So I’m thinking about how I’m going to format my essay. The big stumbling block here is the the narrative. I’ve got the content that I want to deliver but making it into a first person, time constrained thing. I have a lot of esoteric knowledge, all of which is interesting to me, but it might not make for a great story. However, I just need to get something down on the paper for Wednesday, so I’ll make some decisions and see where they take me from there. There’s a couple options for what I could start with. I think the big ones are Legend of Zelda and Dark Souls because they are the ones that really got me thinking about this topic. Starting with Dark Souls feels more honest because it is the game that I enjoy more and that I played first. The issue presented here is that I never really solidified the connections until I started playing Legend of Zelda and that Legend of Zelda is more widely known, understood and researched. The materials I have been able to find have had much more to do with that game after all. So, I should starting with playing Legend of Zelda. Which now presents the problem of what game to start with. There’s a couple of powerful juxtapositions in every game that I have encountered so far. In Wind Waker, the first Zelda that I played, the character of the boat is modeled after an Eastern dragon and the Koroks are modelled after kami. In the second, Twilight Princess, the genus loci of the world are strongly tied to animism and bug-collecting features heavily in the game. In Skyward Sword… well, I can’t think of anything about Skyward Sword off the top of my head… In Breath of the Wild, the Yiga and Sheikah clans are very obviously ninja and employ Eastern-style clothing and architecture. In addition, that game reuses the kami-like Koroks extensively. Ultimately, I think that discussing Twilight Princess is the best way to go. It has the strongest ties to Western societal portrayals of the games that I am considering and its Eastern cultural ties are subtle but noticeable and can have been said to spark my interest in looking for them in other games. Which I will discuss in the order of… Wind Waker (to introduce Koroks and backing up the Shinto connection), Breath of the Wild (because the Koroks don’t make sense without Wind Waker first) and then Skyward Sword (as a counterpoint to the previously discussed thingies).
From there, it’s probably best to move to Dark Souls as it has a much more intensely Westernized presentation and digging through it will be less like grasping at straws. After that, I should discuss the Western depiction of Eastern environments and the differences between how they portray each other. I should start with Civilization because that is the most recent and the most clear in my head and then move into Shogun: Total War as I only have the dimmest of recollection of that game and can easily transition from the memoir-like musings about it that I anticipate engaging in to some sort of conclusion.
