The musical palette and gameplay format of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is significantly different from earlier games in the Legend of Zelda series. The unique narrative organization of this game interacts with the different musical style to suggest a new mode of storytelling within the franchise. This article examines the narrative structure of Breath of the Wild , then groups various contrasting musical elements into emerging topics that are key elements within the game’s narrative structure. In particular, the mechanistic topic is tied to ancient technology, while a contrasting nature topic denotes the living creatures of the gameworld. These topical cues give players important information about their in-game surroundings by linking locations, characters, and events through a completely player-driven narrative discourse.

The interactive drama, a relatively unexplored area of multimedia music discourse, combines elements of film and video game to provide its audience and participants an evolving experience. Because contemporary works of the medium incorporate further innovations that expand the plethora of branching options, the viability of each narrative path and its potential ending necessitates a flexible analytical model for narrative discourse. Music, if it shares the ability to participate in the narrative, must likewise possess this sense of malleability for the work, as its presence or absence in the presented (selected) pathway is not predetermined but remains in a state of potential at all times. This sense of narrative potential for music is a special quality inherent in the interactive drama, allowing for the filmic and ludic qualities of form and function to remain simultaneously “present” and “absent” in a given narrative and provide critical commentary on the events at hand as well as the overall prospective paths that exist in the web of options. Using the interactive drama Until Dawn , this article will explore the concept of narrative potential through three different musical elements that range in their comparative functions to traditionally filmic or ludic roles and their articulation to the underlying narrative. Regardless of supposed function, the music of Until Dawn reveals that narrative form and function of film and video game cannot be differentiated or simply synthesized, but fully appreciated as a unique form of the interactive drama on the multimedia continuum.

This article discusses fan adaptations of music from The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask (2000), arguing that the creators of these adaptations pick up on semiotic meaning in the game’s original music and maintain this meaning while changing some structural features of the music to place the original pieces into new stylistic and generic contexts. The musical meaning in the works is sometimes subtle, but it can be determined through a combination of semiotic and hermeneutic methods. In both the original soundtrack and the adaptations, the meaning of the music is also tied to the in-game narrative context associated with it, which is often sad or anxious in emotional character. Remaking the music into adaptations helps fans of the game contextualize the meaning in new ways and understand how it relates to their own social and emotional circumstances. The adaptations help fans with “world building” and “organizing social life.” 1 After an overview of Majora’s Mask that situates it within Nintendo’s corpus, the Zelda series and its fandom, and composer Koji Kondo’s oeuvre, the article discusses and analyzes multiple adaptations of three specific pieces from the game: “Clock Town,” “Song of Healing,” and “Stone Tower Temple.” The adaptations discussed include amateur remixes and mashups, professional studio productions, covers in different genres, and a full-length opera by composer M. Bulteau. When making this new content, creators “wear people’s faces” (like the protagonist Link does with masks in the game) by taking on the emotional meaning of the works and putting it into new contexts that imitate, but do not replicate, the original music.