It’s a uniquely Welsh experience. I’ve never been Scottish, Irish or Latvian, but those who have inform me that when you tell someone where you’re from, the answer is usually no “What is that?”.
For the Welsh, that basic icebreaker question from anyone outside the UK usually prompts a deep breath and, regardless of whether you have the time, a short structured lesson on geography, history and the world’s coolest flags. Wales is a quiet enigma to most of the world. Land without a trace.
As a Welshman, I don’t expect the national team. I was 14 when I first felt a reflection of Wales in a video game. Second, I was 26 years old. It’s an understatement to say that the media haven’t exactly been kind to Cymru. In a pre-Gareth Bale world, Wales weren’t even in FIFA; the only reliable representation was the obligatory appearances in the odd rugby game, most of which skipped Nintendo’s systems.
Still, while Wales’ history in Nintendo games is sparse, it’s surprisingly deep and had quite an impact on me in a world I never would have hoped for.
Guardians of the Sky Senghenydd
In 1984, a young designer named Takashi Tezuka was tasked with creating a story and setting for a new game. An exploratory epic inspired by his childhood colleague’s obsession with adventuring through the caves around Kyoto, Tezuka decided to delve into his own childhood.
However, it was on the way out of mine that I first noticed Wales in a game on a Nintendo system. The summer of 2010 and a bunch of localization quirks convinced me to try Square Enix’s Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies on the DS. I was sitting in my aunt’s spare room, with an ornate picture of the 1997 Glamorgan Cricket team on the wall, and I arrived in a town called Porth Llaffan. This week, for the first time since then, the townspeople were cordial, old-fashioned and speaking in almost OTT South Welsh accents. It’s clearly written by someone English, their backspace key is probably still warm after deleting the word ‘Boyo’ from the end of every pronunciation, but it’s love. ‘Your’ is spelled ‘Youer’, the characters call the things they love ‘Tidy’, and the whole town is terrorized by a monster known as Lleviathan.
In Welsh it is a double L (“Ll”) letter. Pronounced “Thl”, it is written that way because English printers were not equipped to write the Welsh sign ‘ỻ’, so they were approximate. Lleviathan might be a simple gag, a basic pun, but it’s also tender. This was the first time I had seen Welsh in the game, and this was a joke that only made sense to those who understood our language.
Kiki’s Denbigh service
Yet just a mile or two from where I would one day slay that beast, and in the same month that Tezuka defined yet another adventure, another Japanese creative was on his own. An animator who had just finished his first film as a director, Hayao Miyazaki arrived in Wales in search of inspiration. Weeks were spent hiking the beautiful Rhonda Valley, getting to know it, meeting people, and maybe visiting my aunt. However, when he arrived in the Rhymney Valley, the home of my family for previous generations, he found the inspiration he came for.
Miyazaki witnessed the miners’ strike first hand. In perhaps the defining act of modern Welsh history, the working people of Wales and beyond stood up to Margaret Thatcher’s government, and this moved Miyazaki desperately. The spirit he saw in the Welsh made evident the stories he wanted to tell. Warmth, optimism, and all this despite extreme difficulties. This trip served as the prim ary inspiration for his next film, in 1986 Castle in the sky
Miyazaki continued to incorporate Welsh architecture into his designs and became fascinated with Cymraeg folklore. In 2004, he adapted a novel by the Welsh writer Diane Wynne Jones Howl’s Moving Castle. It moved the action from Wales in the 1980s and laid bare Howl’s deep love of rugby, but the thematic DNA remained.
What is the link for Nintendo? It’s indirect, but Castle in the Sky would go on to directly inspire the airship levels in Super Mario Bros. 3, while Miyazaki’s later work would become a key reference point for Fire Emblem, Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest and perhaps Nintendo’s most distinctively Welsh franchise, Xenoblade Chronicles.
The girl with Gelligaer
I had never played a Xenoblade game when the third installment ended the Nintendo Direct in February 2022. And then a short burst of vocals by Aimee-Ffion Edwards was enough to make me sit up. I’ve never seen a game with the Welsh in charge before. It was almost overwhelming, and enough to make me buy Xenoblade Chronicles 3. While Mio may not have been specifically written as Welsh, there is a familiar tragedy to her story. Deep passion and love for the place she came from, the family she knew and created, and yet the knowledge that these feelings were forged with a foot on the throat. No matter how far she runs, she always looks back to where she came from.
The game continues to drop nodes. I was genuinely cheering out loud when I arrived at Llyn Nyddwr. ‘Llyn Nadwyr’ means ‘Spinner Lake’ in real world Welsh. The previous game had another cat-eared Welsh girl, even giving her a full family of taffs, but number three allowed the scope to be the most Cymraeg-bare of any Nintendo experience to date. Fire Emblem has used Welsh names for a while (the central location of the Three Houses, Garreg Mach is “rewrite my homework” Carreg Bach, meaning “small stone”), but this was another level. Llyn Nyddwr may be small, but it’s a significant acknowledgment of something significant that I don’t think Nintendo themselves noticed.
Lampeter between worlds
Tezuka, still searching for a story all those years ago, decided to turn to the overseas fantasy he loved as a child. He returned to the writing of JRR Tolkien, a Welsh speaker who built worlds out of Celtic folklore. Many of the journeys detailed in the books Tezuka read were inspired by Tolkien’s own Miyazaki-esque journeys through West Wales (and Ireland, but let’s not let the truth get in the way of pure narrative).
Tezuka began reading European folklore, history, and myths, but by sheer coincidence, many of the stories he pulled came from the same place. The master sword, which will become the mythical blade of the series, can be dated back to Welsh legend Mabinogion, the origin of the Excalibur myth. In later sequels, the protagonist will be given a trusty, beloved horse called Epona, a Welsh name taken from the Celtic goddess of fertility.
As the franchise developed, Tezuka’s aforementioned colleague Shigeru Miyamoto cited Miyazaki as a key influence on the game’s visual style. Fittingly, Miyazaki’s own story came full circle in 2009 when Studio Ghibli oversaw the DS game’s animation sequences It’s not Dominion of the Dark Djinn, which would become better known globally in its enhanced Wrath of the White Witch form. The Welsh influences on the design were reflected in the localization, and the character Drippy, the assistant to the player, so that in Cardiff his first word after coming to life was “Nice!”.
These extensive but fortuitously original references came together. Filtered through the Japanese sensibility and utter wonder Miyamoto felt exploring as a child, this became the game we now know as The Legend of Zelda.
There is a word in Welsh that does not exist in any other language: “Longing“. Sad, nostalgic, melancholy homesickness, is a word that perhaps reflects the Welsh like nothing else. Wales is a nation built of beauty and oppression, unashamed to weep for the former but never for the latter. Hiraeth talks about the deep pride of where you come from, but also the knowledge that you will leave. The word understands the feeling of smallness that bleeds from a beautiful home, suffocated for generations, to the point that no one, in those casual conversations across the sea, knows it exists.
The worlds of Nintendo aren’t littered with Welsh exteriors. However, something is hiding under the hood. Mio in Xenoblade may not be explicitly written as Welsh, but her story drips in longing. Miyazaki may be Japanese, but a venture far from his homeland forced him to understand his own life, culture and values. And in such a great adventure, Dragon Quest’s Porth Llanaff gave me a sense of belonging through warmth and good humour.
Call it influence, history, coincidence or simply cultural similarity, but while the mention of Wales may still prompt people to ask “What’s that?”, in the world of video games Wales will always be a nation with a very big footprint.
Table of Contents
