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I played Link's Awakening with my wife and daughter. My wife was taken back at the ending (surprised, not disliking). I think she basically just assumed the whole time that it wouldn't end with everyone on Koholint basically dying, or vanishing from existence.
This got me thinking about how I played this, or watched my brother play it, when I was the same age as my daughter. None of the media she consumes challenges her with difficult endings. Everything HAS to return to the status quo at the end, because we can't risk anyone being unhappy. In Frozen, Anna is unfrozen. In Moana, even Maui gets his fucking hook back after it breaks. Fake out deaths and fake out status quo changes happen left and right, but it is really rare to see something that actually sticks.
I love downer endings, and I think it made me who I am. It makes me sad and disappointed and a little disgusted to see basically all of the media of my kids' day be bland and not challenging them to really feel something other than a vague blandly happy dance party ending. Dance party endings aren't new, but have been made ubiquitous in the past 20 years. Same with fake out deaths, and I blame Marvel for that. I guess I personally chalk this all up to the general trend towards never making anyone uncomfortable, which is tied in with the corporatization of media and corporate-memphization of media.
It's been a long time since I played Link's Awakening, but I seem to recall it's not so much a downer ending as a "Buddhist" ending. To read it as "everyone dies at the end" is to impose a Western (Christian) lens on the story which is not present in the original.
If we're going to extrapolate a trend, maybe its that in the '90s there was more media being produced in Japan with distinctively Japanese cultural assumptions, since it was aimed primarily at domestic audiences, and the translation into English was only an afterthought.
Interesting. What do you think is Buddhist about it? To be fair, I am Western, so I will always end up imposing some sort of a lens on that. There's a lot of western media and philosophy about dreams too, though.
It makes me think of the famous Iroha poem:
Then we have the "Nightmares", which grow increasingly aggressive as you get closer to waking the Wind Fish. These represent attachments, which try to keep you trapped in the world of maya.
(Importantly, in the game, death is not the same as nirvana. Death just reincarnates you back into the world of illusion, and is an obstacle on your path to awakening.)
And also, something about the eight instruments of the Wind Fish and the Noble Eightfold Path? (OK, maybe this is a stretch.)
I won't go so far as to say that the game is "preaching" a Buddhist message. It just seems like its overall narrative speaks to a culture with Buddhist background assumptions, in the same way that (to take an example mentioned below) The Land Before Time is not exactly a "Christian" story, but the overall "sacrifice → tribulation → paradise" theme is one that Western audiences will understand instinctively because of their Christian background.
Haha, I like that and I'd kinda buy it. The first Zelda game has 8 pieces of the triforce of wisdom, second has the 6 crystals for the palaces, third has the 3 pendants and 7 maidens, and this has 8 again.
There are only a few small numbers that a game can use. Seeing meaning in the numbers is pareidolia unless there's a lot more and the numbers are just a tiny bit of it.
Such as the old Ultima series, which invented an elaborate system of 3 core principles that combine into 8 virtues, and built the entire world and all the plot around it.
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