Tri the Force, Luke
December 18th, 2005 at 8:53 pm

With the exception of the Four Swords series and the more tangential Zelda games (like Awakening and Majora), the centre of the Zelda universe—the common bond (aside from Link) that ties everything together—of course, is the Triforce. You’ve got three sacred equilateral triangles of pure gold, but that’s not the big part of it. There’s a deep magic embedded within this relic, and, in a way, it’s a lot like that genie in the lamp from Aladdin (only the Triforce doesn’t have Robin Williams’ sense of humour). The Triforce has the power to make your darkest and most secretive wishes come true, the power to restore time, to cheat death, and to take over the world. (”Triangle Man, Triangle Man. / Triangle Man hates Particle Man. / They have a fight, Triangle wins. / Triangle Man.”)

From our experience in the many games that do have the Triforce, we’ve learned quite a bit more about the Triforce than was initially conceived of back in Legend of Zelda and Adventure of Link. Triforces can be split into many pieces at the wish of its owner (LoZ and WW), Triforces can leave the boundaries of Hyrule (AoL), the Triforce passes to the victor of a battle after the owner is defeated (LttP), the Triforce can be broken into its three components (OoT), the Triforce can be willingly left behind (MM), the Triforce pieces can be taken from its owners without killing them (WW), and… the Triforce can indeed talk… and move, as if it were a living, breathing entity (OoA and OoS). I mean, think about how much stuff is here; could anyone forsee even 90 percent of that back when the first Zelda came out. The Triforce, being all 1337 and magical and omnipotent and stuff, sort of became the deus ex machina when something needed to happen. It became the most manipulated tool of the games for through it any possible plot that the developers needed to have happen became possible once you messed around with what the Triforce was.

At a deeper level, this is one of the reasons why a Zelda timeline is so difficult to come by. Just in the span of seven games (technically twelve, but five of which don’t even dare to even breathe the word Triforce), rules upon rules intermixed with exceptions to the rules and exceptions to the exceptions of the rules have been heaped atop the initial concept of the Triforce so high that even Death Mountain looks like an anthill. This is one of the reasons why I’m this shy of being a timeline nihilist: At every step in the cycle, some fact that everyone seemed to take for granted gets changed by some developer.

Take the Oracle games. The Oracles brought about the biggest change in thought to the Triforce to date, the notion that the Triforce might indeed be sentient. Now we’ve heard time after time again that the Triforce doesn’t know the difference between good and evil; it robotically does whatever its master craves, and that’s the end of it, right? Wrong. At the beginning of the Oracles, regardless of which you start, you see Link coming into this temple, and the Triforce says unto Link, “Accept our quest, hero!” Uhm, what? (Why aren’t you granting my wishes and then shutting up like I’ve wanted Navi to do for years? An annoying fairy is bad enough, but you too!?) Here we see the Triforce wanting something. The Triforce suddenly has motives… an objective to complete. It wants an evil Link doesn’t even know about to be stopped. This isn’t the old-school Triforce we once knew and loved; this makes the Triforce look like Averagejoe Character. Then, at the end of the game when Link is safely home, you see the Triforce come onto the screen, jump up into the sky, and transform itself into birds of some variety. To quote Link, “….” I’m surprised this didn’t kill the hero in the sheer shock of the event.

No other game validates these traits of the Triforce, yet it’s still “canon”. And what happens to all those people who try to figure out all the nuanced details of the Zelda games, the so-called “Zelda experts”? Well, their jaws all drop in unison as they try to explain it. Canon just shot a cannonball (or would it be a canon-ball?) through all sanity. The fabric of space-time is ripped open. Chaos and paradox reign supreme. Gozilla ransacks Tokyo again, little kittens and puppies die, and Pokémon suddenly becomes loved by all gamers. It’s not a pretty sight. This is precisely why those timeline debates should carry one of these:

SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING: Timeline debates has been known to cause cancer in laboratory Cuccos. Other side effects incluse nausea, diarrhea, vomiting, excessive fanboy-/fangirlism, and death. Please consult your doctor before using.

The only “logical” conclusion is that we don’t and can’t know everything there is to know about the Triforce (as well as other details of the Zeldaverse). Is the Essence of the Triforce intelligent? Can the Triforce be destroyed? Can the Triforce turn into a pail of ice water? Can the Triforce do my chores? Can the Triforce insult my mother? Is there a good recipe for Triforce Stew? None of these questions can ever be answered unless we see them in a game, and even then the results and outcomes of the so-called canon will be argued over until Ganondorf comes up with a decent plan to take over Hyrule. Sigh.

However, just to really emphasise my point (and to cause a good number of people to throw down their controllers at me in disgust; I’m feeling particularly dangerous today), let me rub an old, sore wound of the community about the Zelda series. Let’s talk about yet another of the most vicious debates I’ve ever seen discussed: the Quadraforce.

“TML, is there a fourth Triforce?”

Ah, my friends, if only I could answer that with a quick “Yes, Virginia” or “No, Virginia” reply. The obvious answer, the answer perhaps 95 percent of you would agree with, is no. “There’s never been a fourth Triforce! There are three goddesses, each with their own Triforce! We saw that in Ocarina! And ‘tri-’ means three! It must be so!” Of course, the 95 percent is very well accustomed to what the 5 percent has to say on the matter. “But ‘tri-’ could mean ‘triangle’ for three sides. And they did mention the Goddess of Time! And there’s the upside-down triangle on Link’s shield! Beat them rupees!” Back and forth you guys would bicker, and while it would pass the time until Twilight came out, Sam the Cucco would get its feathers dirty because of the bloodbath, and giving him a bath is less fun than going on a date with a Lizalfos, so let me bypass that and give you the answer, since I happen to know it.

The answer is maybe.

Are those groans I hear? I thought so, but before any of you jump down to the comments section to write me a new one, hear me out on this. I particularly do not care what they mean by “tri-”. I do not particularly care what Miyamoto thought back in the mid ’80s. I do not care what the upside-down triangle means. I don’t care if the Goddess of Time is real or not. The future, as we’ve seen before, is mutable; just because something happened back then does not mean it’s forever constant and assumed true, especially in the Zelda series. There is no one in this room (er… at these buffet tables?) that could convince me that Aonuma would never consider the possibility of making a fourth Triforce. Even if you could, once Aonuma moves away from Zelda, there’s going to be someone else in charge… and then someone else… and someone else… and eventually someone might decide that there shalt be Triforce Four, and poof, all the naysayers would be proven wrong. I think the odds of that happening are small, but Heisenberg and Murphy have a way of mucking up probability and sanity when you least expect it.

Personally, if you ask me, if there were to be such a Quadraforce, rather than “filling in the hole” of the Triforce, I think that it would look something like this. (And yes, you can trust the executable in there. I coded it myself; it’s a simple OpenGL application. And for those of you who don’t trust Uncle TML, there’s always these guys who’ll vouch for me.) Granted, I don’t think we’ll ever see it come, and I don’t think anyone who believes there are only three is some evil Gerudo villain, but there’s always that chance that what we never believed could happen to Zelda will happen. After all, if Nintendo can have a Revolution, so too might a revolution in Hyrule happen as well.

Written by The Missing Link

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