Tools of the Trade: Link’s Greatest Gadgets

One of the best parts of any game experience is the different gadgets and weapons you get to play with along the way. Perhaps no franchise better embodies this idea than the Legend of Zelda series; each dungeon presents a new treasure to uncover and subsequently use to either defeat the boss or reach your next challenge. Since my love for this series is already well documented, we can skip past the praise-lavishing and get straight to the good stuff: my list, in no particular order, of some of the best Zelda weapons and gadgets of all time. I’ll try and forgo some of the more iconic choices, i.e. the Master Sword, on the assumption that you and I both know that the Master Sword owns you.

• Butterfly Net – I know, I know, seems like a lame way to start out a list of supposedly badass things, right? Wrong. This thing saved my butt in Link to the Past more times than I can remember, and for one reason only: fairies. Snag a fairy in your net, stick it in a bottle, and presto! Instant do-over whenever you die. Don’t leave home without it.
• Whistle – Yes, you read that correctly. Whistle, not Ocarina. Yes, the Ocarina of Time is awesome, and lets you do awesome things. But in Link’s very first adventure, the Whistle not only weakened his opponents, but its haunting melody created a whirlwind that took Link to the doorstep of any dungeon he’d already completed. Not bad for 1986.



• Pegasus Boots – This set of fancy footwear gave Link the ability to dash at high speeds into enemies or smash certain objects. For me, it was really just an excuse to run him full-tilt into walls over, and over, and over again.
• Fairy Spell – In Link’s lesser-known second adventure, The Adventure of Link, you learn several magical spells during the course of your journey. One of them, the Fairy Spell, turned Link into one of the franchise’s abundant fairies. This allowed him, among other things, to fly through the keyholes of locked doors. Insert your own “Link becomes a fairy” joke here. Honorable mention goes here to the incredibly named spell “Spell,” which turned some of Link’s enemies into little blobs. Good stuff.



• Biggoron’s Sword – While the Master Sword is all well and good, in Ocarina of Time, Link’s most critically acclaimed adventure, you had the opportunity to wield Biggoron’s Sword, a two-hander that was roughly the size of Link himself. This also carried with it the inability to use Link’s trademark shield, forcing you to be quick with your sidesteps and backflips to avoid damage.



• Hookshot – Easily the coolest tool among Link’s admirable arsenal of gadgets, the hookshot gave Link the ability to pull distant objects toward him or latch onto stationary objects and fling himself to them. While this was great fun in two dimensions in Link to the Past, the hookshot really came into its own in the three-dimensional, sixty-four-bit glory of Ocarina of Time. The gameplay mechanic of the hookshot was taken to new extremes in Link’s Wii adventure, Twilight Princess. The trademark hook was replaced with a claw for the newly re-dubbed clawshot, but the really cool part was when you acquired a second clawshot, amping up the platforming and puzzle possibilities.

  There you go, some of my personal favorites. Please, throw out some of your own choices! But no griefing for omitting the boomerang, or bow and arrow, or bombs, or any other ridiculously obvious selection.