “a miracle of engineering and elegant artifice.”
Past Legend of Zelda games have played with gender roles and gender ambiguity. Link, the main character has to infiltrate the predominantly female Gerudo tribe to finish quests, while Princess Zelda, in the Ocarina of Time, takes on the persona of a male character, Sheik. Long-time Zelda producer Eiji Aonuma has also explicitly said he wanted Link to be gender neutral.
“People refer to [Link] as a male, but he has all of these feminine characteristics about him that people can read into. Link is also very much a transgender icon for that,” Ash Parrish, video game reporter with The Verge, said.
Parrish said a lot of other mainstream games that typically market to the biggest video game demographic, 18- to 35-year-old men, could learn from Zelda about thinking “outside the narrow gender binary.”
“It’s always good for video games to have representation for all the kinds of people who play games,” she said. “For a franchise that has been around for as long as it has, to play with its main characters in the way that Zelda has, that’s really revolutionary in a lot of ways that other [blockbuster] games and publishers just haven’t really caught up with yet.”
This video was produced by Casey Kuhn, Yasmeen Alamiri, Julia Griffin, and Jenna Cohen. Additional footage and photos from Nintendo, Thomson Reuters, and Getty Images.
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