Idle Thumbs 302:
The Stupidity and the Grandeur
You peek over the edge of the hill to confirm — good, they're still there. One of them gets up and walks away from their friends. You inch forward to get a better look and, yep, that one saw you. Their weapons come out, they call for help. You ready a grenade, turn to throw it, run into a rock you didn't see, and drop the grenade at your feet. It rolls down the hill. The hill is on fire, the tree is on fire, you're on fire, you accomplished nothing, and it was wonderful.
Discussed: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Far Cry 2
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The discussion about how Breath of the Wild evokes similar feelings of wonder and of the unknown as the first Zelda game makes me want to play the game even more.
I did not play the first Zelda, so I got the experience with A Link to the Past. I was at the hospital* at the time that my parents purchased it, either based on my sister's research or the recommendation of a store clerk. I was getting out in a couple of days, and my parents tried to cheer me up by describing the game, although they had obviously not seen it being played. Therefore, their description was incredibly vague, and probably all based on the the box art and maybe some screenshots they had seen in a magazine, stuff like "Oh, it has bombs and swords and boomerangs and all kinds of things." I had no idea how the game actually played, so in my mind, I basically reskinned Super Mario World, the only SNES game we owned up until that point, with the elements listed by my parents, literally swapping Bullet Bills with flying swords, and so on.
When I got home and started playing the game with my sister, who had refrained from trying the game until then, I didn't know at first what I was looking at. The atmosphere of the opening was unlike anything I had experienced before in a video game, and the gameplay was new to me as well. As neither of us were any good in English, we did not know where to go at first. When we finally discovered the secret entrance to the castle, we were so excited. Likewise when we finished the first dungeon and got to roam around in the open world. And again when we discovered the dark world. We spend hours and hours searching for the heart pieces and other secrets, but had to finish the game with one piece of heart missing. I played through the game multiple times with my friend but never got close to the end score of the first run, 200 and something. Only years later did we realize that the number was actually the completion time in hours.
Interestingly, I have never actually played A Link to the Past for more than a couple of minutes. I always either watched my sister, her friend, or my friend play the game instead. I'm still not entirely sure why I preferred watching to playing so much in this case, since I played other games a lot.
* It was okay. I had a pretty bad asthma as a kid, so I occasionally had bronchitis and stuff like that.