A lot of people I’ve spoken to in the past have maintained a pretty weird stigma against the Capcom Zelda games. Minish Cap is one of Link’s best outings to date, and while Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages aren’t the most essential Zeldas around, they’re still better than around 90 percent of games on the market at any given time.
On one hand, I think Capcom’s understanding of traditional Zelda dungeon design lent itself remarkably well to ensuring these games were extremely cohesive, which they still are to this day. On the other, the tone of the Capcom Zeldas – and Minish Cap in particular, which is the game I want to discuss in this article – was so immediately impressionable that they feature some of the most definitive versions of Link in the series’ history. A lot of this can be attributed to Link being posited as a foil to Vaati, who, by every conceivable metric, is a much better villain than Ganondorf could ever be.
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Ganondorf is synonymous with Zelda’s Big Bad. He’s Nintendo’s iconic counterpart to Link, a mainstay on the Smash roster, and a key figure in the upcoming and highly anticipated Breath of the Wild 2. Really, though, he’s just a bit boring. If my Breath of the Wild 2 theories are correct and we get to see a pre-Demise Ganon next year, my mind could be changed. Right now, though, this is one of the main reasons why Vaati is so much better – we understand his motivations, misdeeds, and meandering from a path that could have gone very differently – he doesn’t just say, ‘I want to destroy Hyrule… just because!.’
Minish Cap sees Link embark on an adventure with a sentient hat named Ezlo. As you play through the game, you’ll eventually learn that Ezlo was once one of the eponymous Minish people, or Picori. His most promising student betrayed him in search of power, which – you guessed it! – we eventually learn was Vaati. As soon as this becomes clear, the entire framing of the mysterious villain who unleashes hordes of hellions into the world shifts – this was once an innocent Picori, with real talent and ambition and kindness. We never quite learn why he betrayed Ezlo, or what it was that caused him to become so warped and powerful that he is capable of plunging the entire Kingdom of Hyrule into a state of perpetual darkness. But we do see him for who he originally was. We can see that the final boss of the game, which has three distinct and horrifyingly wretched forms, wasn’t always a manifestation of darkness and evil – he was a normal kid.
Ganondorf has always been bad for the sake of being bad. Sure, he’s after the Triforce, but that’s just because he wants to be omnipotent. I mean, he’s already representative of the Power part of the trifecta, but “power” is a pretty boring reason for doing shitty things. All of the best villains in fiction have more complex motivations, and although Vaati’s are still a little murky, it’s clear that something caused him to betray his master’s trust somewhere along the way. Jealousy, maybe, or unchecked ambition – whatever it was, Vaati’s heel turn is Ezlo’s failure, which affords the central conflict of the game a much more dynamic and tangible presence throughout.
My favourite Zelda is Majora’s Mask, which also happens to be Ganon-less. I mean, Twilight Princess and Ocarina are also in my top five, and they specifically rely on Zelda’s most infamous villain for their stories to land. Still, though, I can’t help wondering what the best Nintendo Zelda games could have achieved if they were willing to embrace Vaati. Sure, point for point, Nintendo’s games have for the most part been conventionally better than the ones outsourced to Capcom. That doesn’t mean these alternate takes on the universe weren’t worthwhile, though, nor does it prevent them from superseding their origins in certain very specific ways.
I doubt we’ll ever see a day where Vaati gets to make a cameo in a Nintendo Zelda, let alone take centre stage. Still, if I had one wish for a future Zelda experience, it wouldn’t be for old dungeon designs, or limitless freedom, or the return of Skull Kid – well, maybe I would wish for the return of Skull Kid.
But after I got Skull Kid, right, and the reed pipes from Twilight Princess, my last genie wish for this series would be to write Vaati into a new mainline Zelda. To this day, he’s one of my favourite video game villains of all time, and the fact he hasn’t appeared in the series for a whopping 17 years is a colossal waste.
I’m not confident we’ll ever see Vaati again, but I’d sure as hell play a Zelda game where he got even a sliver of screen time in a Heart Piece heartbeat.
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