Thankful It's Over: Tri Force Heroes and Family Dysfunction

The approaching Thanksgiving season has me thinking about the good old days when my family felt complete. As with most things in my brain, many of these memories are inextricably tied to videogames. One of my earliest family gaming-related memories is of sitting in my family’s humble heartland-of-America living room with my parents and sister, swapping a Super Nintendo controller in between levels of Super Mario Bros. 2. Whoever was playing at a given moment was in the hot seat, both literally and figuratively since we… well we took turns using a heated foot-jacuzzi at the same time.

Look, I’m self-aware enough to know that’s a little gross. It probably seems unnecessary to even mention in a story about games, but I was a little kid and I thought it was just a normal thing to do. Anyway it’s definitely going to pay off later in the story, so just deal with the mental image of my clan’s sweaty hooves stewing in a cauldron of filth. Okay?

You love these people and probably spend a great deal of time with them. Even so, you find yourself regularly swearing to god that the next time they pull something so stupid you’ll throttle the life out of their miserable eyes. It’s often said that the star-stealing shenanigans of Mario Party are the quickest way to make a group of friends hate one another. While true, this pales in comparison to Tri Force’s ability to assemble friends into makeshift families with one hand and slap them each in the face with the other.

Speaking of cartoonish violence, the weapons add another layer of maddening chaos to the mix. Imagine how much more you’d have hated your dad had he constantly thrown huge bombs into your hands with no warning. Picture skimming for coins at the bottom of a lake while your sister uses her magical Water Rod to keep you from diving. I’m not going to wander into the dirty-joke minefield of recontextualizing the Gust Jar--used to literally blow people off--into a family-based anecdote. Don’t even ask.

Hell, the game’s emoticon-based chat system effectively approximates the inevitable breakdown of communication between people who simply don’t possess the right tools to articulate their needs. When your dad screams at you to shut up so he can hear the television better, that’s probably just because his brain doesn’t have an icon labelled ‘this program is very enjoyable to me and I would appreciate you keeping the noise down’. Red Link may seem like he’s not even trying to help when he stand near a switch and shouts ‘ITEM’ repeatedly, but in reality the game is sorely lacking for a ‘pick me up so I can use my Fire Gloves on this torch you dumb bastard’ button.

Rather than sharing a foot-bath, my friends and I pass blunts between rounds. Though the physical air hangs heavy with skunky smoke instead of funky-foot steam, the metaphorical air is thick with a familiar mixture of frustration, relaxation, and plain ol’ fun.

I’d be lying if I said that the novelty of recreating this long-lost sensation isn’t one of the primary causes of my affection for The Legend of Zelda: Tri Force Heroes. The game is deeply flawed, and hardly stacks up with most Nintendo classics in sheer merits, but there’s little more important to me than how a game makes me feel while playing it. Like a totem of technicolor heroes lifting one another over cliffs, the nostalgia alone lifts my spirits to heights normally inaccessible.

At least until the next time Blue Link dies after we’ve already beaten the boss. You know, on second thought, fuck family.

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