Some are outrageously moustache-twirling, while others are strange loners, community linchpins, honest hardworking citizens or bumbling goofs. Twin Peaks channels much of the ‘50s nostalgia and surreal brutality of Lynch’s Blue Velvet into an ongoing narrative told as FBI Agent Dale Cooper arrives in the eponymous North Western town to investigate the murder of homecoming queen Laura Palmer and is drawn into the interweaving lives of a large cast of townsfolk. However, despite being of no fixed genre, it had a single question which punctured the confusion and hooked a huge mainstream audience: Who killed Laura Palmer? Lynch takes the viewer on a journey between picture-postcard Douglas fir trees and nightmarish horrors in suburban houses from the mundanity of diners and high schools to surreal red-curtained waiting rooms with zig-zag flooring populated by maniacal doppelgangers and beings who talk backwards. Okay, scrap that - there's an argument for it being part-musical, too. although music is utterly integral, and characters aren't beyond breaking into song. Part-supernatural procedural that inspired things like The X-Files, it's also melodramatic soap opera, surrealist comedy, psychological horror, philosophical farce, feel-good nostalgia trip - in fact, it might be quicker to say what it isn't. That reductive label, though, hardly does it justice the show is a synthesis of practically every genre imaginable and defies easy categorisation. So when it came to The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, I wanted to make something that, while it would be small enough in scope to easily understand, it would have deep and distinctive characteristics.įor anybody not familiar with Twin Peaks, the TV show premiered in 1990 and could legitimately be described a dozen different ways, but let’s start with surreal murder-mystery serial. The drama was all about a small number of characters in a small town. Odd characters have been a feature from the beginning of the series ( Zelda II, for example, had plenty of enigmatic, unusual folk residing in its villages), but it wasn’t until the fourth entry in the series that the developers consciously added what Tezuka called ‘suspicious types’:Īt the time, Twin Peaks was rather popular. We’re approaching an incredible twenty games in the mainline series now and we’ve grown accustomed to the quirky and oftentimes sinister bit players that give Hyrule a very unique texture in the canon of video game kingdoms. Broadcast in Japan as development began, David Lynch and Mark Frost's hugely influential and bizarre series was as popular there as it was in the West and Tezuka was keen to infuse some of its idyllic small-town flavour and surrealism into his diminutive Game Boy title. In an Iwata Asks interview on the topic of The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks, director Takashi Tezuka was reminded of his desire to build a world of characters inspired by Twin Peaks when he set about creating the original Link’s Awakening in the early '90s. The developers have noted the conscious influence of David Lynch on the 1993 Game Boy original, so it follows that the writer/director/artist has left a lasting impression on the series as a whole. The first portable entry in the celebrated series, this diminutive adventure would go on to influence every Zelda game to come with its otherworldly, dreamlike sense of place and motley crew of oddballs. As many of you will have been reminded by playing the recently released remake on Switch, The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening is a surreal little adventure with an odd cast of characters which give Koholint Island a very specific feel.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |