Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
This forum is in permanent archive mode. Our new active community can be found here.
What's Your Fave Zelda Game?
What's Your Fave Zelda Game?
Mine's Link's Awakening it comes right out and says "hey there are 9 dungeons."
Mine's Link's Awakening it comes right out and says "hey there are 9 dungeons."
Comments
More recently I just beat Twilight Princess this past week so I downloaded the original Legend of Zelda from the virtual console since I've never played it before. Having gotten into video games mostly with the later years of the SNES (like Mario 3 and beyond) having to navigate a world going only vertically and horizontally is intriguingly difficult. I'm having fun with it, though.
Another thing that I found odd is that I've always heard of the original Zelda described as an incredibly deep game for it's time. Imagine my surprise when I start the game for the first time and am dumped in the middle of a screen, pick up a sword from a nearby cave, and go out killing monsters without any motivation whatsoever. No backstory. No uncle leaving mysteriously in the middle of the night. No sister kidnapped by a giant bird. I'm just there and now I've got a weapon and I guess I may as well use it. If I were Link and randomly woke up like that I'd just go home and go to sleep.
My favorite Zelda is Link's Awakening. It will always have a special place in my heart, I don't know why, but it was probably the Zelda I most enjoyed. Now if only I had a Game Boy that could still play it... and could find my cart of it.
Cramit's right, though. After beating Twilight Princess and seeing the Zelda retrospective on Game Trailers I started following some online forums about the Zelda timeline. Interesting stuff if you're the type to get into that sort of thing. And I am...
You will see that same model carry through every Zelda game right up to Twilight Princess. You start the game confined to a very small area and are given a very small number of items. Items are synonymous with abilities in the Zelda universe. First, you are given the most basic abilities and you must master them one at a time to travel to a wider and wider area and get more rewards. Eventually you will master enough items and abilities to open up this incredibly huge world. All that started with being essentially naked in a village.
It's not just that you get more abilities and use them to get to bigger areas. It's that the abilities are somewhat open-ended. It's not as simple as getting the blue key and suddenly being able to access the blue areas. Let's say you get the boomerang. Well, now you can beat bad guys who were weak to it. Now you can retrieve items you could not previously retrieve. Now you can open doors controlled by windmills. What makes it fun is that not every use of the items is immediately obvious. You constantly travel to all sorts of new places in the world discovering new things. You will come across new challenges and are teased by ever-increasing treasures. Sometimes you do need a new item to get something, but most often you simply have to think about how to achieve your goal by using your existing abilities in a new and interesting way.
The Metroid series follows the same pattern. The first Metroid didn't really so much, but Super Metroid definitely took a lot of game design hints from Zelda. Metroid Prime and the 3D Zeldas are incredibly similar from a game-design perspective. They're not the same game by any means, but they are both fun for a lot of the same reasons. Look, I got the spider ball, look at me go to this new area!
I've always thought there should be an MMO that follows this game design principle. It would have no leveling. How long you played would not determine how well you did. All that would matter is what items you had and how cleverly you used them. The trick is that to make it interesting in an MMO you have to have lots and lots of items in a big big world. You definitely need something like the Source engine that allows for physically accurate manipulation of many real-world objects.
Ocarina of Time comes in second for the time being, simply because it was a revolutionary step in gaming design. I say this because no other game could reproduce three-dimensional worlds as vividly as OoT until the Dreamcast (correct me if I'm wrong) and retain classic Zelda puzzles and elements.
Legend of Zelda ftw!