A castle courtyard. Flowers, statues, Link meets Zelda for the first time. She asks if he wants to look through the window, and he does. On the other side of the window, a huge Gerudo man in black armour kneels before the King of Hyrule and swears his loyalty. Then he lifts his head, and he looks straight at the window.

That’s the first time most of us ever saw Ganondorf. Not on a throne, not wreathed in fire, and not sitting atop a tower with an organ. He was kneeling. Nintendo’s most famous villain was introduced to the world bowing to a king he already planned to destroy, and he wasn’t hiding it from us. Zelda told us exactly who he was. Link saw it with his own eyes. And then the whole of Ocarina of Time played out exactly the way Ganondorf wanted it to anyway.

We think of Ganondorf as the Zelda villain of raw power. He holds the Triforce of Power, turns into a beast, floods kingdoms with darkness, and raises armies of monsters. But if you trace his major appearances and look at how he actually gets what he wants, a different pattern emerges. He rarely breaks in. Someone opens the door for him. Usually, it’s the hero.

It happens in Ocarina of Time. It happens in The Wind Waker. It happens, in a different way, in Twilight Princess. And in Tears of the Kingdom, more than twenty years after that courtyard window, Nintendo put Ganondorf back on one knee before another King of Hyrule and did it all over again.

On November 5th, Ocarina of Time comes back on Switch 2, rebuilt from the ground up, with a redesigned Ganondorf who drew some of the warmest reactions of the whole reveal. And that means one of the first big story scenes Nintendo has to recreate is that kneel. So today I want to go through every major Ganondorf, starting where he started, and figure out why Zelda’s greatest villain keeps winning the same way, and why Hyrule never seems to learn.

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The King Who Knelt

To understand why that kneel matters, you have to understand who Ganondorf was before he ever walked into Hyrule Castle. In Ocarina of Time, he’s a Gerudo, from a desert people made up almost entirely of women. Only one man is born among them every hundred years, and by birthright, he becomes their king. So the first thing to notice about Ganondorf is that he didn’t climb to power. He was born into it. The twin witches Koume and Kotake raised him as surrogate mothers, and by the time we meet him, he already commands an army of thieves, a desert fortress, and some very powerful magic.

And it still isn’t enough. Ganondorf wants the Triforce, and it sits in the Sacred Realm, behind the Door of Time, which opens only for someone carrying three Spiritual Stones and the Ocarina of Time. So the obvious question is, if he’s this powerful, why doesn’t he take them?

The answer is that he tries, and it doesn’t work. Before Link even leaves Kokiri Forest, Ganondorf has already gone to the Great Deku Tree, demanded the Kokiri’s Emerald, and been refused. So he curses the tree. The Deku Tree dies holding on to the stone and hands it to Link instead. Up on Death Mountain, the Gorons are starving because their food supply, Dodongo’s Cavern, has been sealed off, and Darunia tells Link that Ganondorf wanted the Goron’s Ruby. Darunia refused as well. The strongest man in Hyrule goes to the guardians of the Spiritual Stones, and he walks away empty-handed.

Brute force doesn’t open the Door of Time. Guardians protect the Spiritual Stones and would rather die than hand them over, and the Deku Tree literally does. So Ganondorf changes his approach. He goes to the castle, and he kneels.

On the surface, it’s diplomacy, the King of the Gerudo swearing allegiance to the King of Hyrule, and from the king’s side, there’s every reason to accept it. A powerful desert ruler choosing peace is good news for any kingdom. But it also puts Ganondorf inside the walls, close to the royal family, close to the Ocarina of Time, and close to whoever is trying to stop him. The only person in the castle who isn’t fooled is a girl having bad dreams about dark clouds, and nobody listens to her. Zelda tells Link she can’t convince her father.

And this is where the kneel stops being a disguise and becomes something much smarter. When Link looks through that window, Ganondorf looks back. He sees them. He’s just been told, in effect, that the princess knows exactly what he is, and that she’s found herself a boy in green. Ganondorf sees opportunity. He lets him go.

From that point on, Ganondorf watches Link gather the stones, waiting for him to open the Door. The stones he couldn’t take by force are now being collected for him, one by one, by a child the guardians trust. The Deku Tree gave Link the Emerald. Darunia gave him the Ruby after he cleared Dodongo’s Cavern. Princess Ruto gave him the Sapphire after Jabu-Jabu.

In Ocarina of Time, Ganondorf’s power fails him at every sacred site in Hyrule. The thing that works is patience. He bows his head, lets everyone see him bow, and waits for the hero to do the part he couldn’t.

Thank You for Opening the Door

When Link comes back to Hyrule Castle with all three Spiritual Stones, he arrives just in time to watch the plan fall apart. Ganondorf has made his move. Impa is riding out of the castle with Zelda on horseback, and as they cross the drawbridge, Zelda throws the Ocarina of Time into the moat. A moment later, Ganondorf thunders after them on a black horse, stops in front of a child holding a tiny sword, and demands to know which way the princess went.

Link refuses and draws the Kokiri Sword. Ganondorf seems almost amused, and he swats him aside with a burst of dark magic without even getting off his horse. It’s a great little scene that shows the power gap between them. If Ganondorf wanted Link dead, then Link would be dead. But Ganondorf isn’t chasing Link. He’s chasing the Ocarina.

And he doesn’t get it. Zelda has made sure of that. The Ocarina sits at the bottom of the moat, Link dives in to recover it, and Zelda appears in a vision and teaches him the Song of Time. On paper, this is the moment the good guys win. Ganondorf has shown his hand; he’s chasing the wrong target, and the boy now holds all three stones and the Ocarina.

Everything Zelda needs to beat Ganondorf to the Triforce is in Link’s hands.

So Link walks into the Temple of Time, plays the song, and the Door of Time slides open. He walks through, finds the Master Sword in its pedestal, and pulls it free. And at that exact moment, everything goes white.

Only someone old enough can wield the Master Sword, so Link is sealed away in the Chamber of Sages for seven years, until he’s grown. The moment he’s taken, Ganondorf appears behind him in the Temple of Time, laughing. He’d been waiting for this. He knew what Zelda was trying to do from the beginning, and he let her do it, because her plan was the only key that could open that door. He thanks Link for opening it, and then he walks straight through.

I think this is one of the most brutal twists Nintendo has ever written, because it’s so simple. Zelda’s plan wasn’t foiled. It worked. It did exactly what it was designed to do. The stones were collected, the Ocarina was protected, the song was learned, the door was opened, and the sword was drawn. The trouble is that the plan to keep Ganondorf out of the Sacred Realm and the plan to get Ganondorf into the Sacred Realm turned out to be the same.

And then something happens that even Ganondorf didn’t plan for. When he finally touches the Triforce, it splits. The Triforce stays whole only for someone whose heart holds power, wisdom, and courage in balance, and his doesn’t. He’s left with the piece he valued most, the Triforce of Power, while the other two pieces go to the people destined to hold them: Wisdom to Zelda and Courage to Link. It’s the first crack in his strategy. He got through the door, but he couldn’t take everything on the other side.

So what does he do? He waits again. For seven years, Ganondorf rules from his castle, holding one piece of the Triforce and knowing the other two are out there somewhere. And when Link wakes up and starts restoring the temples, freeing the Sages one by one and undoing the damage Ganondorf has done, Ganondorf lets him. He later implies he suspected Zelda would help Link along the way and allowed his progress for that reason. He needed her to come out of hiding.

And she does. After the final Sage awakens, the Sheikh meets Link in the Temple of Time and reveals she’s been Zelda all along. It’s one of the series’ great moments, and it lasts about as long as it takes Zelda to hand Link the Light Arrows. Then the ground shakes, Zelda is trapped inside a crystal, and Ganondorf takes her to his castle. Seven years of hiding, undone by one reveal. Once again, he waited for the heroes to open the door themselves.

And here’s what I find most interesting. When no doors are left to open, and Ganondorf has to stand in his tower and fight Link directly, he loses. He’s beaten as a man, coughing up blood, and as his castle collapses, Zelda looks at him with something close to pity. She suggests he couldn’t control the power he took, that the Triforce of Power, without a righteous heart, was always going to fail him. Even his final transformation into Ganon isn’t enough. The Sages seal him away, and his last act is to swear revenge on Link, Zelda, and the descendants of everyone who stood against him.

Remember that threat, because the rest of this series is Ganondorf making good on it. And every time he comes back, he brings the same trick.

The Hero Who Assembled the Prize

The Wind Waker is set hundreds of years after Ocarina of Time, on the branch of the timeline where the Hero of Time is sent back to his childhood and never returns to the adult world he saved. So when Ganondorf breaks free of his seal and returns to that Hyrule, no hero is waiting for him. People pray for the Hero of Time to return, but he doesn’t. So the gods answer a different prayer: they flood the entire kingdom, sealing Hyrule and Ganondorf beneath the waves.

And for a while, that works. By the time Wind Waker begins, Hyrule is a legend, the Great Sea stretches in every direction, and boys on Outset Island wear green on their birthday to remember a hero nobody alive has ever seen. But Ganondorf has escaped his underwater prison, his power diminished, and he’s looking for one thing: Princess Zelda’s descendant and the Triforce of Wisdom she carries.

He doesn’t search the Great Sea himself. He sends the Helmaroc King to snatch pointed-eared girls from the islands and carry them to the Forsaken Fortress. That’s how Link’s sister Aryll ends up in a cell, and that’s how the whole adventure begins. It’s a blunt plan, and it doesn’t work on its own. Ganondorf has the wrong girls, and the girl he’s actually looking for is a pirate captain called Tetra, who has no idea who she is.

So once again, brute force stalls. And once again, the heroes finish the job for him.

The first door is the Master Sword. Link raises the Tower of the Gods, descends to the sunken Hyrule Castle, and pulls the sword from its pedestal, exactly as the legend says the hero should. The moment he does, time resumes in the frozen castle, the monsters wake up, and Ganondorf regains his full power. The Master Sword was part of the seal holding Ganondorf’s power in check. Link drew it, and in drawing it, he let the villain out of the box. It’s the Door of Time all over again, a hero doing exactly what a hero is supposed to do, and Ganondorf benefiting most.

Ganondorf had also planned for the sword itself. He’d had the sages of the Earth and Wind Temples killed, the two people whose prayers gave the Master Sword its power to repel evil. So when Link finally confronts him in the Forsaken Fortress, the legendary blade does nothing. Ganondorf even compliments the boy for getting this far, and you can hear that same faint amusement he had on horseback outside Hyrule Castle centuries earlier.
The second door is Zelda herself. During that confrontation, Ganondorf’s Triforce of Power resonates with Tetra, and he realises, right there, that the pirate captain is the princess he’s been searching for. All those kidnapped girls, all that effort, and in the end Ganondorf only finds Zelda because she walked into his fortress to help Link. Later, the King of Red Lions, who turns out to be King Daphnes Nohansen Hyrule, awakens Tetra as Princess Zelda and hides her in the chamber beneath the sunken castle. Ganondorf takes her anyway.

And the third door is the biggest of all. To return to Hyrule for the final confrontation, Link spends a huge chunk of the game hunting down the scattered shards of the Triforce of Courage across the Great Sea. He completes it. When he climbs to the top of Ganon’s Tower, Ganondorf has Zelda, the Triforce of Power, and the only thing missing is the piece Link just put back together.

Before that happens, though, Ganondorf talks. It’s the most famous speech he’s ever given, and it gives him something Ocarina of Time never did: a reason. His homeland was a desert, where the wind brought searing heat by day and cold by night, and either way, it brought death. The winds across Hyrule’s green fields brought something else entirely, and he coveted them.

Then Ganondorf knocks Link down, and for the first time since Ocarina of Time, the complete Triforce is assembled. Power from Ganondorf, Wisdom from Zelda, Courage from Link. Three pieces, scattered for centuries, and two of them were delivered to his tower by the people sworn to stop him.

Ganondorf doesn’t win outright because someone else gets there first. Just before he can touch the Triforce, King Daphnes appears and makes his own wish: that Hyrule be washed away for good, and that Link and Zelda be given a future. Ganondorf responds by laughing. Not the confident laugh from the Temple of Time, but something much wilder. He draws two swords, Zelda fights alongside Link with the Light Arrows, and in the end Link drives the Master Sword into Ganondorf’s head. He turns to stone, still standing, as the sea pours in.

Now, at this point, the pattern looks pretty clear. Ganondorf kneels, waits, and lets the hero open the door. But Twilight Princess complicates things because Link doesn’t open the door. It’s the people who were supposed to make sure Ganondorf never walked anywhere again. And what Tears of the Kingdom does with that pattern is, I think, the boldest thing Nintendo has done with this character. Stick around for that one.

The Executioners Who Let Him Out

To get to Twilight Princess, we have to go back to the end of Ocarina of Time, to the other branch. When Zelda sends Link back to his childhood, the game’s final scene takes place in the castle courtyard. Link walks up to Zelda at the same window where it all started. And for the first time, the kneel doesn’t work.

This is the Child Timeline, and it’s the only time in the series where someone sees through Ganondorf before he gets through the door. Link knows what happens next. He’s lived it. And the Sages, as the Twilight Princess story tells it, now know enough to act. Ganondorf is captured and sentenced to death, and the sentence is carried out in the Arbiter’s Grounds, deep in the Gerudo Desert.

It’s one of the darkest scenes Nintendo has ever put in a Zelda game. Ganondorf, chained, with the Sages standing around him. A sword driven through his chest. And it doesn’t kill him. The Triforce of Power awakens in his hand; he tears free of his chains and kills the Sage of Water. In a panic, the surviving Sages reach for the only thing left: the Mirror of Twilight. They banish him into the Twilight Realm.

In the Twilight Realm, Ganondorf finds a Twili man who was passed over for the throne and desperate for power, and he gives it to him. Zant becomes his instrument, and Ganondorf stays behind the curtain for most of the game.

In Ocarina of Time, Link opened the Door of Time. In The Wind Waker, Link drew the Master Sword and assembled the Triforce. In Twilight Princess, the door is the Mirror of Twilight, and the Sages open it. The very people charged with ending Ganondorf are the ones who deliver him to the one place in all of creation where he can find an army, a puppet king and a way back. The Sages even admit as much to Link and Midna. They tell them they overestimated their abilities when they tried to end Ganondorf’s evil. It’s one of the few times anyone in this series says out loud what’s been happening all along. The people trying to stop Ganondorf keep handing him the keys.

Zant invades Hyrule. Zelda surrenders her kingdom. Midna is cursed. Hyrule is swallowed by twilight. Through almost all of it, Ganondorf never steps onto the stage. Zant is his knight this time: a public face doing the visible work while Ganondorf watches from somewhere else. The difference is that in Ocarina of Time, Ganondorf was hiding behind his own bowed head. Here, he’s hiding behind someone else’s.

When he finally appears in the last act, he does what he always does when the doors run out: he has to fight. He loses. He possesses Zelda, then becomes Ganon, then fights on horseback across Hyrule Field, and finally faces Link alone, sword against sword, with a scar on his chest from the execution that should have ended him.

And then he dies on his feet. Link lands the final blow, the Triforce of Power fades from Ganondorf’s hand, and he stands there as the light goes out of him—no vow of revenge this time. No laughter. Just silence.

In three games, Ganondorf’s victories all come from the same place. Not his own strength, but other people’s actions. A girl’s plan, a hero’s sword, a king’s chamber, the Sages’ mirror. Every time the heroes reach for something powerful to stop him, they hand him a door. And for twenty years, that was the shape of Ganondorf. Then, in 2023, Nintendo brought him back in human form for the first time in a mainline game since Twilight Princess, and put him right back where we first met him.

He Knelt Again

Tears of the Kingdom opens with Link and Zelda walking into the dark beneath Hyrule Castle. People have been falling ill from a strange gloom seeping up from below, so they go down to investigate. Deep beneath the castle, they find a withered body held in place by a glowing, disembodied arm. Zelda is drawn to it. She moves closer. And as she reaches it, the arm gives way, its stone falls at her feet, and the body opens its eyes.

And there it is again. The door opens because the heroes walked up to it. Now, to be fair to Link and Zelda, this one is murkier than the others. The seal had held for ages; the gloom spreading from it suggests something was already going wrong, and nobody in the game blames them for what happens. The seal fails the moment the princess reaches out to it. Ganondorf rises, shatters the Master Sword’s power with a wave of gloom, and recognises them. He even says someone named Rauru placed his faith in them. Zelda asks how he knows who they are, and he doesn’t answer. Then he rips Hyrule Castle into the sky, and Zelda falls through time.

She lands in the founding of Hyrule, in the court of its first king, Rauru, and his queen, Sonia. And not long after she arrives, Zelda watches a memory that, if you’ve played Ocarina of Time, should make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. A Gerudo king is invited before the court of Hyrule. He kneels before the king, and he pledges his loyalty. The game’s description of the scene notes that he’s hiding a smile.

It’s the courtyard window, twenty-five years later. The same man, the same bowed head, the same promise of fealty to a King of Hyrule he intends to destroy. And, like in Ocarina of Time, a princess in the room knows exactly who he is. Zelda has come from a future where the Demon King is legend. Even his name sets off alarms for her, and once the Gerudo leave, she tells Rauru.

And this is where Tears of the Kingdom does something Ocarina of Time never did. The king believes her. Rauru tells Zelda he knows what Ganondorf wants. He’s not fooled for a second. He chooses to accept the vow anyway because he’d rather keep Ganondorf close so he can watch him. Zelda Wiki even points out the contrast directly: in Ocarina of Time, the king doesn’t listen to his daughter. In Tears of the Kingdom, he does.

That’s the smartest thing Nintendo has done with Ganondorf in years, because it removes the excuse. For decades, you could explain the kneel as a failure of the people around Ganondorf. The King of Hyrule was naive. The adults wouldn’t listen to the child. Fix that, give the king perfect information, and surely the trick stops working. Tears of the Kingdom tests that idea, and the answer is no. Rauru knows, Zelda knows, the whole court has been warned, and Ganondorf gets inside the walls anyway because the kneel was about getting close.

And once he’s close, he behaves exactly like the Ganondorf of Ocarina of Time. He’s seen the Secret Stones, understands what they can do, and knows brute force won’t take them from the royal family. So he works from the inside. He sends a creature disguised as Zelda to get close to Sonia, and when he exposes the disguise, he strikes from behind. Sonia is killed, her Secret Stone is taken, and Ganondorf becomes the Demon King under a Blood Moon, laughing as monsters pour out across Hyrule.

That disguise keeps coming back, too. In the present day, a phantom version of Zelda appears to people across Hyrule, sowing confusion and leading Link around. Ganondorf has learned the lesson of every game we’ve talked about today. People will open any door for Zelda. So he wears her face.

In the end, Rauru can only stop him the way the Sages did in Twilight Princess: by sacrificing himself. He binds the Demon King with his arm and his Secret Stone, and the two freeze together beneath the castle. Ganondorf’s last words before the seal takes hold are that he looks forward to meeting the hero Rauru has promised will come. He’s not afraid of the future. He’s patient.

But here’s the twist that I think makes Tears of the Kingdom the most important Ganondorf story since Ocarina. For once, the heroes beat him at his own game. Zelda, trapped in the past, knows the Master Sword will be needed in the future, and she knows it’s been damaged. So she swallows her own Secret Stone, gives up her body and mind, and becomes a dragon, circling Hyrule’s skies for thousands of years while the sword slowly heals. That is patience on a scale even Ganondorf never attempted. For once, it’s the heroes who wait. When Link finally pulls the restored Master Sword from that dragon’s head, it’s a door the heroes open for themselves.

And Ganondorf? At the very end, beaten by Link even with his Secret Stone, he does something we’ve never seen him do. He refuses to lose to a mortal, swallows his own stone, and throws away everything- body, mind, and all those centuries of careful scheming- to become the Demon Dragon. The strategist abandons strategy. He’s at his most powerful, and it’s exactly the moment he loses for good.

The Door Opens

Which brings us back to the courtyard. On November 5th, Ocarina of Time launches on Switch 2, and at some point in the opening hours, Zelda will stand on tiptoe at that window again and ask Link if he wants to look.

Here’s what we know about the remake that matters for this scene. Nintendo has confirmed fully voiced cutscenes and expanded character dialogue. The redesigned Ganondorf drew some of the warmest reactions of the whole Direct, with a sharper, more grounded look that many fans felt suited him far better than the remake’s children. And Nintendo has already shown it’s willing to rethink things as we learn more in this story, with the Triforce appearing on Link’s hand in the teaser’s very first shot.

We still don’t know how Nintendo handles the kneel itself, so everything from here is speculation. But it’s worth thinking about, because this scene has changed more than any other in the game, without a single line being rewritten.

In 1998, that kneel was our first impression of Ganondorf. Nobody watching knew what he was capable of. Zelda told us he was dangerous, and we took her word, but the scene itself was just a big man bowing to a king through a window. It only became chilling in hindsight, after the Temple of Time, after he thanked Link for opening the door.

In 2026, nobody sees that scene for the first time in quite the same way. Longtime fans know every beat of what’s coming. And for the millions of players whose Zelda started with Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom, many of whom will be meeting Ocarina of Time for the first time this November, something stranger happens. They’ve already seen this scene. They saw it in Tears of the Kingdom, with Rauru on the throne. For them, the courtyard window won’t be the original. It’ll be the callback. A whole generation of players will watch Ganondorf kneel to the King of Hyrule and think, I know exactly what you’re doing, because I watched you do it before.

So what would I want from the remake here? Honestly, not much. Expanded dialogue could easily put words in Ganondorf’s mouth during the kneel, a vow of loyalty spoken aloud, maybe the king’s response. That could be great. But the power of this scene has always been its silence: seen from a distance, through glass, by two children nobody listens to. The one thing I’d love the remake to add is the smile. Tears of the Kingdom gave us a Ganondorf hiding a smile as he knelt before Rauru. If the remake gives Ocarina’s Ganondorf the same expression, even for a frame, as he lifts his head and looks out the window, it would tie these two scenes together across the timeline without changing a word.

And then there’s the moment that I think will matter most: the Temple of Time. For the first time in nearly thirty years, the scene where Ganondorf thanks Link for opening the door will be fully voiced and rebuilt in a modern engine. It’s the payoff to everything we’ve talked about today, the moment the whole pattern was born.

On November 5th, millions of us will boot up Ocarina of Time on Switch 2. We’ll gather the Spiritual Stones, protect the Ocarina, learn the Song of Time and walk into the Temple, knowing exactly who is waiting on the other side. We’ll do it anyway, because that’s the game. The hero always opens the door. And Ganondorf, after nearly three decades, still gets to say thank you.

So here’s my question for you. Out of every version we’ve talked about today, which Ganondorf do you think plays the long game best? The Ocarina original, kneeling at the window? The Wind Waker’s, waiting beneath the sea? Or Tears of the Kingdom’s, who knelt before a king who knew exactly what he was and got inside anyway? Let me know in the comments, because I’ll be reading every one.

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