Hogan Reviews

As a new on-and-off review series I’ll be looking at the Legend of Zelda manga series as I brought the rather lovely treasure chest shaped box containing the hardback Legendary editions of the series (except the Twilight Princess series anyway). While I was tempted to put them in game-release order I decided to instead follow the series as it was released, therefore let’s start with Ocarina of Time! It’s odd to be covering the Manga of OOT when I haven’t actually covered the legendary game itself yet, but there you go! Let’s take a look at how good it is as a manga, as well as comparing it to its source material (ignoring obvious differences like Link talking, obviously…)

Ocarina of Time follows the game quite closely, at the least the core storyline anyway. The main difference you’ll notice is how much more people talk, or in the case of Link and several normally silent bosses and enemies, that they talk at all, but that makes sense when you’re translating the game to a reading format. So Link is a little elf-looking boy who grows up in Kokiri Forest happy and healthy but he has no fairy, where as every other kid in the forest has one already. One day the Great Deku Tree is hurt by a demonic creature inside of it and after gathering up some courage Link slays the beast within. It’s too late to save the tree but Link is given a special task of delivering the Emerald Spirit Stone to Princess Zelda of Hyrule, a journey he soon sets off on accompanied by a fairy called Navi, who joined him during his first quest.

Great bit of art, though does kind of make it seem the Great Deku Tree is also evil with that shadowing…

Link meets with (and immediately falls for) Zelda, who after the two are spooked by the clearly evil King of the Gerudo Ganondorf, tells Link of the Triforce and how she wants to keep it out of Ganondorf’s hands. In order to do this she instructs Link to find the other two Spirit Stones spread across the land. Link successfully saves the Gorons and gets the Fire Stone (and meets a small friendly Dragon who becomes his pet) and then helps the Zora from within Jabu-Jabu’s belly. For the record as this is happening he’s getting the correct equipment to defeat the bosses / dungeons as in the game, again visually its very close to the game in that sense as the artwork is top-notch. Of course things don’t go according to plan and Link travels to the Temple of Time to retrieve the Master Sword and in doing so time is forwarded by seven years…

This leads of course to the second half of the manga / story, where a now adult bodied Link walks out of the Temple to find a world covered in darkness and ruled by Ganondorf. He then goes on a second set of fetch quests / dungeons revolving around finding hidden Sages (that turn out to be people he knew as a kid, coincidentally!) but this time there are quite a few differences. First off the fiery dragon boss Volvagia turns out to be the adult version of the friendly young dragon Link took on as a pet, now twisted by Ganondorf’s magic. Link is forced to kill his old friend, who manages to mutter his old master’s name teary eyed just before it dies (Damn, pulling at my heart strings with a Zelda boss? That’s some good rewriting there!) Another major change is the complete lack of the Shadow Temple and its corresponding Bongo Bongo boss, replaced instead by a good old fashioned fight with Dark Link. We find out about Link Hylian heritage but they go one step further and claim he’s of royal Hylian lineage, descended from a family of knights. Makes sense and all, but it’s technically new info!

Damn it, got something in my eye again…

Sheik is shown to be loyally following Ganondorf and his trainers the Twinrova Koume and Kotake, but also clearly on Link’s side when he’s sent out to take him out. I think the last major change is Sheik’s big revelation of being Zelda is disguise happens a bit earlier, but it’s accompanied by some fun scenes of Impa training her for the role, as well as training an older Link a bit later on. Impa in general is shown quite a bit more during the manga, though her role as one of the Sages means she can’t compete in the final battle, naturally. I guess I’ll save the end for the spoiler section, but even if you’re not familiar with OOT after its been out now for a few decades you could probably imagine what happens. I will mention three bonus chapters at the end of the book though, two chapters showing Link and his friends getting lost in the woods and meeting Skull Kid ahead of his main role in the next story, and a single chapter story involving Link helping the heir of a race called the Watarara come of age and become brave. They’re fine bits of extra fluff but really felt like anime filler episodes, especially the last one with manga-exclusive characters.

Overall Thoughts:

*Gasp!* … Okay, I talked about this earlier in the review, but still… *Gasp!*

I had a lot more fun with this manga that I thought I would. I got the set mostly for shelf eye-candy assuming the mangas were just brief retellings of some pretty simple games storywise, so I was pleased to see an attempt to beef it up a bit by expanding characters and adding scenes while still keeping the whole thing very close to the games in tone and artwork (and what often stunning artwork it is, for the record!) It’s still light on plot though, and the final battle is quite short so it’s not perfect, but it’s as close as you can get with a Zelda property that doesn’t involve you actually playing it…

Zelda is captured by Ganondorf but Link arrives in time and slays the evil warlock, only for him to transform into a demonic beast. With the help of Zelda’s magic and the power of the Sages Link destroys Ganondorf “for good” and peace returns to Hyrule.

Here’s Ganondorf! Not from the climactic battle, but still. At least I found a picture of him, something I can’t say about Zelda… What’s that? She’s in the title? Well, maybe there should’ve been more scans available then (I’m not bending back my shiny new hardback spines to scan some myself, that’s for sure!)

As a reward Link is returned to his child body so he can live out his childhood instead of being robbed of it, which Link is sad about because he’ll lose this Zelda he’s fallen for. That’s that! This Link will then go on to warn everyone of Ganondorf’s betrayal before it even happens and then, well, “tune in” next time!