ISRIERI'S PROFILE

A couple nights ago I dreamt about walking through some streets where there were a lot of cats. Then I walked through some woods where a woman was walking her dog. And I think I had a dog as well. The camera (cuz the dream was shot like a film) was low to the ground in the forest but around my head's height or a little above while in the streets.

This is not an exciting dream but I DON'T HAVE DREAMS VERY OFTEN so the fact that I remembered it is immediately significant. This might have been the first or second dream I remember having this year.

I'd rather be brain damaged and have crazy dreams than not have any at all.

In before this status becomes the new Thinking thread.

Actually can statuses be locked? I never thought about that before.

If I have a beef with ALBW its the dungeons. They don't feel like labyrinths, or have any sense of space, or dread, or mystique. Certainly not like Twilight Princess had. Go load the game up and look at the dungeon maps. They're all essentially a giant square room with walls dividing it up.

That's a very nitpick complaint though. The dungeons feel very "video-gamey" but that doesn't mean that the puzzles aren't well-designed nor that they aren't fun to play through. And its not like square rooms comprising your entire dungeon is something I can really get mad at, considering...y'know.

Lorule Castle gets me pumped for the finale. And the final boss was superb.

Locke does bring up a valid point with the items and how since you can have them all the devs assume you never have them. I didn't think about it that way before and is a real let-down. But the way I see it: Its baby steps. The only reason they did that was so you could play dungeons in any order. And they pulled that off. Next time, they'll expand to having all the items in one dungeon hopefully maybe.

author=LockeZ
Twilight Princess is the only game in the series where the swordplay has any more depth than swing sword, charge up sword for circle swing, jump attack for double damage. You got all kinds of neat combat abilities like finishing moves and counterattacks and rolling strikes and stuff. And it was the first and last game where the tools were also integrated into combat well - you could use them all effectively while locked on, and even use some of them from horseback while locked on. I loved it.

This is precisely the root of my personal disappointment: The tools available to you for combat were plentiful and well-implemented and fighting flowed well and it was fun to hit things. But I can't consider it anything but wasted potential because all the enemies are so duuuuumb. I mean, I know the AI in Zelda foes has never been up to snuff ever, and if it did the game would get frustrating very quickly, but this was the game that felt as though it could have benefited the most from buffing them up a bit. You've got the combat skills you can learn to take on smarter foes, and have myriad tools to fall back on to cheese the hell out of some trickier enemies (bomb arrows on ice spear dudes is hella fun) but the game just makes that "the way" and not a weakness to be exploited or make you feel clever for using. It totes sucks. The funnest combat of the game was probably the Cave of Ordeals because at least they tossed them in some interesting enemy combos and made health scarce.

Don't get me wrong, its still fun to be a whirling dervish of death. But I had such hopes for the game's foes and they didn't live up to that. I mean say what you want about OOT but at least the skeletons had the decency to strafe. Yes I am being a tad unreasonable with my expectations. A full grown man like myself is basically disqualified from calling Zelda too easy.

I WAS just a teenager at the time though SO ITS STILL VALID.

Far better than the bullshit horrible Skyward Sword bullshit where it tracked your remote terribly, and then did everything a third of a second after you did it.

That's not the worst of it my friend. No one ever seems to realize it, but the game relies 150% on Z Targeting. All you have to do to kill those annoying gobby bastards and most of the directional-blocking foes is just not target them. They'll hold their weapons back like a bunch of idiots and just let you spin-attack them all the live-long day. The core gameplay mechanic relies on you being a goody two-shoes.

If I recall correctly you can even cheese the Lizalfos with this. And they were hands down the most engaging enemy. Skyward Sword did impress with me with them, at the least.

author=LightningLord2
Bosses in OoT and Minish Cap are sluggish, easily predictable and merely require spamming whatever item you found in the dungeon until the opponent falls over,

Pretty true, and it sucks that every boss ever after OOT has you do that crap. But they had the benefit of being intimidating bosses at the time. There was a real menace to walking into a boss room and seeing that giant goddamn dragon monster or the creepy crawly parasite you had to actually look up on the ceiling to find. Or the scary ghost ganon that SHOT LIGHTNING BOLTS UP YOUR ASS in very claustrophobic conditions. And Deadhand. That guy.

Not the most challenging but they were cool bosses. The bosses in the newer games are just silly sometimes. (Not that there aren't a few winners now and again. The final fight with Ganon in Wind Waker is my favorite Ganon fight)

The LTTP bosses are superior gameplay wise, so that's why it got Best Gameplay from me.

author=LockeZ
Wind Waker has the worst exploration. I mean, that's obvious. Fuck the ocean. Never playing that game again. The sailing is so bad. It makes the game completely unplayable.

But its so adventurous! The wind at your back! The seagulls! The endless horizons! If the whole game was JUST sailing around and exploring islands I would have loved it all the more. But nooo Zelda games have to have dungeons. I concede this: They could have really benefited from putting the islands closer together. There was no reason not to make the game a giant archipelago.

author=LightningLord2
I also like the dungeon design in A Link to the Past as it is always clear which way to go next - in OoT, it's very frequent to run into dead ends, traverse extremely complicated floors (dat forest temple) and you don't get a map + compass until you beat most of the dungeon already.

The biggest thing the dungeons have going for it is that they don't always give you a key to immediately use on a locked door that prevents your progress to the next linear room. There were sometimes multiple locked doors you could choose to open and explore that room with. It didn't come up often, but the option was clearly there. It put the exploration of the dungeons in your hands. The reason they're so well designed is that they give you that non-linearity and allow you to get lost. But the tools are there so that you can find your own bearings if you use your noggin.

This freedom to use keys on multiple locked doors is the reason the Water Temple is so hated; they hid one of the keys in a pretty sneaky spot. And the entire world bitched about it and they've never let us have that freedom again. OOT kids all bitch about the Water Temple but we secretly love and cherish it. It built character.

Here's the solution Nintendo: Give us an item that counts the total keys in a dungeon. Bam. Problem solved forever why aren't they paying me for this.

I have an uncanny ability to fall down one-tile holes. Two tiles or wider? I usually clear those. One tile? Like a lead safe in a swamp.

It is hilarious trying to watch me play an FPS. The most fun I've had with one was Halo Reach. Made a game type called Soviet Grunts. Now THAT was entertainment. So many grenades~

EDIT: Okay just saying its hilarious isn't enough, here's a funny story from when me and my bud was playing co-op:



I feel like I've told that story on this forum before. Deja vu?