Saving Zelda (2012)
tevisthompson.com
tevisthompson.com
In phantom hourglass, if bombing a crack is necessary to advance, not only will there be a massive crack visible, but the DS will actually switch to a cutscene the first time you enter that room specifically highlighting the crack. If that's not enough there will be a huge SIGN nearby telling you why not try a bomb, and in case you had not thought to bring any, there's also a bomb-plant providing an infinite supply in the corner of the room. If I remember right, for the boss that you need arrows to defeat, there's some kind of infinite resupply in the room as well.
P.S. I wonder how many times you need to mention "bomb" on HN to trigger an XKEYSCORE alert?
In opposite, the latest versions of the game are so easy. For example In Twilight Princess, I did not even die once versus the final boss... What a disapointment.
In a Souls game the "story" is not fed to you in bursts of out-of-place exposition but instead is found in the layout of the environment, the description of items, and the types and placement of certain enemies. Hidden areas and items abound, and without a guide you would be hard-pressed to find everything available in the game in a singe play through. You are not generally kept out of areas that are too difficult to you. In fact, some of the more difficult parts of the game are readily accessible from quite early on. So you die. You die a lot. Which brings us to difficulty. While I don't think these games are as hard as they are sometimes made out to be (you can out-level much of the difficulty if you want to spend the time doing so), the learning curve at the beginning is steeper than I have seen in a series in a long time. Games now have almost conditioned you to expect the developers to give you a break in the form of a special item or by restoring your health to full before a difficult section like a boss battle. This is not the case in the Souls series.
I kind of checked out of Zelda games after Ocarina of Time as I found the series less and less interesting as I grew older, though I still remember the old games fondly. While the characteristics of these older games are harder to find in newer titles these days, they are still rewarding and being used to good effect outside of the Zelda universe.
But there's a very hard game-design problem here: Completionism.
Modern gamers are obsessed with finding every last object, every achievement, 100%. If you play the original Zelda in this way, it becomes a tedious process of acquiring 12 bombs, running back to a particular screen, and bombing 12 blocks in a row checking to see if there's a secret cave... then, you're out of bombs and you have to commute back and do another round...
How do you preserve the mystery while avoiding the bomb-every-block tedium?
Video games no longer have that thrill of discovery because the Internet has ruined it. I loved the original Zelda, but we can never go back to that. So while I appreciate the nostalgia, it's like saying newspapers were a better model of journalism than the web. True or not, there's no going back.
Though I suppose I disagree with your assertion that one can never recreate or improve upon anything that evoked childlike wonder. Portal 2 did that for Portal; Mega Man 2 and 3 did that for their prequels, Empire did it for Star Wars, and as someone with powerful childhood memories of the mid-1980s Main Street Electrical Parade, I've been hearing good things about Disney's new Paint the Night.
You don't, it's part of the fun.
It never works. A game is ultimately never going to be able to outsmart its player; a determined player can always peek behind the curtain. Suspension of disbelief has to be willing - so why not embrace that?
And if the author wants to complain about games feeling like work, precise controller-use, meaningless deaths, or blind alleys are surely much bigger examples of that. The idea that you "actually become better" by getting better at videogame swordfights is laughable. That the original Legend of Zelda was harder doesn't make it any more heroic. Only less fun.
Part of the problem, I think, is that the Japanese market has a lot of gamers who like to have their hand held, and relatively few who want an open-world adventure. The same may even be true of the Western markets, but open-world games such as Fallout do NOT sell well in Japan, and attempts by Japanese developers to put those elements into Japanese games provoke criticism from the fan base that the game is "too Western". So you get this thing of a game where what to do next is always real obvious. Go where the thing tells you, fight these enemies by waiting for an opening and then attacking, bomb the obviously bombable wall, etc. Press a food pellet, get a reward. An open-world game confronts them with the unpleasant possibility of the unexpected. Now you have to survive, and what you have to do to survive isn't obvious. So you're going to die, and die, and die an awful lot in the game, and there's nothing like the artificial feeling of "making progress" brought about by the scripted game's obvious action-reward mechanism. But each death, each failure brings with it new knowledge about how the game works and so when you finally do "make progress" it's because you gained understanding through effort and that's much more rewarding.
Discovery creates an amazing gaming experience, but it takes some patience to get it. It might be frustrating at the beginning. Back in the early 90's you just had a few games, you had to get most of them. Now, people are exposed to millions of games for several platforms. If a game doesn't catch the attention of a player in the first few minutes, it's ditched for another one.
It's the market what's sinking Zelda, sadly...
When I played notch's minicraft, it had a distinctly Zelda-ish feel to it, including being hard enough that you have to really pay attention what you're doing sometimes. And he wrote that in what, 24 hours or something?
The Binding of Isaac is a good attempt in that direction.
I feel "A Link To The Past" is the best ever Zelda. My brother, who's younger than me, swears Ocarina of Time is the best Zelda. I am sure there are kids in their teens now that feel Skyward Sword is the best Zelda.
Nintendo seems to be ok with fan made ports as long as they aren't selling it - as seems to be the case with Mari0 [2].
There was some work being done on porting Super Metroid to the PC but I think that has been lost in time. Many years ago I contacted the author and instead of giving me the source he gave me compiled binaries :(. I can post a link if people are interested.
Zelda will never again be what this guy is looking for; there is simply too much pressure now for AAA games to be cinematic, cater to all audiences and easily expose all of their (extremely expensive) content to the player on demand - people want to get what they paid for.
The kind of experience he's looking for is now a niche corner of gaming: roguelikes offer random world generation, truly punishing death, and the need to really explore and figure things out (because it's a little different every time).
The biggest problem that a game has to deal with nowadays is how to treat failure. How do you offer risk/reward, and punish the player in a way that they keep coming back?
As a game player, I've discovered that the best thing you can do nowadays is try every game you can get your hands on, especially the enormous world of indie games out there. I've had to work through the natural instinct to stick to the prettiest, biggest-budget games and start trawling the indiest of the indie on Steam. You can find a better experience with a small game that made design decisions that resonate with you rather than a AAA, zillion-dollar-budget blockbuster that needs to cater to everyone, so seek out games that are opinionated. I can't tell you how many times I've been so pleasantly surprised by a $10-$15 deal and sunk hours and hours into it... maybe it's about as many times as I've gotten bored with another AAA chore simulator.
Meanwhile, Link to the Past was just about the perfect game to me. I remember watching my aunt play the original and it seemed fun, but Link to the Past was brilliant in my eyes.
A nice work of criticism and some interesting points, but the "mystery" and "ambiance" of what makes a game great is way too subjective for this to be very useful.
Now I'm gonna go dust of Shadow of the Colossus ...
The original Zelda worked just like the later ones. You needed the raft to get across the water. You needed the bomb to get into the hidden door. You needed the candle to burn away a bush. You needed the boomerang to get the key.
The core of Zelda has not really changed, it is what it's always been. Skyward Sword was a terrific game, and the others have all been great too.
I have no patience for people who complain that a game is not what they want it to be. Zelda isn't what you want? OK then make your own game that is what you want. Don't insist that Minamoto make your vision over his own. That's narcissistic beyond all reason.
The issue is genre. To take an extreme example, I might like the brutal open-world genre a la Dark Souls and complain that the Forza games are all garbage because they aren't that. Most would recognize this complaint as silly, because if I want a brutal open world with no hits I should find a game that purports to contain that, not go bashing racing games because I don't like that genre as much.
What the author's doing to Zelda obviously isn't as extreme, and it is a bit more grounded (Zelda games did used to be more like what the author wanted). But it's the same type of argument: back when there were no open world games, the author played one called Zelda and really liked it. Since then (starting with the third), almost /every single title in the series/ has been an extremely dungeon-focused, puzzle-focused game. The overworld has always been a big part, and there have always been some secrets, but the defining aspect of the genre has become these dungeons and puzzles.
This isn't to say the complaints are invalid; there's nothing wrong with wanting a game that is more hidden, less hand-holding, more focused on the action and less on the gimmicks that let you solve a puzzle. But that's not asking for a better version of Zelda, that's asking for a different genre altogether. Focus on asking for new titles in that genre, and leave other genres in peace.
I like what the author says but when you have to find something and you don't know what you're looking for you have to resort to a brute-force search. The original Zelda's overworld had 16x11=176 blocks per screen and was 16x8=128 screens. At a minute per screen that's two hours to do a rough exploration of the entire overworld. Twilight Princess is roughly four times the map size* and 8 hours looks like a long time to explore.
Compounding the problem is in the original Zelda a rock was pushable/not-pushable, a tree was burnable/not-burnable, a wall was bombable/not-bombable. That binary "I have checked this/I have not checked this" has largely disappeared. Not to mention 2-D vs 3-D.
Basically there is no fast Zelda Search Algorithm so either the game A) has a small map size, B) limits where the user needs to search, or C) takes forever.
*-http://www.ign.com/boards/threads/the-size-of-hyrule-area-co...
I'm not that invested in it though. This guy writes freakin fiction based on Zelda (and Mario and Metroid!). This guy doesn't want to "save" Zelda. This guy is upset that Nintendo has gone in a different direction with Zelda, and not the one he thinks is "right" (ie the one he wants).
I couldn't agree more with other comments here:
"I have no patience for people who complain that a game is not what they want it to be. Zelda isn't what you want? OK then make your own game that is what you want. Don't insist that Minamoto make your vision over his own. That's narcissistic beyond all reason."
And if you don't like it?
"Chill out and play skyrim."
Ultima Online was amazingly fun and brutal. If you died your body was free to loot by anyone.
But ever since World of Warcraft. All we have are carebear mmos with soul bound items and no reason to explore or do anything besides grind.
I don't know how people find most of today's games fun. They are so boring.
I miss the games I played as a kid on my SNES and Sega Mega Drive. Hours sunk into games with no save points or having to be careful when low on items or health. :(
I think this may be a defining factor for a lot of people in this thread. As a kid, time management is extremely different. You presumably had much more time and less options of things to pick from, so for the most part, video games may have taken up a large percentage of what you enjoyed, and even what you cared about.
As a kid, I would sit for hours playing the nes Zelda and repeatedly dying, picking up the controller, and having another go. But now, now if I even have time to play video games, I just want to sit down and play some mind-numbing, flashy video game to blow off some steam. After a day of work, I don't want to continually be challenged and exert mental effort.
I just wish that both clever and mind-numbing games were still being built, but lately consumer trends have skewed towards the mind-numbing.. which I do believe is unfortunate for people with more time and interest in playing quality video games, namely the next generation of kids.
I have been so far unimpressed with the combat in the game. The monsters have slapped-together "powers" and appear in incoherent groups. Often just a room full of one type and little synergy with mechanics. The Darknuts that are impervious to damage from the front, for example, are tedious and frustrating because the only edge of their hitbox that will take damage from your weapon is constantly moving away from the character and you can't run and hit at the same time. Throw in their random choice about when to turn and you can spend an hour making your way back to the same room to be slaughtered over and over until you get lucky enough one time to win. That's not heroism: that's persistence.
It does have many redeeming qualities of course. I agree that the completely accessible world is certainly a wonderful design decision in the early games. It is a concept well plumbed in pioneering rogue-likes such as Moria and ToME (when it was still Tales of Middle Earth). The world is presented as is and the player is plopped into an area that is suitably dangerous and exploration outwards tends to get more difficult with distance -- the occasional high-level location not withstanding. The use of items for progression is a well-trod trope of the adventure genre and used effectively in The Legend of Zelda. It's unfortunate that the series would turn the mechanic into a lock-and-key system just as the adventure game genre did instead of taking the original game's tack and using items to add new abilities instead of more areas.
If it had followed that tack the Zelda series might've felt more like the rogue-like games did around that time with items, identification, and combination being a game unto itself.
If anything the original games gave us a set of tropes and gimmicks to build upon. Wall bombing, block pushing, gimmicky-enemies, and grids of tilemaps: all of them are practically cliché today. We make inside jokes about them and print them on t-shirts.
I'm not sure what keeps the original The Legend of Zelda up there on its pedestal. It's a frustrating game to play. Without the narrative thread of its successors it makes almost no sense. And yet it holds an allure for those of us that were there before this context existed. This game was new, fresh, and exciting. Maybe it was the potential: the lure, the promise, the hidden cave of gaming goodness that we've been stumbling after all of these years. It's not so much that The Legend of Zelda was a good game for me. It objectively wasn't a great game in some respects. But it did stake one of the early flags on the shore of an undiscovered land and set our collective sights on something.
While I've enjoyed the series, for the most part, to date I can see how it is slightly disappointing how it veered from Miyamoto's vision and forged a different path. It would be interesting to see if, like Mario did with the Lost Levels, an offshoot or side-project of the series could try and revive those early mechanisms and "save the series."
The dungeon "puzzles" are almost insultingly easy, too. Even easier than typical modern Zelda dungeon puzzles.
I'm loving the game, especially the non-linearity and the numerous choices without clear right/wrong answers. But it really just does not provide what the author is looking for.