Akira Himekawa. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Part 1. VIZ Media, 2008. 191 pages. Age 8 to 12.
Let’s face it: There’s no point in reading a Zelda manga adaptation without, at the very least, humming some video game theme music in your head. By extension, there’s no point in reading this review without said music. I recommend queuing up something from Zelda Reorchestrated before continuing.
In an author’s note, the two women who collaborated to create author/artist pseudonym Akira Himekawa (who have apparently created a number of Zelda graphic novelizations) say, “There are hardly ever any main characters that are so strong, cool and kind [as Link]!” I don’t know about that, but the mythology of the Zelda games is genuinely good storytelling. There are details that fail to reconcile from story to story, game to game, and yet there are fans (I among them) of the series as a whole, the sum of all its disparate parts. There are single-Link theories, multi-Link theories, legends-are-inherently-inconsistent theories, and split-timeline theories. Ocarina starts with Link as a child, making it a (if not the) genesis story.
I never played Ocarina because, well, I never got the hang of 3D video games. There, I said it. Regardless, I can tell this follows the story closely, down to the “ta-da” sound we should be hearing whenever Link gets a new item (or, in this case, the four note chromatic “da-na-na-naaah!”) “You can use it to get fruit that’s too high up in the trees to reach.” Yeah, or poke your first boss’s eye out. I actually started to wonder if I was reading a dramatized, surface-level hint guide, with lines like, “Gohma’s weakness is her eyeball! Aim for her eye!” The only parts of this adaptation that were decidedly not like a video game were the times when boss-level bad guys were dealt with in single blows. My thumb callouses beg to differ.
This is only the first half of the Ocarina of Time story, and at least four more stories are forthcoming.
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