The Town of Saria

The Spell of Life

The Town of Saria is simply enormous, spanning three screens.  For any town across the entire series, this is large, and to be honest, unnecessary.  Saria is one of my least favorite spots to visit because little to none of the villagers say anything interesting (they all comment on how you should save Hyrule, how they know nothing or how you should be paranoid) and this town introduces fake townspeople: when you talk to some of the dames who claim not to know anything, they will transform into bats.  Guess you can die in towns, and you shouldn't always trust who you talk to.  The biggest biggest thing about this town is that you learn the Spell of Life.  This spell allows Link to refill a great deal of his life bar.  This ability greatly increases his survivability and allows him to stay out in the field, and traverse through dungeons, for a  longer period of time without fear of losing lives.  The only negative is that this spell takes a good deal of magic to cast, however, if you are clever even in dungeons magic can be restored quite quickly.  This spell, no exception, is the best one in your arsenal.  It basically turns this Link from a sword-wielding wizard into a sword-wielding cleric (he multi-classes into fighter after learning both stabs and maximizing his attack and defense power, for those of you following the Dungeons and Dragons terminology).

Link Discovers the First-Person

The next awesome thing about the town of Saria is that in order to obtain this spell, you must find the mirror that one of the women lost in the town and bring it back to her.  When Link finds this mirror, he exclaims "I found a mirror under the table!"  This is a novel experience, as it is the first and last time that Link will make use of the first-person case subjective pronouns.  That being said, I took a picture so that I could share that with you.  Most of the time in the series now that NPCs are in the picture, they do all of the talking and Link's response is inferred by facial expressions or by his actions.  Did he speak, is he just plain rude, or can he only speak to himself, as demonstrated in this photo?  This has been a mystery to Zelda fans for over a decade, since this is the only real evidence we have that Link can speak words.

You know, everyone has things they're good at and not good at...I'm good at listening and reading, I don't like to talk or to write...why bother when people already know what I'm going to say?  I was just excited to find this mirror so I shouted about it, not a big deal, really.  Though I am quite glad I did, it led to me to the ability to heal myself...now I don't need to visit the town whore every time I need to do so, I can take care of that business by myself.