I'M JUST GONNA LEAVE THIS HERE WITHOUT MUCH FURTHER COMMENT.

Most of the article seems to revolve around the premise that wild freedom and open world exploration is the only valid ideal to which the game should strive, and anything that doesn't lead to that end is fundamentally broken. This is a stupid premise.

Basically the guy just hates the idea of a game getting bigger as you play it instead of starting at maximum size, with no discernable reason for this hate beyond "the original zelda didn't do it".

There are other ways to make a game. Open world isn't the end-all be-all of game design. If you like the original Zelda's style of gameplay, fine, but it's not wrong to deviate from it.

I get the feeling he just hates the games out of jealousy and resentment for not being the same type of game as the one he liked the most, and hates the fans for liking the new ones better and not demanding that his favorite game get remade, and this hate has been building up for 20 years and finally he has a blog where people will listen to him so he just ranted and raged and let all the frustration and resentment out. Hopefully he feels better now.

Well there's one section of the article about difficulty, yes. This is a pretty common complaint with modern video games in general and I'm much more inclined to agree with it compared to the opening and closing sections of the article.

You should play Ocarina of Time: Master Quest. It's a version OoT for the Gamecube that has more monsters and harder monsters and monsters that attack you while you're solving puzzles and a few of the puzzle rooms are just straight up replaced with monster rooms. I feel like you'd enjoy it a lot more compared to the original.

He should play Parallel Worlds, a Link to the Past rom hack. It doesn't plop you into an open map like Zelda 1 as you still have to do the first rescue Zelda quest and the third dungeon needs the items from one and two (not counting the second quest because that dungeon got removed in it) but eventually when you reach the Dark other world it does exactly what he wants. You start in the spawn point, there are the crystal dungeons and the tower and you can do the crystal dungeons in any order you want. Plop, have a world! ps it is really really fucking hard. Zelda 2 hard for all your misguided 'heroic' dungeons.


I do absolutely agree with hand holding. Okami is terrible at this with Issun basically telling you how to solve 95% of the puzzles in the game before you ever really got a chance at it. I don't mind hints being available in a game but give me the choice to use them. In fact more games need good hints. UHS Hints was a life safer when I finally beat Gabriel Knight; I could get hints on places I was stuck without giving away the answer until the very end and getting a nudge in the right location is far more preferable to blankly staring or a direct solution. I think Jolly Roger does this with an auto-NeedAHint system that's way too frequent but can be turned off. Don't remember the quality of the hints though. Basically fuck writing messages in brick chalk on the side of crypts.


ps Fighting for survival in Zelda 1 is a joke. Anything short of blue iron knuckles are brain dead pushovers and the iron knuckles only gain exemption because you have to be up close to hit them right and they can suddenly turn right into you for good damage. I found dungeons in LttP far harder and more interesting as a kid from the variety and layout of obstacles and enemies.

author=Link
I'd prefer a non-linear Zelda game. The style of the game makes it a perfect fit for free roam.

I'm not sure this is actually true. The core thing of the Zelda series as far as I can tell, the thing that makes it Zelda to me, is the tools. While obviously you can add more roaming than exists in most of them, there have to be places that you can't get without the hookshot and the bombs and the bow and the fire rod and all the other tools. There have to be a pretty good number of them for those tools to have any meaning.

You can do it like Arkham City, where the world is entirely accessible from the beginning, but it's filled with hundreds and hundreds of green question marks for you to collect. A dozen or so of them are behind 15 foot sections of water so you need the zipline for those, and a dozen or so of them are behind steam vents so you need the ice grenades for those, and so forth. But that feels cheap to me, I want the tools to affect the game in a meaningful way, not just let you solve minor one-off puzzles that reward you with a piece of concept art and 1/500th of an achievement.

If the tools aren't a key component of exploration, then the exploration doesn't feel Zelda-y to me. It just feels like any other open world game that has the Zelda logo on the box. And if the tools are a key component of exploration, then you can't explore until you get them.

But, you know, for those of us in this thread who don't work at Nintendo, "hey this isn't ZELDA" probably isn't as big a deal as "hey this isn't FUN" so maybe that's not a worthwhile argument to pursue.

Idk I like the direction the series is headed. I don't understand the notion of "god zelda is the same every time" when they manage to change the look and feel of the games while still preserving what made it good. I really liked Skyward Sword but there were 2 things that really bothered me and something that might tie into whatever next LoZ they'll be making.

First, every time you arrive at a dungeon there's this fetch quest you have to do, basically a scavenger hunt where you look for all of the pieces of the key using your sword as a minesweeper. I just groan at this, maybe I'm getting old and every video game is essentially a fetch quest but outright telling me to go "collect x" like in some MMO just feels tiring. Think this is also in TP where you have to collect these necklaces or w/e as a wolf. In other Zelda games you just... figured out how to get into the next dungeon with whatever new item you got. There was more exploration and mystery. SS just kind of explains and lays it out for you.

Another thing is the Sky Overworld. The only reason why this place exists (so far to my knowledge) is that they're there for chests to open. You cannot open these chests however unless you break the whatever seals with your sword down below. Why not just... have the chests on the ground? Like they were probably running out of time or something so they couldn't elaborate on the sky place all that much but it just feels kind of sad that you can fly around on this nice bird and only A. Go to town or inn. B. go to whatever chest you "unlocked" As opposed to Wind Waker's vast sea with whatever island you wanted to go on. Not asking for fucking Morrowind over here, but just an overworld with better purpose.

This author does not want to save Zelda. He wants to go back in time and pines for a bygone era. As a paleontologist would pine for dinosaurs. Games with a nostalgic past have gone back to their roots before and were not met with thunderous applause but a mediocre 'yay' and a long sigh for an opportunity missed. Megaman and sonic come to mind.

imho, if he wants a game like that, he should make one.

Exactly, kentona.

He's complaining because he misses a nostalgic feeling that he doesn't get from games in the same series. Yeah, they are fundamentally different now. That's called evolution. You can't make the same game over and over and expect the series to last as long as Zelda has. (Mario is the exception I guess?)

There is a large part of the indie game development community that exists solely for this purpose. To make games that are unique, but tap into the nostalgic feeling of yester-game. The Binding of Isaac is a Zelda-like game that was spawned from this exact scenario.

Hell, probably around half of the games on RMN are an example of this. Hero's Realm is no exception.

I agree that the Zelda games need to be more difficult, the monsters should be actual threats. Combat should also be deeper. In particular, fighting multiple enemies simultaneously shouldn't be awkward. Then I also agree about having less items, but with more uses. If the developers are worried about not having enough dungeon treasures that way, they can make upgrades to already existing items instead of making new ones. As a general rule, items should have a lot of use beyond where they absolutely has to be used. Otherwise they may just as well be replaced by key-cards.

I don't agree about the story. I did not feel like I was saving anything in the first Zelda, because there wasn't anything to save. However, in Majora's Mask, I really wanted to save Clock Town. I don't think the lack of story and characters were features in the original Zelda either, rather they were consequences of technological and time limitations. How is having personality devoid people in caves supposed to enhance the sense of adventure?

As for exploration, I'm a bit on the fence here. I don't like when they plot lock huge portions of the map in in games with such a huge opportunity for exploration. On the other hand, I do like to be able to get access to new stuff as I progress. I think Majora's Mask did a good job here. Personally, I think I'd prefer if areas are locked away and gradually released, only it's more like multiple branches rather than a linear one area after the other deal.

Each has her or his own preferences. When the article writer asks "Isn’t that what we want?" in the end of the article, I think he's speaking for himself rather than for a significant portion of the Zelda fans.