How Impa Jumped from Background Lore to the Zelda In-Game Canon
When I was a kid, the information I read in video game instruction manuals felt sacred. I subscribed to gaming magazines, sure, but I was aware on some level that the people who wrote those were different from the ones who actually made the games. The people who wrote the manuals had insight that, in my young mind, could not be denied. Were this true, however, then the games of NES era would have played out differently. Mega Man would have lived in Monsteropolis, for example. The big bad of Castlevania would not be Dracula but more generally just The Count, as if public domain weren’t a thing. And an important story element in Super Mario Bros. would have been field horsehair plants, whatever the hell those are.
This was not the case, and much later in life I’d learn that my version of these little rectangular booklets was not actually written by the people who made the game. No, more often than not, a whole different group of people would translate, adjust and sometimes just full on fanfic their way through the original text in an effort to make it make sense to non-Japanese-speaking gamers. Depending on the company, these bits of allegedly official information were not always to be trusted.
In writing the previous post about Ganon, I realized the Legend of Zelda games worked a little differently. For example, the name for Ganon’s non-piggy form, Ganondorf, debuted in Ocarina of Time but had technically appeared seven years before in the instruction manual to A Link to the Past. It’s almost as if the lore for the Zelda series was building behind the scenes at Nintendo’s Japanese headquarters, and the booklet that came with this one game allowed us to get a glimpse of the larger story before the games weren’t showing us yet. That’s not the only example of this happening — specifically in the Zelda games — and a story about a stranger version of this phenomenon started out as an entry in the previous posts’s miscellaneous bits section before it grew into the larger thing you’re reading now.
To segue into it, a transition that I’d imagine few people have ever uttered: “Hey, gang, who wants to talk about Impa?”
If you asked most casual Zelda fans when Impa debuted in the series, they’d probably say that she, like Ganondorf, debuted in Ocarina of Time. They’d be right, and it’s quite a debut. A tall and strikingly muscled woman, Impa rocks a mean pair of purple bike shorts and a short, slicked-back ponytail. In a game full of female characters who seem like they have eyes for Link, Impa seems like one of the least likely to have a crush on our hero. She’s much more concerned with the welfare of young Princess Zelda, as she’s her attendant, bodyguard and, given how she teaches Link Zelda’s lullaby, perhaps her nanny as well? Even when the game jumps seven years forward in time, Impa still towers over Link, and it seems likely that she could take him in a fight if she so chose.
Impa is one of the more important characters in Ocarina of Time, as it turns out, and although she would not return for The Wind Waker or Twilight Princess, she would play a prominent role in several subsequent games.
Her appearance in Ocarina of Time makes her actual, technical debut in the series all the stranger, however, especially considering that she’s been there from the beginning, more or less, even if you never see her. She’s actually a character in the original Legend of Zelda instruction manual, and she’s identified as Zelda’s nursemaid. Once the princess is captured by Ganon, Zelda sends Impa off on a solo quest to find a hero strong enough to fight him. So basically before the first of Link’s adventures, Impa has one of her own, without a sword. It’s basically the opening sequence with the midwife in Willow, only Willow opened in theaters three years after Zelda debuted — and Impa doesn’t get ripped apart by wild dogs.
Here’s how the English manual sets up the prologue.
Overlaying text onto a graphic backround was apparently still new technology in 1987, so if you’re having trouble reading it, it’s reprinted here.
The next page shows an illustration of Link aiding poor old Impa, and the accompanying text implies that the information in the booklet is more or less the information Impa gave Link, which is a cute touch. But that’s the end of Impa in the first Legend of Zelda. Throughout the game, Link meets a good number of hobbled old ladies who live in caves, but none are explicitly identified as being Impa. As far as we know, she only shows up in the instruction booklet and not in the actual game.
Nonetheless, Impa is given greater prominence in Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, where she explains how Ganon might come back and also how there are two separate Princesses Zelda. (It’s really complicated, but yeah — the Zelda you rescue at the end of the first game doesn’t make an appearance in the second one, and instead you’re working to revive that Zelda’s ancestor, who is also Princess Zelda.) Impa is the one who sets the second adventure into motion.
Once again, Impa does not appear in the actual game, and that’s weird, given that the scope of the sequel is a lot bigger than the original and it features multiple towns populated by characters Link can talk to. Link meets many hobbled old ladies in this game, but apparently none of the is Impa. She at least gets a mention in the opening prologue, however.
Impa sits out the next eleven years before returning in Ocarina of Time as a younger and more physically imposing character. And while she does not appear consistently in every mainline Zelda title, she’s one of the more prominent recurring characters — and easily the most prominent female one. In Skyward Sword, she appears in both youthful and aged forms, thanks to time travel but also as a nod to the fact that both the old and young versions of her are part of the Zelda canon. And while she appears only as an older woman in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, the spinoff Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity takes place in the same continuity but an earlier time period as these games, so she’s young again. I just think it’s cool that she gets to be young or old, depending on the game, and sometimes she gets to be both.
I’m struggling to think of another character who made the jump like Impa did: from so far behind the sidelines that she only appeared in the instruction manuals to a prominent character you actually get to play as sometimes. Maybe Gouken, Ryu and Ken’s master from the Street Fighter series, who had been an unseen figure in various characters’ backstory only to finally become playable in Street Fighter IV? But as unusual as Impa’s leap to prominence in this franchise is, it’s not the only time a Zelda manual offered up something that ended up becoming a major part of the franchise.
To go back to the Zelda II manual and its bizarrely convoluted backstory of the two Princesses Zelda, Impa tells Link that generations ago in the Hyrule royal family, the original Princess Zelda was put into an eternal sleep by her spiteful prick of a brother. This prince goes unnamed but his design really tells you everything you need to know about him: He is a spoiled, vicious brat. Speaking as a gay man, I have to admit that it’s really hard not to read this prince as one of video game history’s unsung gay villains.
Think “Little Lord Fauntleroy gone very, very bad,” in a way that make me wish he’d become playable in a Zelda title, whip and all. Maybe for the next Hyrule Warriors?
What’s really interesting about his design is the fact that an evil wizard, also unnamed, is apparently merged with his shadow, because this is the first instance of a plot pattern running throughout later Zelda games. As stated in the manual, the prince is consumed with jealousy when he learns that his late father willed him everything except the whole of the Triforce; he only got part of it. (Neither the English nor the original Japanese specifies if this means only fragments of one Triforce or only one Triforce of the three-piece set.) An evil wizard tells him that the king bestowed the remaining Triforce elements on Princess Zelda I, and so the prince tries to get her to reveal what she knows, even threathening a sleeping spell. In the end, it’s the wizard who puts her under, even when the prince seems to want to hold off. Apparently sobered by grief, the prince places Zelda I on display, more or less Snow White-style, in the North Castle. He also decrees that every female child born into the Hyrule royal family should be named Zelda. Link begins his second quest in the North Castle, beneath the platform displaying the sleeping princess.
The evil wizard is not identified with Ganon and as far as I know, he’s not supposed to be, but the relationship between the wizard and the prince does foreshadow the way Ganon uses intermediaries or avatars to commit his evil deeds when he’s not physically able to. For example, in a Link to the Past, the primary antagonist through the first part of the game is Aghanim, a wizard who similarly uses his position as an advisor to the king to manipulate events to benefit Ganon, who’s trapped in an alternate dimension. (Later, Ganon fully admits that Aghanim was his alter ego all along.) Zant in Twilight Princess and Yuga in A Link Between Worlds serve similar roles in their games. They perhaps have more autonomy than Aghanim has, but in the end all three are just henchmen in the service of their master, arranging the chessboard so that the odds are stacked in Ganon’s favor.
I don’t think that the story about the prince and the wizard in the Legend of Zelda II manual is the creators hinting at what’s to come so much as toying with a background lore idea that someone liked enough to incorporate in more prominent ways in later games. It’s foreshadowing, I suppose, but it’s also proof that the people who make the games we love are attached to certain ideas that they want to implement in the best possible way.
To me, it’s surprising to see how a basic concept can be approached and reapproached years later, whether that’s the idea of a mysterious magician who might be more than he seems or Princess Zelda’s right-hand woman getting a major level-up in her in-game duties. But it makes me really interested what always-in-the-background elements from my favorite video game series might one day be brought to the forefront in a way I never imagined.
Miscellaneous Notes
I had Impa on my bedsheets when I was a kid! That seems weird to think about now, but at some point I was given sheets that had a Mario/Zelda pattern on them. Every character looked off-model, and I remember Link in particular looked like Charles Bronson. All the images were clearly derived from the official Nintendo art available for the original Super Mario Bros. and Legend of Zelda only, and because Zelda was one of the few humans appearing in that art, I guess whoever was in charge of making this happen decided that she should appear? And as a result, some kids got Impa on their sheets.
I slept with Impa every night! These sheets were… not particularly comfortable, in addition to being off-model. The early 90s were a great but strange time to be a child who liked video games. (Image via.)
Regarding Aghanim’s status as Ganon’s alterago or emissary or whatever, in the Ganon-focus Retronauts episode I was a guest on, Diamond Feit explained that the Japanese term is bunshin, 分身, which can mean “alter ego” but also a sort of magical clone used to distract or confuse an opponent. Oddly enough, this is exactly what Aghanim does when Link fights him, splitting off into doppelgangers in an effort to confuse. So Aghanim is a bunshin who uses bunshin, which is either confusing or appropriate depending on how you look at it.
To be clear, I did not write this post to say that the instruction manuals for the Zelda games were innocent of having bad or misleading info. Famously, the first one alleges that one dungeon enemy, the Pols Voice, hates “loud noises,” which might make you think that it’s vulnerable to the recorder, the musical instrument item otherwise used to summon a teleportation whirlwind. It’s not. This is actually a hint for those playing the game on their Famicom to shout into the microphone on the second controller, which did not exist on the counterpart Nintendo Entertainment System. The text of the English manual was not updated to reflect this. (Also, this is not to be confused with the boss enemy Digdogger, which was vulnerable to the recorder as a result of a deep cut reference to Clu Clu Land.)
While I’m on the subject of the Pols Voice, a rabbit-looking whatchamacallit whose oversized ears are a hint to its original weakness, I want to point out that no one knows where this enemy’s name is supposed to come from. The English name is clearly drawn directly from the Japanese one (ポルスボイス, Porusu Boisu), and I can make nothing of this. Apparently no one else has either.
One way Impa is an outlier in Ocarina of Time is that she turns out to be one of the six sages whose combined power can seal away Ganon, but she’s the only one not to share a name with one of the towns in Zelda II. Rauru, Saria, Darunia, Ruto and Nabooru are all locations Link can visit in that game — but there’s no Impa in the game outside of the title screen prologue, to say nothing of an Impa Town. Weirdly, there are also two towns not named for sages — Mido and Kausto — so there were more than enough town names to go around. For what it’s worth, Impa is also the only one of the sages to have the origin of her name explicitly stated by people who worked on the Zelda games. In the forward in Hyrule Historia, Shigeru Miyamoto says Impa’s name (インパ , Inpa) comes from the word impart, which is what she does to kick off the events of the first two games.
