Like many children of the 80s, my first exposure to the world of role-playing games was “The Legend of Zelda". Differentiated from other games by virtue of its shiny gold cartridge, Zelda (as most people called it) was the "must-have" item with my friends for Christmas 1988 - primarily because the nature of the game essentially necessitated you having your own cartridge to play yourself, as it was torture trying to convince your friend to let you play with his character and potentially sabotage his quest.
Though more of an action-adventure game with RPG elements than a true RPG, Zelda closely followed the typical hero quest formula: namely a hero sets out to accomplish a goal while forces work to help or hinder this individual (in this case an elf named Link) in the achievement of said goal (Krzywinska 386). A common theme within such games involves the need to rescue a princess from the clutches of an evil tyrant, with the tyrant and his minions posing a series of challenges on route to the realization of the hero's ultimate goal. Zelda was no different in this regard, as Link was required to travel across the land of Hyrule in order to save Princess Zelda from the evil Ganon – pretty basic stuff, but thoroughly captivating to my eight-year-old self.
While thematically not all that different from something like Super Mario Brothers (wherein Mario needs to save Princess Toadstool from Bowser), The Legend of Zelda offered players a different form of player agency at the time - primarily the ability to collect and use inventory items to solve puzzles and complete levels, as opposed to the fundamentally linear gameplay experience titles such as Super Mario Brothers offered. This offered players a greater degree of freedom within gameplay, as inventory items could be used in any number of ways, rightly or wrongly, within the confines of the game itself, and players were free to explore the game world as they saw fit (meaning there was no set order that the game world needed to be experienced in).
This increased agency would ultimately give rise to the notion of open world games such as Grand Theft Auto, as designers constructed worlds in which players were freed of any sort of constraints upon gameplay as they interacted with the game world largely as they would the material world. An interesting phenomenon that emerged from the development of these open world games was a corresponding rise in the number of video parodies it generated – primarily created by video game fans who sought to explore how life in the material world would be different if governed by the rules of their favourite video game.
"The Legend of Neil" represents one such parody, though it subverts the notion of "life as a video game" slightly to become "life in a video game" (as Neil is actually transported into the game itself and forced to abide by its rules as opposed to having the physical world bend to the rules of a video game). Using "The Legend of Zelda" as it's thematic basis, "The Legend of Neil" combines a faithful rendition of Zelda's gameplay (throwing boomerangs, placing bombs, shoving rocks to reveal caves) with issues lifted from contemporary society (race/gender relations, relationship issues, office hierarchies) to create something which is at once fantastical and grounded in reality. Despite the fact that Neil (playing as Link) is forced to abide by the rules of gameplay and complete quests to rescue Princess Zelda as though he were an agent controlled by another player, the human element he brings to the gameplay (lamenting how heavy his inventory items are to carry, greeting each new challenge with alternating doses of apprehension and sarcasm) provokes the viewer to re-examine the original game in different light.
Interestingly though, in exclusively adopting Neil's point of view "The Legend of Neil" effectively stays true to the nature of "The Legend of Zelda", wherein game play is centered around one individual's experience of Hyrule, interacting with a fairly two-dimensional supporting cast who aid Neil in moving through gameplay (most being caricatures representative of assorted stereotypes: The Fairy is like a clingy ex-girlfriend, while Ganon resembles the incompetent office manager). While the other characters within the parody interact with Neil as he moves through the game world, his perspective remains uniquely three-dimensional, as each time he strays from the standard dialogue/rules of the game he is greeted with confusion on behalf of the other characters. Just as a player may shout at an on-screen character when they don't know what activity to undertake next, so too do Neil's outbursts and utterances serve a similarly futile purpose – the game neither acknowledges nor understands him, and continues to behave in accordance with its governing rules. By "living inside a video game", Neil is thus constrained by the communicative and interactive structures the game affords - and it's within his responses to these constraints that much of the comedy within the show itself is generated. Dealing with the nuances of the video game world in a manner that is by turns ironic and self-referential, “The Legend of Neil” challenges the remaining linearity within Zelda’s gameplay, while at the same time drawing attention to particular events within the gameplay to highlight the arbitrary nature of the game’s governing set of rules.
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