What About Caves?

Hey, do you remember these? You know, the big rocky underground places that appear in some Zelda games? Of course, by some games I mean, like, pretty much all of them. Hell, do you remember the original Legend of Zelda? The very first location you were supposed to visit was the cave where you get the sword.

By caves, I’m talking about the Zelda tradition with them. In Zelda games caves are small sub areas that are used for a variety of purposes. Sometimes they contain optional secrets, sometimes they must be visited to acquire a necessary item, and sometimes they need to be passed through to get to another location. They make all kinds of sense in an adventure title, considering that caves are favorite targets of explorers even in the real world. But, like, what actually happened to them?

Skyward Sword, for example, only had a little over… er, make that exactly two traditional caves: The Waterfall Cave and Lanayru Caves. These are pretty much caves in the traditional Zelda sense. There were more areas in the game that were, in-world, still caves, but each instance of these still departs majorly from the concept of a cave that’s familiar in the Zelda series. Lanayru Mine was simply an extended part of Lanayru Desert and was a large plot area (and wasn’t even entirely enclosed.) The caves beneath Eldin Province were much the same, as they were a major plot area that’s visited while going through the region, complete with unique music, and it even doubles as the Mogma “town” later in. The Volcano Summit was, like the Eldin mines, a fully unique plot area. Sometimes Zelda’s traditional caves were used for plot reasons, but they were never played up to be full and unique plot areas like these, and either way we’ve never referred to elaborate and unique caves in the series by the term anyway. No one thinks of the Ice Cavern or Dodongo’s Cavern or Dragon Roost Cavern as traditional caves; they’re dungeons.

It sucks too, considering that Skyward Sword had (in my opinion) one of the best cave tunes in the entire series (honestly you should just consider that tune the theme song of this post), and honestly many of the linearity issues present in the game would have been much better if there were optional areas to run off to like caves. They could have had the caves on their own or used them to connect to brief optional areas within the main areas (Faron Woods, Eldin Volcano, Lanayru Desert). But Skyward Sword isn’t the only game in the series to have lame caves. Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask had plenty of caves, but 90% of them were one-room grottos, which doesn’t satisfy me. To be fair, there were exceptions, but Twilight Princess did it the best of the 3D Zeldas. Yeah it had the one-room grottos (although this time they’re filled with enemies), but they also had the epic Lantern Caverns, which are almost like tiny, tiny dungeons in themselves and only one of several is required to complete the game. It’s ironic that I often praise Skyward Sword, which blatantly screwed up the caves, whereas Twilight Princess, which I complain about, has one of the best executions of caves.

So ultimately I think that while they’re not the only thing that does this, I think caves help embody the sense of adventure and exploration as well as the sense of freedom of the series. I think that the trend of minimizing them (though it was broken briefly in Twilight Princess) is not beneficial to the series and I would like to see them return to and expand on Twilight Princess’ version of it. How about you? Do you like caves?

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