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BigJKO

The Legend of Zelda

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After reading this article about Zelda games and how the first one is awesome and then it all turns a bit shit, I decided to fire the first one up again in an emulator!

So far, it's god damn hard. You don't realize how much modern games hold your hand along the way until you go back and play an old game like this.

But.. I'm kind of liking that it's hard. It's not too hard so that I give up completely, but still hard enough that I've died more often in the first hour than in the entire Twilight Princess, probably.. :P

Also, the boss at the end of the first dungeon (or what I'm assuming is the first dungeon) looks awful..

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The difficulty curve of the first Zelda is really interesting, since it starts out really hard. You only have three hearts and get hit by everything. However, as soon as you collect two more hearts, suddenly everything gets really doable, because you can soak op more damage and make more mistakes. Pretty much the inverse of what usually happens in games, who tend to start easy and get more difficult later on.

Of course, Zelda gets hard again during the final few dungeons, make no mistake.

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I don't agree with this article whatsoever. I don't see how the design of burning every tree and every rock is good design or even fun gameplay. The fact that he's referencing the second quest as some kind of genius makes me think this guy is writing some kind of trolling fluff piece. I played the second quest and all it is is just harder enemies with unmarked rooms on map dungeons and the added bonus of running against wall tiles to find invisible doors.

I do wish the games weren't so easy now and I do wish they would stop being a nonstop tutorial of instructions and reminders (haven't played past Twilight Princess and on for reference, not sure if this stuff was fixed), but definitely I feel like the games have delivered what people wanted in the first place in terms of puzzle solving, items and story since the NES ones. The NES ones just feel broken or archaic, coming as someone who failed to beat them when young and finished them frustratingly in my teens. It's not the fault of those games, but I don't see how those are some kind of pinnacle of the series.

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I do wish the games weren't so easy now and I do wish they would stop being a nonstop tutorial of instructions and reminders (haven't played past Twilight Princess and on for reference, not sure if this stuff was fixed)

It has definitely not been (if anything it's gotten worse), but I like the games enough to look past it anyway.

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I can't endorse Thompson's love of "Bomb every tile!" "Burn every bush!" to find secrets.

But I strongly agree with this:

It needs to make most of the map accessible from the beginning. No artificial barriers to clumsily guide Link along a set course. Players know that game; they know when they’re being played. Link must be allowed to enter areas he’s not ready for.

Zelda barely has this anymore; the map is yours to explore only at the end of the game. Even if the games should follow a linear progression, a game world only becomes meaningful as a world if we can explore.

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I don't agree with this article whatsoever. I don't see how the design of burning every tree and every rock is good design or even fun gameplay. The fact that he's referencing the second quest as some kind of genius makes me think this guy is writing some kind of trolling fluff piece. I played the second quest and all it is is just harder enemies with unmarked rooms on map dungeons and the added bonus of running against wall tiles to find invisible doors.

I do wish the games weren't so easy now and I do wish they would stop being a nonstop tutorial of instructions and reminders (haven't played past Twilight Princess and on for reference, not sure if this stuff was fixed), but definitely I feel like the games have delivered what people wanted in the first place in terms of puzzle solving, items and story since the NES ones. The NES ones just feel broken or archaic, coming as someone who failed to beat them when young and finished them frustratingly in my teens. It's not the fault of those games, but I don't see how those are some kind of pinnacle of the series.

I agree that he may be overhyping the original Zelda. Yes, it's old and controls like a bitch and is overly hard. But he still has a lot of valid points, I think.

As much fun a hookshot and the various other Zelda items are, they are mostly just treated as keys. Guiding players through a game is all fine, but I do wish you had the possibility of entering areas that are just too hard for you. It gives the whole thing perspective!

Maybe I'm misremembering some of the modern Zelda games, but I like the hell out of the fact that I'm able to walk to most of the areas in The Legend of Zelda, without having even gotten the Master Sword. I'll probably die when I get there. But at least I'm allowed to go there.

At the very least we can all agree on his argument that modern Zelda games need to mix it up, surprise us. Break the routine. Right?

Also, my playthrough so far: "Give this to the old woman" "The secret is in the tree at the dead end" COULD YOU BE MORE VAGUE?! :(

Edited by BigJKO

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I don't agree with this article whatsoever. I don't see how the design of burning every tree and every rock is good design or even fun gameplay.

He's not advocating a return to that design, but lamenting the loss of the sense of discovery that went along with it. It would be great for the smarty-pants designers to find away to recapture that.

I agree wholeheartedly.

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It is impossible for me to fully unweave nostalgia from my perspective on this since Zelda 1 is such a cornerstone of my formative gamer years. It was the first game of that kind of scope that I completed and it was hugely satisfying, impactful experience for me. I beat it as a kid as the result of, I think, literally, years of hacking away at it at my grandmother's house. By the time I finished it I knew every square inch of the world and the location of every grotto, just by sheer grind and repetition and dying one thousand times. I am disconcertingly confident that if you started a new game and blindfolded me I could direct Link to the magic bracelet.

I don't think I could get into Zelda 1 if I had played it for the first time at my age, and I don't know whether that should sadden me or not. I think for better or worse I did actively enjoy bombing every wall of rock and burning every bush for the meager reward of a black square or downward staircase taking its place, but the idea of exploring this expansive world and uncovering stores/rupees/heart containers/belligerent homeowners by poking at everything was still a novelty for me at the time. There is something innately satisfying about finding secrets, and I think on some level the original game is all about that. To be honest, when I played Link to the Past for the first time and realized that every bombable spot was clearly designated my impulse was, "So what's the point?"

As has been pointed out, there's something to be said for the appeal of throwing the player into this huge world with very little in the way of boundaries and just saying, "Figure it out." I actually have to remind myself that in the original game, finding the labyrinths themselves was actually part of it. In the later games you more or less know exactly where you need to go next and the focus is more on the very thoughtfully designed obstacles (often tailored specifically to Link's abilities and range of items at that junction in the game) to challenge your path there.

I think it was probably necessary for the games to get more guided as the series went forward, but I think it's a valid observation that there are lessons to learn from the first game as far as freedom and discovery and just giving the player more opportunities to get in way over his head. There's still a fair degree of Find It Yourself in modern Zelda, but more often than not it's limited to sidequests, heart containers and upgrades. I think that's why I responded so well to that last act of Wind Waker. It felt very retro to force you to effectively just go exploring the overworld in order to collect all the Triforce shards.

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I don't think I could get into Zelda 1 if I had played it for the first time at my age, and I don't know whether that should sadden me or not.

This is key, you need to have been a kid at that time, when the NES was state of the art graphics. There's not much point going back to it on an emulator, it just won't grab your imagination the same way.

Zelda II was amazing at the time for me, but mainly because it was my first zelda and my first action rpg. You really get drawn into fictional worlds more at that age.

One way to think of it is imagining if every diamond in minecraft was signposted and placed on your map. The feeling of discovery is gone. This is kinda what Aonuma did since he took over the zelda series (after wind waker).

Not gonna say it's a shame cause whatever, but skyward sword is the first zelda I ever played that I didn't want to finish. It's gone to shit.

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First thing pointed out in this article is, in my opinion, what "ruined" mainstream RPGs. Visible mechanics and accessibility takes away sense of exploration and immersion. Sometimes I miss the days when they had no quest logs and conversations with NPCs had to be carried out with a text parser - granted, there weren't much to do in those old games (and whether they're more fun is debatable), but it was much easier to lose myself fully immersed in the game world when there were no arrows telling me where to go, or dialog trees laying out all available course of action. I guess some games I still get that old school feeling - minecraft comes to mind for some reason. but it ain't no Ultima.

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Did Skyward Sword have 3+ hours of tutorial-focused gameplay like Twilight Princess did? I never actually got to "the good part of the game" because of that.

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Did Skyward Sword have 3+ hours of tutorial-focused gameplay like Twilight Princess did? I never actually got to "the good part of the game" because of that.

If by 3 hours you mean, like 10, and they're all kinda shitty because WMP is...kind of BAD, then yeah, I guess.

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Did Skyward Sword have 3+ hours of tutorial-focused gameplay like Twilight Princess did? I never actually got to "the good part of the game" because of that.

The Tutorial is much shorter this time around, but many would say you still don't get to "the good part of the game" until like several hours after that. A lot of people don't like the first dungeon, or even the second one. The third one is the first time most people go, "oh, okay, yeah, give it to me, Nintendo."

It all felt like Zelda to me, once I got off the stupid island in the sky, though. I like the first dungeon well enough, even if I didn't think it was spectacular.

The biggest problem the game has is that the tutorial never actually ends. There's more hand-holding in this game than in any other game I've ever played. In fact, at some point I stopped playing the game and never really felt the desire to go back... The mechanics are a ton of fun, but all that hand-holding just drove me away. Normally I can ignore that kind of thing, but I don't know. Maybe I'm just tired of Zelda games treating me like an idiot.

I don't necessarily want games to go back to Zelda 1 style of "don't ever explain anything" - I don't think that would be good for most games - but surely there's a happy middle somewhere.

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The biggest problem the game has is that the tutorial never actually ends. There's more hand-holding in this game than in any other game I've ever played. In fact, at some point I stopped playing the game and never really felt the desire to go back... The mechanics are a ton of fun, but all that hand-holding just drove me away. Normally I can ignore that kind of thing, but I don't know. Maybe I'm just tired of Zelda games treating me like an idiot.

The mechanics in Skyward Sword were surprisingly fun; it's the sort of game that, had it showed up towards the beginning of the Wii lifecycle rather than the end, would have single handedly made the case for hardcore gaming on the system. Yeah, yeah, I know that it wouldn't have been possible without the Wii Motion Plus... but I still find it cruelly ironic that the game that could have sold me on the Wii concept came five years too late.

But you're right. It almost doesn't matter how good the controls and mechanics are, the game almost never stops walking you through things and it's a mediocre experience as a result.

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The Tutorial is much shorter this time around, but many would say you still don't get to "the good part of the game" until like several hours after that. A lot of people don't like the first dungeon, or even the second one. The third one is the first time most people go, "oh, okay, yeah, give it to me, Nintendo."

It all felt like Zelda to me, once I got off the stupid island in the sky, though. I like the first dungeon well enough, even if I didn't think it was spectacular.

The biggest problem the game has is that the tutorial never actually ends. There's more hand-holding in this game than in any other game I've ever played. In fact, at some point I stopped playing the game and never really felt the desire to go back... The mechanics are a ton of fun, but all that hand-holding just drove me away. Normally I can ignore that kind of thing, but I don't know. Maybe I'm just tired of Zelda games treating me like an idiot.

I don't necessarily want games to go back to Zelda 1 style of "don't ever explain anything" - I don't think that would be good for most games - but surely there's a happy middle somewhere.

"If you have played video games before, select YES to remove tedious bullshit"

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DIUM: I was a fan of Wii from day one, but, yes, Skyward Sword is for sure the only game to take it to That Level that successfully. It's just such a shame it a) came too late and B) is bogged down by Nintendo's refusal to admit that maybe the people playing their games aren't troglodytes.

"If you have played video games before, select YES to remove tedious bullshit"

If only.

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Yea, it never really let's go of the reins. Always with the constant interruptions and-- HEY MAYBE YOU SHOULD USE A BOMB ON THAT ROCK, THAT HAS THE MARK OF A ROCK THAT CAN BE BOMBED, MAYBE YOU SHOULD BOMB THAT and now watch us pan the camera by the rock we mean for about 10 seconds. Frustrating and tedious.

Okay, so a bit of hyperbole, but it really grated on me and did kind of ruin something I would've otherwise really enjoyed.

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If there are no more 'cracked walls' left by the time you're done playing through the game, then you're done with the game. Not just the main quest, but the entire game - the game world has nothing else to offer and it's made that very clear to you. I hate that.

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Yea, it never really let's go of the reins. Always with the constant interruptions and-- HEY MAYBE YOU SHOULD USE A BOMB ON THAT ROCK, THAT HAS THE MARK OF A ROCK THAT CAN BE BOMBED, MAYBE YOU SHOULD BOMB THAT and now watch us pan the camera by the rock we mean for about 10 seconds. Frustrating and tedious.

Okay, so a bit of hyperbole, but it really grated on me and did kind of ruin something I would've otherwise really enjoyed.

Ironically, that's not even really hyperbole... it's just the wrong context.

A specific instance I can think of is in dungeon three, the camera literally takes MORE than ten seconds to pan around a chest. Then Fi explains that, "hey, that chest probably contains the key to the final room" despite the fact that I already knew this from the first two dungeons because the chest always looks the same and the key within always opens up the final room. FUCK OFF. UGH.

Even worse is when you fail a puzzle because for once the solution isn't completely totally super obvious but you only failed once but Fi already feels it necessary to FORCE you to listen to her explain how to solve the puzzle. It's not even the beeping "listen to me please if you want", no, she just pops right the fuck out with her 95% probability of me throwing the controller at the wall die die die you horrible little sword-puter thing.

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Thanks everybody for making me never want to play Skyward Sword!

I don't know why I had such fun with the DS games Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks. They are similarly handholding and constrained, but I guess I just liked the controls.

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It ain't all negative though. My feelings regarding the game are ambivalent at best. I think for every thing that annoyed me, there was at least a thing that was good. I like it, but I don't like it, is what I'm saying! But I also like it. See what I mean?!

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Thanks everybody for making me never want to play Skyward Sword!

I don't know why I had such fun with the DS games Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks. They are similarly handholding and constrained, but I guess I just liked the controls.

If you liked PH and ST because of the controls and you could overlook the handholding, you may actually like Skyward Sword a lot. Like Pirate Poo, says, it's not all bad... the controls in particular I found to be outstanding.

My opinion of the game isn't that it's bad, just that it's disappointing. If Nintendo put just a bit more trust in the player, it could've been a great game.

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He says that the recent Zelda games are broken at their core, defining the 'core' as the "central structure and mechanics." Now this is at the start of the article, but already it ignores that the original Zelda had its own mechanical flaws. Though, that aside, I'm mostly pointing this out because I don't personally see the 'core' of Zelda games as being their mechanics under the hood. The core for Zelda games is the presentation layer. To me, you still play a hero in a classic good vs. evil battle, still gathering weapons and items to further your progress toward the final confrontation - the new Zelda games don't differ from the original on this at all. The core is retained, as far as I'm concerned. This is all opinion nonsense that just comes down to agreeing to disagree in the long run.

On the "freedom to explore" point: Absolutely correct about Nintendo making a false claim here. However, I feel like he's perhaps missing some key points about 1) change in game design and 2) fixing archaic game design. A game works perfectly fine if, at the start, you can run around wherever. A game is also fine if it guides you along via "locks" (blocked content) that you need to return to later. It's okay to favor one over the other, but calling one a broken version of the other is disingenuous and false. It's different, is all.

His complaint about cracked walls kind of irritates me, because again he's not looking at two possibilities in design. Either these spaces need to be hidden and found, OR they are marked. What makes each of these design choices work? In the latter, a lot of spots to use later-game items appear toward the start. But if Let's Plays or discussions with people have taught me anything, it's that these things are often forgotten. People aren't that tied into back-tracking, and THAT is what balances out known-secrets. For the former - how the original LoZ worked in that you had to test every tile - you have to provide a means to make this happen with relative ease. That game was tedious as shit when it came to bombing rock faces for secret entrances. Bombs were finite. And burning bushes was worst - until you got the red candle, you could only use the blue candle once before having to exit and re-appear on screen. That is tedious, and frankly it is not okay and it is not a sign of being better at a game or more hardcore or more devoted or anything. It's a sign that you're willing to put up with bullshit, for the moment.

I find it kind of funny that he refers to the extra content in the new games as "work," but ignores the previously pointed out "bomb and burn every tile" problem from Legend of Zelda.

I'm gonna stop reading at this point, I've got shit to do for the day. I can't say I'm interested in reading the ramblings of someone who is pretty much taking on that old-man-on-a-porch persona, telling kids to get off the lawn. The guy isn't able to loop back his points to previous statements he made. He's dead set on hating newer Zelda games, despite playing them still, which now that I wrote that makes me think that he was perhaps coming from a position of little conviction to begin with. Like maybe he casually mentioned to some people that the Zelda games aren't as difficult as the first, and he had the idea of writing something to justify the statement as excruciating as possible.

Edit - Typo fix.

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I don't know. of course bombing every tile is an archaic and terrible, but there's probably a better ways to handle it in modern era without visibly marking it. Maybe an NPC who casually mentions along the lines of "hey, did you hear that the wall next to the waterfall to the north is weak?" or something. Make the players earn the knowledge (or stumble upon it) rather than throwing it at the player.

Like I was alluding to (badly) in my earlier posts, the problem that I see in this regard has less to do with handholding (or ease of play) and more to do with how I perceive the game world: the feeling that there's more to the world than meets the eye.

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