Light Temple Fanmail Follow-Up

It was only a couple of days ago when I posted my long-running preoccupation with the obscure details of Ocarina of Time, and even in that short time I’ve gotten some really interesting messages. Most people wrote to me to say they liked my ideas or just really enjoyed the deep dive into Legend of Zelda nerdery, but two replies in particular really caught my attention. They’re great messages in and of themselves, but furthermore they open the door to more thoughts of mine on this subject, which I never found a place for in the original article. Today we’ll be looking at those messages and discussing the topics they address.

My first message comes from user basilouija, who writes:

“Also worth mentioning is that we technically DO meet Rauru before his first appearance in the form of Kaepora Gaebora, and Rauru is actually SUUUUPER ancient, as he’s the one who built the Temple of Time! This isn’t information that’s available in-game, but it’s all canon!”

While I’m not necessarily going to say this is incorrect, I am going to ask that you put a pin in it for a moment. It’s important to keep in mind that when my Light Temple ideas were first forming (aka circa 2001 or so), this was an extremely popular fan speculation, but not at all confirmed canon. The closest Nintendo ever came to touching on it at that time was via a gossip stone that, at best, could maybe suggest a connection depending on the interpretation.

For the uninitiated, gossip stones will reveal hidden messages if Link interacts with them while wearing the Mask of Truth. This particular stone, located just outside of the Lost Woods, offers this pearl of wisdom:

“They say that the owl named Kaepora Gaebora is the reincarnation of an ancient Sage.”

This one, simple sentence was the source of a ton of fan debate back in the late 90’s/early 2000’s. If you were an Ocarina of Time fan on the internet at the turn of the century, then you invariably heard about this debate at some point.  One camp firmly believed that this message confirmed a connection between Kaepora Gaebora and Rauru, given that they’re both reasonably important characters but we know essentially nothing about either of them. In fairness, I can see where these people were coming from, as the two do pose significant loose ends that the game never really bothers to address. (I would explain why it’s especially weird that Rauru is an apparent blank slate, but I literally just spent like eight pages going over it in excruciating detail a couple days ago.) And it IS reasonable to expect that the game would offer some degree of explanation for Rauru considering that he’s, y’know, one of the seven sages, and we get a backstory for all of the other six. Many fans took this gossip stone’s message as the game’s way of filling in that missing backstory, even if it is in a way that rewards only the most thorough players.

However, the other side of this debate was always quick to point out that the gossip stone doesn’t actually imply a connection at all and that believers were jumping to conclusions. The specific use of the word “reincarnation” is the greatest point of contention – specifically that, if Kaepora Gaebora is a reincarnation of Rauru, then they appear in the game in the wrong order. Reincarnation is a one-way street, and if Kaepora is a reincarnated sage at all, then the message is implying that he’s a reincarnation of someone from the past. The water is further muddied by the fact that Rauru, when we meet him, is already a senior. Only seven years pass while Link is sealed in the Sacred Realm, which means that, unless Rauru is only seven years old with artificial aging, he and Kaepora would’ve existed at the same time in the first half of the game.

Personally, I think the gossip stone’s message is little more than a red herring. It’s not only far from conclusive, but in my opinion it raises far more questions than it answers. The question we ought to be asking instead is, was this message written before or after Rauru’s role was scaled back? I can see an argument in either direction, really. If it was written before, then it could simply refer to another sage from another time, since the series in general has a running them of reincarnation and history repeating itself. If it was written afterward, then it may indeed have been intended to address why Rauru seems to come out of nowhere, but the poor choice of words causes it to cast doubt on itself.

Still, if in fact that’s the connection Nintendo was going for, it definitely landed with players. It was only natural for fans to wonder about Rauru, and maybe it was equally inevitable that they’d eventually tie him to Kaepora Gaebora, especially since one only appears in the past and the other only appears in the future. Any game that gets as popular as Ocarina of Time is going to come under a lot of scrutiny and result in plenty of fan theories, plus people have an innate desire to solve mysteries and make strange things make sense. The alleged connection between Rauru and Kaepora became one of those standard talking points that any fan was expected to have a stance on.

And yet, despite the massive amount of fan attention it garnered, the connection wasn’t yet part of the official canon in any capacity at that time. In fact, it wasn’t concretely confirmed until the release of the book Hyrule Historia in late 2011, five years after the release of Twilight Princess and 13 years after Ocarina of Time. In the book, it’s not only made official that Kaepora Gaebora is another form for Rauru, but as basilouija commented above, it indeed establishes that he’s an ancient being that personally built the Temple of Time.

I think the most interesting thing about the inclusion of this information isn’t the confirmation itself, but rather, it makes me wonder if Nintendo canonized it this way because there were so many popular rumors and theories among fans that just refused to go away. After all, if it was all intended to be canon from the start, why would they have waited over a decade to confirm it? Imagine what it must’ve been like to be in Nintendo’s shoes once these ideas took off: You can either try to explain that there was an entire section of the game that had to be eliminated and possibly upset the fanbase over the things they now know they should have had, or you can look at the ideas the fans came up with to explain the plot holes you were forced to leave behind and go, “Sure, that works.”

Confirming the fan theory not only does nothing to hurt the series, it also enriches it. Whether we like it or not, we’re never going to have the Light Temple in Ocarina of Time, so if there’s a way to explain the odd circumstances surrounding it, who could blame Nintendo for opting to canonize it? In doing so, the case is finally closed and fans that have held onto the theory for nearly a decade and a half can feel satisfied that they were right all along. Everybody wins!

Moving on, I got another great bit of feedback from user timestruehero. Their message reads:

“The idea of a temple of light at one time existing but then being cut is 100% truth. Originally, OoT was to be developed for the N64 disk drive, but since the add-on wasn’t doing so well, they switched gears to make it just a standard n64 game. Because of this, a TON of features and locales had to be cut. While we don’t know all of the details, we do at least know there was originally intended to be a Light Temple, but they had to cut it!”

The message also provided a link to this article concerning the history of the N64DD as a source. I read through the page, and while it does confirm things like Ocarina of Time originating on the disk drive and the fact that the final game does have some lingering bits of the original version floating around inside, nothing on the site itself specifically confirms that a Light Temple was planned and later cut. (Note that I’m not saying this page disproves it, just that it isn’t mentioned one way or the other.)

In any case, if Ocarina of Time was originally planned as a disk drive-only game and was moved to a standard N64 cartridge later in the process, that could potentially be the final piece of the puzzle to explain WHY the Light Temple is missing. I had always guessed it was time constraints, but Nintendo has demonstrated before that they’re willing to delay release dates, which always made that guess feel a little off. A data storage issue, on the other hand, makes perfect sense. There’s a massive difference in the amount of information each format can hold, so if the team had to downgrade, then something had to go. Reworking the Light Temple was probably the simplest way to save space, as it likely had the least amount of work done anyway due to the order of importance.

Interestingly, the article also touches on Ura Zelda, which I’ve thought about with relation to the Light Temple before but never in much detail. I always knew that it was meant to be an expansion for Ocarina of Time on the disk drive, but with the added context of OoT itself having been originally planned for the N64DD, it positions Ura Zelda as possibly having been meant to return the game to its former glory, rather than a simple enhancement. This just leads me to wonder if the Light Temple was actually cut not once, but twice. It’s no secret that the N64DD performed very poorly, and as a result Ura Zelda was never even finished; as it stands, the only way we’re able to see what they were doing at all is via Ocarina of Time: Master Quest, which came as a pre-order bonus for The Windwaker in 2002.

Master Quest plays almost in the vein of the traditional “second quest” that many Zelda games are known for. The base game is essentially the same, but the challenge factor is intended to be much higher – which, in this case, means redesigned dungeons. Everything else in the game is left as-is.

The fact that Ura Zelda was never truly finished is obvious as one plays through Master Quest, as the remixed dungeons can sometimes be a bit… wonky. For example, I ended up with an extra key in the Water Temple and one key short in the Spirit Temple, a discrepancy that I still have no explanation for to this day. In other cases I felt that the “harder” versions of the dungeons were actually easier than the originals! Does this mean that the dungeons were never quite completed, or that they were but hadn’t had a chance to undergo playtesting?

Regardless, I’ve wondered before whether or not the Light Temple might’ve been re-inserted into the game in full had Ura Zelda been properly completed. If they’re designing new dungeons anyway, why not take the opportunity to make use of their original plans? The term “ura” roughly translates to “back” or “reverse side,” which the article likens to the other side of a coin. This means that the title literally translates to, “The Other Side of Zelda.” If the intent was to show us the “other side” of Ocarina of Time, perhaps that could’ve meant giving us its original designs. Including a Light Temple and its related story beats definitely would’ve given us the other side of the story.

But then, if I’m going to speculate at all, I may as well go big: There’s a part of me that can’t help but wonder if there are whispers of the Light Temple in the new dungeons that we DID get. There’s no telling how much work was or wasn’t completed on the Light Temple before it was allegedly cut; maybe they’d done nothing yet, or maybe they already had the whole thing planned and had started building. If the dev team had completed some (or all) of the Light Temple before moving Ocarina of Time away from the disk drive, it would make sense to reuse those designs already at their disposal when later revamping the dungeons in Ura Zelda. It’d be a shame to let that work go to waste, and it’d save a ton of time and money. I seriously wonder if some or all of the new dungeon designs contain remnants of what remained of the Light Temple. Perhaps we’ve been able to play our beloved lost level all this time, but we never realized it.

Now THAT would be the ultimate plot twist – probably the best note I could ever end this saga on!

 

Obligatory Legal Crap

The Legend of Zelda and all related characters and games (even the ones that never got finished) are © Nintendo. I would also like to extend my thanks to basilouija and timestruehero for sending in such great letters, since they gave me the opportunity to ramble even more about this topic. I mean seriously, the last article was eight fucking pages, and this one came out to four. Do you have any idea how many people WOULDN’T have finished the last one if it was 50% longer? That’s why you’ve gotta break it up like this sometimes, man.

Anyway I digress. Don’t sue me, Nintendo.