Imagining Zelda Audiobooks - Ocarina of Time [Ft. AI Stephen Fry]

Published 2024-01-31

I love audiobooks, and wanted to imagine what The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time might sound like. I wrote a brief Prologue and Chapter 1, and used AI to have a voice much more up to the task than mine!

For copyright reasons, and the fact I'm not really much of a writer, I wouldn't write a complete audiobook. But, I enjoyed making this and would love to do a series of these based on the other Zelda games, featuring voices that fit the tone of each story.

For this first one, I chose Stephen Fry's for Ocarina for a few reasons.
His voice seemed to fit the tone of the story: warm, light and magical, but capable of emotional weight and seriousness. Of course, he's also an audiobook master. Besides his own work, he's narrated the Harry Potter and Sherlock Holmes series, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, some Winnie the Pooh stories, and Orwell's classics 1984 and Animal Farm, just to name a few. Ocarina of Time is a classic story worthy of his voice, I think.

A few changes I made to the story for the sake of this imagined adaptation:
- Navi briefly replies to the Deku Tree. Just seemed to make a little more sense in this context than just him speaking.

- I implied Link is around 11 or 12, rather than 7 or 8 as I think he is in the game. This is just so his skill is a little more believable, and to actually have the 7 years older 'Adult Link' later on actually be an adult.

- In the game, the Kokiri mention the Deku Tree never summoning them, and that it's an honour to get to speak to him. The idea of him having a closer, more fatherly relationship with them (As he does with the Koroks in later games) seemed a better fit here, so I implied that instead.

- The main one: I gave Link a line of dialogue. It became harder to imagine a written narrative where the main character doesn't speak at all. The game often implies Link speaks anyway of course, and he's not canonically mute. If I did do a fully story, I'd make it a rule to have him speak as little as possible, and to have Navi speak for him wherever she can. I wonder how the upcoming movie will handle it...