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The Legend of Zelda Series and its place within the History of Video Games
[NOTE ZERO: Spoilers! While we are not going to do a deep dive into every
story twist and mechanic of these games, we will certainly mention some
touching endings, amazing moments with weapons and ingenious tools at the
player’s disposal. So if you want to go into these games completely fresh,
better go play ‘em]
[NOTE ONE: This will be a four-part deep
dive into the Legend of Zelda video game series, that is planned (ha!) to
be published bimonthly. While certain sections will look at aspects of the
series as a whole, it will mostly be chronological, so the most recent
games won’t be the focus until the final part. But if you want to know
right now if you should play 2017’s
Breath of the Wild or 2020’s
Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, the short answers are an emphatic
yes and sure]
[NOTE TWO: Hey, do you like video games? Like, a lot? Then some of this
essay might tread over some very obvious areas of your base knowledge
(whether concepts behind games, or the history of the medium, or parts of
the Zelda series). It's designed to be for both hardcore fans and those
with a passing interest in the (still growing) culture, who obviously know
about Mario, maybe played Sonic, Halo or GTA all those years ago, and have
at lest heard of Atari. Not to say that you'll be totally bored if you can
rattle off your top five Zelda dungeons whenever need be (people like
reading nice things about things they like…and I will proudly defend
Ocarina of Time's Water Temple),
but just a heads up, there might be some ‘yeah, obviously’ moments for
you]
[NOTE THREE: Advances in computer technology have allowed for video games
to improve in quality over the decades and become more and more of an
essential piece of popular culture. At the same time (and also thanks to
computer technology) the video essay
can be created and viewed much easier, the former typically only requiring
an interest in the subject and editing equipment that is available on most
commercial laptops, and the latter only requiring eyes and an internet
connection. As these are both visual mediums, it makes sense that there
are many more video essays covering and analyzing video games than
traditional written essays (it's easier to prove a point about graphics or
gameplay by showing them). But...that's not going to happen here. This is
the old fashioned written word all the way. Which means there can be a
slight disconnect, a bit like reading a book about music that you may be
unfamiliar with (you can’t really understand the music the writer is
describing until you listen to it). So for those who would wish for a
glossary of sorts, or a quick resource to get a visual image and more
basic description of the main points and minutiae of what is being
described here, it is recommended that you have the websites Zelda Dungeon
or Fandom’s Zelda-pedia open in a new tab, ready to clarify]
Chapter Eight: Wind
Waker and The Epic of Gilgamesh
Water is good. Water is essential to life. We are mostly water. But it is
also foreboding and dangerous. You can drown in it certainly, but if you
ever stood on an ocean beach and looked out at the seemingly endless waves
stretching all the way to the horizon, you realize that water is the best
way to signify something immense, powerful, and beyond our familiarity.
In ancient myths, gods and goddesses were the explanation for how the
natural world worked, and when something bad happened five thousand years
ago (or five hundred years, or even today, according to some people), it’s
because you deserve it in a sectarian sort of way.
Flood myths are some oldest, and are typically used to give the impression
that divine intervention on a wide scale was required because humanity was
really screwing up big time. Forget specific targeting to explain why your
spouse died or you had a poor harvest. A flood brings the hurt to
everybody. The oldest known yarn was the side story from the epic of
Gilgamesh, coming out of Mesopotamia in about 1800BC. The god Enlil
thought humanity was being too noisy, and sent a world-destroying flood.
Another god (Ea) warned Utnapishtim (no relation to Agahnim) that this was
about to happen and that he should build a boat to survive it (spoiler
alert: He did). If the Mesopotamians were as protective of their
Intellectual Property as Nintendo, they could have sued the Book of
Genesis with Noah (Judaism/Christianity/Islam), Satapatha Brahmana with
Vishnu/Manu (Hinduism), and Plato’s Timaeus (Greek myths). It was so
popular because everyone knew that water was good, but way too much water
coming way too quickly was an absolute disaster.
It shows that people can make stories out of anything. We do this with
entertainment, sports and political figures, watching their rise, fall
from grace, and possible redemption. We affix these typical ups and downs
to the histories of movie franchises, to long-running television series
and sports teams. So as video games entered the new millennium as the
bright-eyed pop culture kids on the block, it was high time for the same
salutations and expectations to be brought upon them.
After 1998’s Ocarina of Time and
2000’s Majora’s Mask, the Zelda
series has become mythic (or another similar word that’s escaped us at the
moment) in the industry. Having recently passed its fifteenth anniversary,
it was a critical and commercial success, the latest entries showing
storytelling maturity and gameplay complexity not seen in any other games
at the time.
It created new fans of the series and video games in general, and many
critics and fans were curious to see what Nintendo would offer on its
newest console, which would compete with the Playstation 2 and whatever
Bill Gates was allegedly working on.
So when early Gamecube demo footage was shown at the Spaceworld 2000 video
game conference of a realistic 3D Link epically sword-fighting a 3D
Ganondorf (who is egging our hero on, gesturing him to bring it) with much
higher quality graphics than we'd seen in
Ocarina/Majora, everyone was
pumped. Not only did it look good, but it looked dark, violent, and
intense.
So when Wind Waker was announced
one year later and some basic gameplay and info was shared, there were
some complaints that it looked nothing like the demo.
That's right, people were upset that this game looked cartoony, bright and
fun.
It wasn’t what they expected, or what they wanted, and as people grow
emotionally attached to a video games series, artist, or movie franchise,
not getting what they want from a multinational corporation designed to
maximize profits begins to feel like an insult.
It certainly didn’t help that the Gamecube console itself (released the
same year as this early footage) looked like it belong in a toy box, not
sitting within your entertainment unit below your television.
What the PlayStation and the (soon to be announced) Xbox offered in the
early 2000s was what the video game industry seemed to want all along:
seriousness and respect.
Not just in terms of financial success, as it began to make profits that
rivaled the Hollywood blockbusters, but the medium itself growing up along
with the gamers that started playing in the eighties and nineties, and
giving them those m-for-mature rated, blood-gushing experiences they so
richly deserved.
Nintendo seemed to be disinterested in all this, which earned the ire of
some of their longtime fans and indifference from potential new ones.
Miyamoto promised a Zelda for ‘all ages’ in 2002, which meant plenty of
teen and adult gamers were not ready to fully embrace the experience of
cell-shaded ten year old hero and his taking boat.
This is Zelda and Nintendo’s first stumble in the long and still running
‘story about a video game franchise’, and like all good stories, there are
twists, turns and things that seemed to be like this at first but
ultimately ended up being like that. In the ever growing video game
community (bolstered by the ever-more popular interwebs), viewpoints and
opinions will flow like water, in all its importance, flexibility and
danger. And looking back on them afterwards can create their own myths
about what kind of thoughts flooded the world when
Wind Waker first dropped.
Meanwhile, water levels are the
bane of many adventure and platform video games, whether in 2D or 3D
forms. In most games you are running, jumping, driving, flying, moving
faster and faster. But once you get into the water, everything changes
(just like real-life!). Movement is slower, more difficult (therefore
deadlier), and there is a myriad of enemies you are wholly unfamiliar
with. Even in games where there isn't a health bar or timer tied to how
long you can survive beneath the waves, there is definitely a challenge in
getting around. Because there are fewer water segments in a game, that
also means you have fewer opportunities to get accustomed to these new
challenges (unless, y’know, you die over and over again).
For game developers, the ‘water level’ is a
relatively easy way to make something suddenly hard.
They are something you
grimace over in Mario, have a heart attack during in Sonic, and the Water
Temple in Ocarina of Time can
trigger frustrating flashbacks from your initial play-through.
In A
Link to the Past and Link’s
Awakening you would drown in the water unless you had proper
equipment, and in Ocarina you
couldn’t survive long swimming under water before suffocating unless you
had the proper gear. Majora did
the weird thing (surprise!) by allowing you to swim like a fish-man…once
you took the face off a dead Zora and wore it as a mask.
So
as is their wont, the Zelda team changed everything in
Wind Waker by giving you a boat
and making the entire game take place
on water, but not exactly
in water (although Link looks
dang cute as he bobs and swims upon the surface…until his very limited
lung capacity/stamina runs out and he drowns).
Plenty of Zelda games
begin with a retelling of events from a past entry in the series, but a
slightly truncated or altered account (as legends typically dovetail from
historical accuracy as time passes).
Wind Waker directly reference
Ocarina of Time, saying that long after those events, the kingdom was
once again overrun by evil, but this time there was no hero to save them,
and in the end they appealed to the gods, and ‘left their future in the
hands of fate’. But fate was fickle, the
world was flooded, many perished, and now the survivors are just living on
the islands that dot the Great Sea.
It
starts off with...everything absolutely fine. Better than fine, actually,
it’s Link's birthday!
But the celebrations (including getting dressed in customary
green) are cut short when Link's sister is kidnapped, and with the help of
some friendly pirates (led by a spunky young leader named Tetra) who give him a ride to a nearby fortress, our hero begins a great
adventure that takes him across, above and eventually under the Great Sea.
Advances in computer technology were coming fast and furious, and that
meant game developers were able to choose between more lifelike character
and background designs and more intricate ways to interact with the world.
Do you want that rock to look like a real rock, or do you want that rock
to be picked up and dragged around and maybe used at a later point in the
game?
Realistic graphics are great if you really want to feel like you shot that
guy in the face or chainsawed that demon in half but it by no means equals
a fun and engaging game (although yes, at least one of those thing are
definitely fun).
In this game’s case, what you lose in
graphical complexity by embracing a ‘cartoony’ aesthetic you gain in
fluidity and specific nuances in movement.
Link and the entire cast have incredibly expressive faces (certainly
meme-worthy), and for a protagonist who doesn't talk, you become more
connected to him with each new look of surprise, happiness, and sarcastic
disappointment.
His faces in the earth temple when he is either possessed by a ghost or
walking through the haunted mist are more hilarious than disconcerting.
It’s not just Link and the NPCs he interacts
with, but the monsters he’s trying to slay as well. Initial slashings of
the moblins will result in them running away holding their rear ends.
Others will scramble to grab their fallen swords.
Detailed combat animations means using all
the weapons in Wind Waker feels
so good (especially as you strengthen the Master Sword bit by bit). You
can appreciate the quality of the work when noticing Link winding up, the
moment of impact, and the explosion or dazed look on the face of the enemy
afterwards. Everything works seamlessly when you push the right button at
the right time, so the game has a great tactile feel right from the
get-go.
The combat itself is satisfying that you
look forward to battles because it’s a chance to kick some serious monster
ass. The Skull Hammer alone is a reason to get up in the morning.
These details are examples of Nintendo’s
trick of making everything else in the game creation process easier. By
having sprites that are easier to animate because they are less
realistically detailed, it frees up development time and storage space for
other aspects of the game (in the past the real trick was compressing
music tracks onto a cartridge).
Praise is given to
Majora’s Mask for being made so quickly right after
Ocarina, but
Wind Waker’s development time was only a few months longer, and they
didn’t recycle any assets from a previous title. It was all new graphics,
gameplay and story on a different console, and it succeeded marvelously.
As far as a
single player gaming experience,
Wind Waker easily competes with anything Xbox and PlayStation offered
in the early 2000s.
But it’s a time of gritty realism in video
games (GTA, Metal Gear), and
even sci-fi epics (Halo) are
meant to be taken extra seriously. Most of the colours are earthy browns
and green or cold city and spaceship grey, with the themes matching this
tone.
Wind Waker definitely looked
like it came straight of a Teletubby’s belly compared to everything else.
The game ‘feels’ as easy as a summer breeze to play through, even though
there will be still be moments where you have to poke your nose into every
corner of certain room in dungeons (or to find out how to open the talking
door on the cabana island). You might even see a ‘game over’ early on
because you were too carefree when it came to judging a fall height or how
hard that enemy swings their sword.
Travelling on the open seas is a hell of a
lot of fun, because it is a conceit that is perfect for the limitation of
open world video games in general. How can a wide-open flat space be
exciting to traverse from one side to the other?
In previous games it was your own two feet,
with assistance from your horse, Epona (or flying blue bear). Here you can
travel anywhere, and having a big flat ocean was the best way to spread
out all the places to go and things to see across an open world you could
explore in any way.
The alternative was that games would ‘cheat’
the size of the playing area. Buildings you can’t go into. Cliffs and
walls you can’t climb. Permanently locked doors inside castles and
laboratories. A lost woods designed solely for getting lost.
You just didn’t have the time or storage
space (or enough RAM to process it as the player explored) to develop all
that you wanted to in the early 2000s.
Wind Waker’s brilliance was
that they made going through the gaps between the stuff actually fun, by
forcing you to avoid sharks, exploding barrels, and enemy cannons, and
making stopping to pick up rupees and treasure irresistible. Even when you
gain the ability to warp, unless it was really pressing to advance the
story, setting sail ‘the old fashioned way’ was still totally worth it.
The Great Sea is so big that you might even come across a new island or
vessel late in the game.
When you do reach your destination, you’re
always in for a treat, whether it is a peaceful village like Outset or
Windfall, or a place in grave danger like Dragon’s Roost Island or
Greatfish Isle.
The design of the dungeons and the
challenges (in terms of puzzles and enemies) inside them blend seamlessly
with the themes of the story and makes every moment you play that more
engaging and important. They are, for the most part, much more linear
(which usually means easier) than the 3D excursions in
Ocarina and
Majora. It’s like Aonuma and the
team was aware of the frustrations in recent entries and pulled back the
more ‘multi-level spatial awareness’ moments than.
Whatever bit of dumbing down there was,
however, Wind Waker did a sly
creativity swap out by changing how you would have to navigate
the Earth and Wind
Temples.
For the first time he has some help inside them (he’s been responsible
for the safety other characters in previous ones). Characters Medli and
Makar accompany Link inside them, and their own abilities must be utilized
to help Link traverse the dungeon. Of course sometimes they’re more
trouble than they’re worth because they don’t have a sweet sword like our
hero does, but we can let Link’s expressive face show how he feels about
that.
What’s even more impressive is that the
story pacing and mechanics of the game works so harmoniously well,
considering several proposals had to be cut to make the deadline (and not
have the problem with employee crunch, or ship a game full of bugs and
glitches).
Wind Waker
was supposed to have more dungeons, the designs of which are shown in very
rough form in the 2011 Zelda art book, the Hyrule Historia. These aspects
were cut and were replaced with the late-game,
easier-to-design-but-significantly-less-fun triforce fetch-quest.
Like myths of old, beneath the Great Sea is
an ancient place of wonder and mystery, and when Link is able to explore
this kingdom with a rather familiar name, there is certainly a feeling of
awe that a humble, sleepy kid from a tiny island has made it this far,
with even more responsibility soon to be thrust upon him.
It truly feels like an adventure and less
like a video game, with a great story with memorable cast of characters to
elevate it at every moment. The NPCs aren’t just designed perfectly from a
visual standpoint, but from a personality standpoint as well.
Some genuinely sad moments involve parting,
with Link leaving home for the first time and waving goodbye as he departs
on the pirate ship, or
Medli having to abandon
Dragon Roost Island to fulfill her ethereal duties. If Link returns to his
home later, he’ll find Grandma mumbling in her sleep how much she misses
you.
These are balanced out many, many moments of levity, whether it be working
for the nicest pirate crew you’ll ever meet, witnessing Beedle’s
membership card bonus, and keeping a bored carny busy at the
‘sploosh-kaboom’ battleship game (he holds up paintings of people with the
faces cut out so he can 'act' as them, including Tetra at one point, since
this game is not afraid to get a wee bit meta for a laugh).
The ‘bullies’ from Majora’s
Clocktown are back at Windfall Island, and you have to once again find
them to advance the story. Other kids want to charge for hints,
gossip-mongers admonish you for eavesdropping, and a strange man in a
snowsuit implores you to help bust his friend out of jail. After you
rescue the young women from the Forbidden Fortress (with the pirates’
help), you can find how their lives have changed when they return to
Windfall.
Ganondorf’s portrayal here is by far the most complex and developed of the
series. Even in the great leap forward that was
Ocarina of Time, he was a fairly
one dimensional, cackling villain.
In Wind Waker he is...dare we
say it...sympathetic. Especially the way he says, 'I coveted that wind, I
suppose', with such wistfulness in his face (and since there is no voice
acting (at this point) all this has to be conveyed in
Wind Waker's excellent art).
With the airiness and bright spirit of adventure coursing through the
entire tale, it just makes his lines like-
‘your gods destroyed you!’
-hit all the more hard.
Ganondorf wants to raise Hyrule back to the
surface so he can rule over it as he sees fit, in complete defiance of the
gods. The Triforce doesn’t judge, but situations can turn on a dime, and
nothing can be more dangerous for hero or villain alike than excessive
pride (Link himself wouldn’t know). Fighting him at the climax perfectly
incorporates the helper mechanics you’ve become familiar with, and his end
is absolutely fitting and a little bit tragic.
Let the past die. Let the water rush over
the mistakes and have the survivors start again. At
Wind Waker’s climax, water will save you or damn you, as it always
has for thousands of years.
Not bad at all for our young Gilgamesh.
[It's 2002 and also 2003, because the game released in December in Japan,
and not until the new year in the rest of the world.
Nintendo's GameCube has been out for well over a year, and it's
been...okay. They handed the launch title reins to Mario's brother, and
Luigi's Mansion was a much different sort of platformer than
anything that came before, and the sales were below expectations. Even
Mario's own eventual big title,
Super Mario Sunshine didn't have the same initial welcome (critically
or commercially) as previous entries.
Meanwhile, with
PlayStation 2 Sony is raking in grands upon grands by the hour, and would
continue to do so, with some of the best-selling games for this console
sounding like the best-selling games of the first PlayStation (Gran
Turismo 3 and 4, a Final
Fantasy entry). But there is also the Grand Theft Auto series.
On PS2,
GTA 3
and GTA San Andreas
lets you do terrible things and the same sort of people who hated (or
would have hated) heavy metal in the 1980s decried it as being a hideous
blight on society and won’t someone please think of the children? Rockstar’s
improvement of everything in the first two entries in the series was
rightfully widely praised, and because kids would rather run people over
than save some silly old sword kingdom, it sold like mad.
A good, stark comparison was that the exact same month
Luigi’s Mansion came out in
North America and offered a vacuum cleaner to explore a haunted, cartoony
hotel, Playstation 2 released the mindfuck that was
Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty,
the latest in the Konami stealth series overseen by Hideo Kojima, which
explored ideas such as political conspiracies, geo-engineering, virtual
reality, and free-will.
It was a new, serious gaming world, and with
Sega trying and failing to beat Nintendo with that angle a decade ago,
that company has now ditched the hardware market and
moved to become just a gaming company, allowing for
the surreal experience of being able to play a Sonic the Hedgehog game on
a Nintendo console.
But
in this supposed vacuum another company steps in.
Even while designing,
developing and releasing their own console, Xbox, Microsoft has just
offered to buy Nintendo outright for $25 billion (spoiler alert: The Big N
said no). With insanely deep pockets, the pressure to immediately become
profitable was not there, and for that same reason the company just bought
smaller gaming studios just to see what they might come up with. Bungie
software provided Xbox with its perfect killer app at launch,
a futuristic
first person shooter game that ditched
Doom's blood and gore replaced
it with a ton of vehicles, some great combat mechanics and a pretty good
sci-fi story. Halo: Combat Evolved
was smooth sleek, and just grew in stature after its late 2001 release.
Its multiplayer function and well-designed maps (Hang 'Em High!) meant
endless replay-ability with friends and foes on your couch.
Because it was Microsoft, Xbox was also the
first big console to have internet capability built in, while the Gamecube
and PS2 offered separate accessories in order for you to do so. This means
that at the moment PC Gaming is leading the way in online multiplayer
experiences, simply because by this time practically every computer is
built with the assumption the user will want to access the internet,
because it seems to be flooding the world…]
Wind Waker is the game where
if an eight year old plays it, they’ll become a fan for life. Not just of
the Zelda series, but video games in general.
It is the adventure that eight year olds (of
all ages) dream about.
When the rest of the industry was moving
towards realism, Nintendo did a complete u-turn and embraced a style that
came to be known as ‘Toon Link’ (which is how this variation of our hero
will come to be known on the Smash Bros roster). Eventually two sequels to
Wind Waker were made for the
handheld Nintendo DS (Phantom
Hourglass and Spirit Tracks),
but because the initial sales were half that of
Ocarina of Time, fiscal concerns
meant the Zelda team were obligated to go back to the drawing board for
the home console experience that would follow it.
It seems ridiculous now that this game was
met with indifference or even disappointment. Time has been incredibly
kind, because no one is going to deny that
Wind Waker is light-hearted,
joyous fun and brimming full of bright positivity (even while it still has
plenty to say about the past and regret).
Oh, and the music is tops! From the jaunty
main theme to the energetic sailing music to the slightly melancholy theme
of Dragon’s Roost island.
It’s paced like an incredible adventure film
for the whole family, but the sort that Pixar would make which means that
it absolutely has ‘a little bit of something for everyone’.
It is a perfect example of how a title
story’s can compliment the gameplay without overshadowing it. Going back
and forth between the two elements on your adventure feel natural and
effortless. Who knows, maybe Wind
Waker is something people will still be talking about in mythic awe a
thousand years from now.
[Playable on: Gamecube, Wii (via Gamecube
disc), Wii U (HD Version)]
Interlude: The Tech, or
'It's Dangerous to Go Alone! Take This!'
The stuff you use to play video games have changed over the years, and
Nintendo is the only one of today’s big three that was making video games
when Microsoft was still DOS-ing about and Sony was selling life insurance
(really) in addition to electronics.
As of this writing, we have just recently began the ninth generation of
video game consoles, and going into detail about them will most likely be
the most boring thing in this entire piece (fingers crossed).
Generations don’t start and end neatly, and
companies don’t always release their new consoles at the exact same time.
But because they are expensive items sought after by plenty of children
(and fine, children at heart), it’s not much of a shock that they
typically launch during the November/December holiday shopping season.
The first generation of consoles is also the
longest lasting, going from 1972 to the Video Game Crash of 1983. The
Magnavox and Atari series are the best known ones from this period
(although Nintendo was also on the scene with the name-challenged Color
TV-Game Series), but this was still a time when the arcade was king.
Forget bits and megaybtes, these ones didn’t
even have microprocessors (CPUs). They were dedicated consoles, a finite
state machine which meant it could only play what it was programmed to
play at the time of its manufacturing. For the Magnavox, it was three
games: tennis, hockey, and squash (which was called ‘smash’, because
reasons). For Atari, it was just Pong, and the console looked like an old
radio.
As an example of generational overlap, the
second one began in 1976, It was the start of consoles having CPUs, as
well as cartridges that held code which could tell the console how to
‘play’ the game. The Atari 2600 has 128 bytes of storage, and games could
be as ‘big’ as 32 kilobytes in the early eighties. The Video Game crash of
1983 is usually the moment when this generation sputters to a halt. The
crash itself was a typical bubble, with too many low quality video game
consoles flooding the market because it seemed like a ‘get rich
quick’-type product in the early eighties, and it just so happened that
the fad ended in 1983.
The third generation actually began on a set
date, July 15, 1983, with the release of both the Nintendo’s Family
Computer (Famicom) and Sega’s SG-1000 in Japan, where the crash really
didn’t happen on the same level as in America and Europe. It was the
beginning of the 8-bit era, as these consoles had data units that were 8
bits wide (with 256 possible values!).
The release of NEC PC Engine in Japan in
October 1987 began the fourth generation, and with its re-named launch in
North America as the Turbo Grafx-16, it’s easy to guess what the
difference is from the gen three. Sega’s Mega Drive came out in 1988, and
Nintendo wouldn’t release its 16-bit console (the Super Famicom) until
1990.
The fifth generation is indeed the 32-bit
era…and also the 64-bit era. It began in 1993 with (double checks this)…FM
Towns Marty (oh…kay), a console made by Fujitsu. But everyone will know it
more for the beginning of CD and 3D gaming thanks to the release of the
PlayStation and the Nintendo 64 (…bit) in 1994-95 and 1996 respectively.
Consequently, this is perhaps the biggest jump since Generation One to
Two.
Generation Six began on November 27, 1998,
when the Sega Dreamcast launched. It was the 128-bit era, but it didn’t
really mean anything because anything more than 32 or 64 bits didn’t have
much of an effect on performance. Instead, other aspects of the CPU like
clock speed and memory size were key. Dreamcast was a bust, suggesting
that rushing the latest tech out was pointless if the games weren’t any
good, and it takes time to develop good, non-glitchy games for new
hardware. Which is why Playstation 2 didn’t come out until 2000, and Xbox
and Nintendo’s Gamecube fought tooth and nail in late 2001.
By the time of the seventh generation, there
were really only three main console makers, so a new era was heralded when
Xbox 360 came out in late 2005, and Playstation 3 and the Wii released
twelve months later.
When the Nintendo Wii U launched in late
2012 and the Xbox One and Playstation 4 burst onto the scene the following
year, that’s Generation Eight. And because of some…sales issues… with the
Wii U, Nintendo rushed the follow up in a relative sense and had the
Switch arrive in early 2017, with enough computing power similar to the
aforementioned consoles that it was also labeled an eighth-generation
machine.
It meant that Nintendo had fallen out of the
release rhythm of the other two consoles, because the Switch was still in
the middle of its life cycle when the Xbox Series X/S and the Playstation
came out in November of 2020, beginning Generation Number Nine (number
nine…number nine…).
The initial success of a new console is
always dependent on having excellent launch titles, but this isn’t always
possible because gaming studios don’t always have access to the new
console’s design kits until late into the production of the hardware.
Nintendo has always had the advantage of
developing hardware and software practically in tandem, which Sony and
Microsoft do not do to the same degree (even while they own game studios
which design titles exclusively for their respective consoles).
The first Zelda game came out on a third
generation console, but because the console came out two and half years
prior, the Nintendo development team were very well-versed in how to
squeeze every bit of hard drive space and technological power out of
cartridge chip and console alike. This has continued up to today. The more
time software developers have to get familiar with the hardware, the
better they can optimally designs the games.
For the Super Famicom/SNES, Miyamoto felt
that the launch title (Super Mario
World) was rushed and therefore incomplete, but by having another year
to work on A Link to the Past,
it was guaranteed that it would be the very best the system had to offer.
The Nintendo 64 controller and
Super Mario 64 are inexorably
linked (and how you now have to move the camera in various ways at the
same time as moving Mario, which necessitated the return of the joystick),
but its true legacy is the underside trigger button (labeled ‘Z’) that
allowed you to target and lock onto your enemies in
Ocarina of Time. There was also
the Rumble-Pak accessory that made the entire controller shake based on
what was happening on-screen, making it an early example of haptic
feedback. Despite the pioneering steps this controller took, many in the
video game community feel that the controller for the next system
(Gamecube) is the ultimate dissonance. It looks like a child’s birthday
party, but was the most ergonomically smooth and efficient one out there.
Nintendo tried add-ons
early, notably with the Disk System for the Famicom in Japan. It was the
only way to play the first two Zelda games, since re-writable discs were
the ‘only’ way you could save your progress. Assuming that the North
American public wouldn’t want to buy accessories like that,
game cartridges included an itty-bitty battery
inside that allowed you to save your progress whenever you wanted.
But Nintendo kept at it, and the Nintendo 64
included a few ways to ‘beef up’ the system for games that came out later
in the console’s lifetime. Majora’s
Mask required the Expansion Pak, a 4mb (ha) memory boost to handle all
of Link’s painful transformation screams. It looked like a printer ink
cartridge and you inserted into a slot on the console when you were ready
to play. Since you had to buy this accessory to play
Majora, it’s no surprise that it
sold half as many units as Ocarina of Time. The 64DD was meant to go even more extreme for the
Nintendo 64 – it was intended to play 64mb magnetic disks while having a
real-time clock, several applications that could make music, animate and
edit videos, and even internet connectivity for browsing and online gaming
– but delays pushed it back to end the end of console’s life, and it
barely had any games made for it.
Even before this, Nintendo came up with
other unique ways to play games, like the Satellaview modem, an accessory
for the Super Famicom which allowed users to download games (in 1995!) and
play them at a certain time (Sundays in August) during a live broadcast on
the network. Three Zelda titles were developed for the service, and while
they were modeled after the first game in the series as well as
A Link to the Past, Link isn’t the protagonist, or even support.
He’s not in it at all. Instead you play as the character you created to
play all the Satellaview games, and you could only play at certain times
of the day. Sometimes there were live events (a village attacked by
monsters) that you had to go and complete in real time. Nintendo billed it
as ‘the world’s first integrated radio-game’, making it simultaneously
ridiculously dated and forward-looking.
Then there is the Wii, which became such a
motion-control global sensation in 2006 and 2007 that we can skip the
basics and go right to the accessories. There was the Balance Board, which
could tell how you stood and moved upon it, so it was perfect for exercise
games. There was the Wii Wheel (mainly for
Mario Kart), the uDraw Tablet,
and the third-party Wii Babysitting Mama Interactive Baby (yep).
Link’s Crossbow Training
came out in 2007, reusing assets from
Twilight Princess. As the name
implies, it’s centred on firing bow and arrows, but came bundled with a
plastic gun that has slots to fit the Wii remote and nunchuk into (echoes
of the NES’s grey and red gun for Duck Hunt). Because guns are frowned upon in most Nintendo
franchises, it was called the Wii Zapper. It wasn’t just for this one
title, either. Series like Resident Evil, Call of Duty, and the James Bond
franchise utilized it (the Wii sold so well that many third-party
developers were willing to hawk their wares on the system).
The Wii U gamepad was the centerpiece of the
Wii U, a large controller with a high-resolution touch-screen right in the
middle of it. But because of its relative failure, it was essentially
repackaged as Nintendo’s next console, the Switch, although now with
effortless portability.
Nintendo truly tried to mix their recent
failure and past success with this latest console, because the Switch
controllers (both the Joy-cons and the traditional) have gyroscopic
sensory features, so a (thankfully) limited amount of motion control
puzzles are included in Breath of
the Wild, but other games (like
Arms) revolve completely around it.
Meanwhile, the future of gaming (dare we
already speculate about Generation Ten?) is being pulled in a few
different directions. The smart phone has become the modern arcade,
because what used to be simplistic and addictive quarter-swallowing games
now exist as simplistic and addictive micro-transaction-filled games you
can switch to when you’re briefly done with social media. VR technology is
advancing to the point where entire rooms and more powerful computers will
be required for you to fully immerse yourself in a virtual world. At the
same time, cloud gaming means no console at all, with the data stored on a
distant server that you consistently access with a very robust and
reliable internet connection (so you can already see the problem…).
But no matter what you’re playing on, rest
assured it will always be worth buying
Ocarina of Time again (if
available…).
Chapter Nine: Four Swords - Better Together
So you're this one guy, right? Link.
Because that’s how the hero’s journey works.
It’s just one person facing adversity as they become stronger and more
knowledgeable (a progression from naivety to experience) until they
ultimately triumph. His associates either dispense advice (sometimes of
the painfully obvious sort) or need a hell of a lot handholding through a
dungeon or temple.
In
addition to these story themes, the original TLoZ’s basic, 8-bit
limitations prohibited many different characters fighting alongside our
hero.
So you - the one person with the controller in your hand - are Link,
but hey, imagine like if y’know there was more than
one universe so like maybe there could be more than one Link, and the
other wasn’t a mirror image of concentrated evil that needs to be
destroyed?
Hey, a bunch of
Links killing together sounds like a great time.
Playing with friends was how video games started, after all.
The games on early consoles were predominantly two player, and even the
solo games in the arcades were all about competing with friends and
strangers for high scores.
Mario (even with its two player option) and Zelda were the first two big
single player games, so playing with friends involved the old fashioned
hand-off, where each time you die you pass the controller over to the next
person on the couch so they can have a shot, and when they die they pass
it on to someone else or back to you. While always nice to share
experiences, it definitely took away the idea that you did all of this
yourself. You aren’t imbibing Link with your own button-mashing skills if
your friend suddenly takes over and is the one that beats up Gohma.
The
first four Zelda games (1986-1993) pre-dated the utter dominance of the
Internet (you had to rely on Nintendo Power magazine or other kids in the
schoolyard (or co-workers) to tell you how you had to move that one stone
to be able to blow up that hidden wall to find the key), and even when
Ocarina and Majora’s Mask
arrived, computers could only connect to the information superhighway
through your home phone line.
At the cusp of the
online gaming era for consoles, Nintendo’s ten year old Gameboy made it
possible to play against other people with the same game through a
specially designed cable. While certainly best known for its use in the
early days of the Pokemon franchise, it could be used to trade items
between friends who owned copies of
Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons.
This led to the first attempt at having more
than one Link run around at the same time, because
in a series that is full of magic, monsters, time travel, and talking
boats, why not throw in some cloning and parallel universes?
Four
Swords released on the Gameboy Advance in December 2002 in North
America and Australia and not until March 2003 in Japan (that’s right, it
landed there second, a flip of how
Wind Waker was released).
But there was quite a catch: it was only
available as a companion piece to the re-release of
A Link to the Past (marketed with the very clever name, ‘A
Link to the Past and Four Swords’).
Pairing these two makes sense, as the
graphics and gameplay are extremely similar to the 1991 classic. In fact,
it’s fair to say that Four Swords
was more like bonus content to ALttP than a standalone game, as its
average play time was roughly 3-4 hours.
It was a natural fit for a handheld, because
you needed was 1-3 friends who also had a Gameboy Advance and a copy of
the game. And wires to connect them (sold separately).
The few levels are much more segmented, and
the temples have randomly generated rooms so that each experience inside
them can be slightly different (it’s the closest you’ll get to a
rogue-like* Zelda so far). In addition to defeating evil, you are
competing against other players to collect the most amount of rupees in
each segment (which are timed!). How would you be able to tell the
difference? Just make ‘em different colours: Green, red, blue, and hyper.
*-rogue like is a game genre where the levels are randomly re-arranged
every time you play, and each time you die you start back at the
beginning, but because the level re-arrange themselves it’s like a new
experience each time you try, try again.
Since everyone you would play with could
only be as far away as one cable would allow, it was easy to tell people
what you were going to do (and what they should or shouldn’t do in
response, if you’re the bossy type). But there isn’t much need to tell
people what you’re going to do because the ‘puzzle’ is usually stepping on
two activation plates at the same time, as the
Zelda multiplayer experience is the least-developed large-scale game
mechanic in the series.
While nice to see a friend on your screen, its
A Link to the Past-gameplay
feels overly simplistic (especially compared to the recent Oracle games).
Usually the Zelda team is able to add new components to their 2D games to
always make them fresh and new, but
Four Swords puts all its eggs in the ‘look at all the Links’ basket
(although now a pair of Links can brutally pull certain enemies apart).
Exploration is severally curtailed, because for as long as
the Zelda series has stayed away from the ‘World One, Level One’
Mario-esque set up, here it is, forcing you along a much more obvious
singular path (they also took the Mario ‘story’, as the new bad guy (a big
eyeball named Vaati) wants to marry Zelda). You can also buy another life
after being killed, which costs fifty rupees to start but goes up with
each successive death, and certainly makes the game easier and less
heart-pounding.
Four Swords Adventures
brought the action to the Gamecube in 2004, and while it seemed to make
sense that you can now play with up to four people on the couch thanks to
the four controller slots available (and with the fancy new modem
accessory that cost extra, people outside of your house), developers also
made it possible to play it as a single player game. You did this by
switching back and forth between the different Links on the screen.
As the name suggests, its setup is very
similar to Four Swords, and is
once again ‘heavily inspired’ by A
Link to the Past but added…lives (subtly inserted as fairies). While
that no doubt gives fans a familiar setting and feel, by now it was
getting a bit tired (Minish Cap,
released the same year on Gameboy Advance, would be the last ALttP-style
game released for nearly a decade).
Since
Four Swords Adventures was built upon the success of
Four Swords (or at least perceived success, because it was not
exactly easy to know for sure if people really just wanted to play
A Link to the Past on the
Gameboy Advance, eschewing the multiplayer add on), its gameplay was
similar, but the game itself was longer (eight worlds, with three levels
in each). So much for ‘where do I go next?’, because the answer is always,
‘the next level’.
It’s not exactly antithetical to everything
Zelda stood for, but takes some getting used to (following a set path on
an overworld map?! Items don’t
carry over? My god!), especially since the graphics and feel harkens back
to a game where the point was to explore far and wide to your heart’s
content.
Four Sword Adventures
played a bit more smoothly than its predecessor because it was on a much
more powerful system. Parts of the side-scrolling final levels were
creative, they added new characters (hey everybody, it’s the Zuna tribe!
Remember them?), and it was nice to have the additional feature of ‘Shadow
Battle’, which is where everyone’s Links can hack and slash at each other
until there is only one left standing. But despite these features,
Four Swords and
Four Swords Adventures are both novelties that wear off quickly.
They felt eleven and thirteen years old,
which makes sense because it’s strongly based on a game from 1991, and
what is supposed to be the contemporary, 2004 thrill of playing in these
short bursts with friends on a couch just makes it feel a lot less like a
Zelda game on the whole.
Starting each level without any of the items
and health you had collected in the previous one make sense for
level-based gameplay, but hurts the effortless immersion we’ve come to
expect from the series, and as such some areas rely heavily on upgrading
your items by throwing them into a fairy fountain (taken from an actual
fairy tale, The Honest Woodcutter, by the way). Despite this handicap,
these games are by far the easiest Zelda titles in terms of combat
difficulty, and the same could be said about its puzzles as well.
It would be over a decade before another
multiplayer Zelda experience arrived, and it proved that time doesn't just
heal all wounds, it also improves the quality of video games.
Tri-Force Heroes was released
in 2015, and was a mish-mash of Four
Swords and the recent A
Link Between Worlds. Like
Four Swords Adventures (and
actually the Four Swords Anniversary
Edition (briefly re-released in 2011 and 2014) as well), you could
play the whole game in single or multiplayer mode, this time choosing
levels from a menu playing them in (almost) any order.
These short segments of one or two head
scratching puzzles and an odd bit of combat will actually feel quite a bit
familiar for those who worked their way through
Breath of the Wild’s many shrines (in part because this game was in
development at the same time).
A nice addition to add depth (or really,
height) to these challenges is that now you can stack your Links like they
were a totem pole (‘totem’ is even the prompt word to do it). This makes
fighting flying enemies easier and having the ability to shoot targets on
higher levels (although sometimes it’s hard to discern the exact height in
a mostly 2D environment).
You can even…skip levels?! With the only
penalty being a smaller reward at the end of the segment?! What sorcery is
this?!
The character and other design models in
Triforce Heroes are identical to
A Link Between Worlds, as are
the array of enemies. So too is the basic gameplay and feel.
Sound too similar? Don’t worry, Daddy
Nintendo’s got you, and will give you plenty of reasons for you to furrow
your brow and go, ‘what the heck?’
The swerve is in the story component.
In
Triforce Heroes the kingdom of Hytopia is obsessed with fashion, and
when the usually trendy Princess Styla is sent a cursed outfit that she
cannot remove, she and the land spiral into depression.
Imagine ‘Next Top Model’ with swords,
because there’s a casting call for heroes who look the part, and after you
get sent to a fashion designer to get some hot green threads, you are
called upon to fight against the evil tailor who sent the Princess the
drabbiest of clothes.
It’s as if a Zelda game merged with
Love Nikki Dress Up Queen,
because Link can definitely buy and wear everything from the familiar
(kokiri clothes, a goron suit, a zora costume) to the bizarre (koopa
troopa gear, princess zelda’s dress, a cheerleader costume), almost all of
which give you stat boosts.
The game frequently winks at its own
ridiculousness, and sometimes it even works. Everyone is judged
immediately on their looks, and Link fits the bill of a hero because of
his perfect pointy ears, his luscious sideburns, and his properly parted
hair. ‘Talk to le hand!’ and “Isn’t it adorbs?” are lines of dialogue (and
to be fair, when you are wearing the Zora costume, you are certainly the
latter). The game cheekily implores you to smash things with the magic
hammer: “Go on, you know you want to!” And we’re not exactly saying
fashion designer Madame Couture is an Ann Wintour stand-in, but…
Even the UI system has a social media flare
to it, because the way info is given to you (taking damage, getting
rupees, different items available) is like a news tickers zipping across
the screen.
After getting suited up, the multiplayer
element starts immediately, and even if you are waiting in a lobby for
others to connect, Heroes does
play up the idea that you are waiting for doppelgangers from other
‘dimensions’. A wise old man even does a ‘Doppel Dance’ to get it started,
but the real connection you need to make (and keep) is your wi-fi.
Sometimes you might be waiting for quite a
long time to party up with people, especially if you are playing after the
initial enthusiasm for the games has petered out. Sometimes you just ended
up booting players who attack you instead of monsters (or just generally
screw around), which the game calls ‘blacklisting’.
Nintendo was never a big proponent of voice
chat, and while most people associate it with online multiplayer games
where there is co-operation between teammates in shooting the enemy to
pieces, it’s even more essential for puzzle solving.
Which is why the multiplayer element in
these games is really tailored for people in the same room (so you don’t
have to worry about any lag when yelling what angle to throw the
boomerang), not the same city, country or planet.
Since it didn’t really jibe with the Zelda series, Nintendo's more
profitable workaround was to farm Link out to other multiplayer
experiences. He was an original participant in the best selling fighting
series Smash Bros (which would come to add Zelda, Sheik and Ganondorf as
additional fighters), and joined the Mario Kart roster in 2014 for
Mario Kart 8.
[It's the early 2000s, but let’s go waaaaay back.
While Zelda helped create the single player
video game experience, the multiplayer form pre-dated it in plenty of
ways.
Pong, Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, Pac-Man,
all these games were played in arcades and tournaments during the late
seventies and early eighties, even if Pong was the only one of those where
you actually played against an opponent at the same time.
In many of these games there wasn’t really
an ending, there were just more and more levels, getting increasingly
harder until they’re either impossible to beat or the game crashes. No one
minded, since it was the high score you were chasing.
With consoles bringing the action into
living rooms, you were sitting on couches and floors instead of standing
in the arcade, but the games were similar.
1992 was big year for bragging rights among
friends and family because two important multiplayer games debuted, both
becoming archetypes for their respective genres.
Super Mario Kart’s impact on
multiplayer gaming cannot be overstated. Before it, racing games attempted
to be realistic (or as realistic as possible on eighties hardware), and
after, you could choose between the hyper-authentic
Gran Turismo or the bonkers
dreamworld of Mario Kart. Most people chose the later. In fact, by the
Gamecube era, the Mario Kart games for each new console began outselling
the flagship Mario titles.
And that’s because Mario Kart was for
everyone. Even people who thought video games were only saving the
princess, or focused on Call of Duty
deathmatches couldn’t resist the obvious pull of easy-to-understand racing
with bananas, blue shells, and rainbow road.
The other important title came to arcades in
1991, but the world shook truly shook
(and it wasn’t just because of E Honda) when
Street Fighter II arrived on console the following year. This was
during Capcom’s honeymoon period with Nintendo, and it became a massive
seller.
Of course there had been fighting games in
the arcade before (there’ve been rumours that there was even a Street
Fighter…1, but that sounds ridiculous), but Street Fighter II had
improvement on the surface (better graphics for characters and stages
thanks to Campcom’s CPS chipset) and under the hood (it introduced combo
mechanics, and unique move-sets for each character). It was also the first
fighting game where players could…wait for it…fight against each other,
not just the computer.
You against the evil in the world is Zelda
in a nutshell, but you against the ‘evil’ sitting beside you with an
identical controller is something else entirely.
But why limit the fun to someone that close?
Just one year later,
Doom is released on PC. For all the praises it gets for blood, gore,
and monster-‘sploding glory, id software flagship title changed
multiplayer gaming more than anything else.
Now it wasn’t just a fighting tournament
along a two dimensional plane where you could just move forward, back,
jump up or crouch down. With 3D death-matches (along with plenty of other
modes like capture the flag that your teammates will completely ignore),
more and more players could join, and all the weapons you could use in the
single player experience of Doom
(or whatever first person shooter game that came after it) was at your
disposal for the body disposal of others.
While the internet obviously wasn’t
everywhere in the mid-nineties, where it was, you could probably find some
people playing Doom (or its
spiritual successor, Quake).
The communal aspect of the arcade was fading
as console and PC gaming became more and more popular. These
brick-and-mortar establishments were shutting down for good, and now
parents could actually see how their kids were spending their time,
because it was in front of the television or the computer monitor (some of
them even joined in).
And now that we’re back in the early 2000s, it’s easy enough to add an
Ethernet port inside an Xbox. Microsoft introduced Xbox live in late
2002…but the first Halo game
wasn't made for online multiplayer, so everyone waited a couple more years
for Halo 2. It plays on the original Xbox (which is NOT called Xbox One)
as well as the new one that came out in the fall of 2005 (which is NOT
called Xbox Two). It introduced the console gaming world to online
multiplayer bliss, and its release was covered by the mainstream news
media in a way that wasn’t before. Not as a curiosity, but a cultural and
financial force (it was pointed out that it made more in its first 24
hours than most blockbuster movies of the time).
With out-of-the-box online support for the Playstation 3 and the Wii, Sony
and Nintendo both got on board, and now everyone can race, shoot and share
sweater designs (Animal Crossing)
online with millions of other people.
For
many people, online multiplayer is all video games ‘are’. Today this
communal experience that is the heart of so many games (video or
otherwise) has never been easier to achieve.]
Video games are a business, and for all the lofty artistic aspirations
that are within the industry, sometimes you squeeze that stone for every
last dollar.
The Zelda series has been fairly well-protected from mediocre cash-ins,
but thanks in part to these attempts being so lousy that they quickly
disappeared from screens and shelves (we’re getting to that soon), it
retains a stellar reputation. But even the biggest Zelda fan will admit
that the multiplayer was not the smoothest experience, for a variety of
reasons.
While oversimplified and segmented gameplay is obviously the chief
drawback for a series that constantly offered the opposite, the hardware
itself presents a hurdle if you want to play them today.
Four Swords on the Gameboy
Advance requires an investment not just in several hard to find retro
consoles, cartridge and accessories, but some additional gamers as well.
Four Sword Adventures ‘just’
requires a twenty year old console (Gamecube) to start with. Only
Triforce Heroes is easy to play today, since it’s available on the
Nintendo 3DS’s digital store (although the online matchmaking lobbies are
rather empty).
Since the games are not without their
charms, it wasn’t a matter trying and failing, it was trying and doing all
right and then moving on.
The underlying rule was clear that Link
needs help, but not this kind of help. Unless it was a near-invisible
fairy that doesn’t shut up or a sassy cursed imp with a complex back story
who hides in your shadow, the hero of Hyrule is at his best when he flies
solo.
[Playable on:
Four Swords: Gameboy Advance, 3DS (limited
time download (booooo…))
Four Sword Adventures: Gamecube
Triforce Heroes: Nintendo 3DS]
Interlude: It Takes a (Kakariko)
Village
A pop culture franchise can be a wonderful thing.
There is always a strange balance between the goal of making people happy
and making a shitload of money. Especially when the people who created it
were initially trying to do more of the first than the second. But when
you strike it rich creating something that you love and the people you
make it for also love, it’s not always going to be fields full of rupees
hidden in the grass.
The Legend of Zelda series has the reputation of tweaking
what the fans want just enough to keep them coming back for more, and not
changing too much to scare (or anger) them away for good. That the most
recent main entry in the series was absurdly successful in terms of
critical, commercial and fan reception means it’s not going away anytime
soon, either.
It is lovely to imagine that only out of
their joy to share their wondrous talents and imaginations of what might
be fun do the designers at Nintendo offer up these adventures for the
eager and adoring millions, but that’s never how Hiroshi Yamauchi saw the
company he ran for fifty three years. When he assumed control of Nintendo
in 1949, it was a primarily a playing card company. Even after it
successfully transitioned to video games in the seventies and eighties,
Yamauchi ran it as business no different than if the product was a diesel
engine or PVC piping. He didn’t play video games, and seemed absurdly
proud of the fact when he told people, letting Miyamoto, Tezuka and their
workhorses pump out amazing titles at a steady clip to create lifetime
fans, or at least fans who will have pangs of nostalgia when they realize
they can play those eighties and nineties games again via Virtual Console
when they bought a Wii for their kids (or a Switch, with the Nintendo
Switch Online instead of the VC).
While purchasing the same games all over
again is a sweet cash-in,
the real money's in the merch (George Lucas can attest to both). Zelda
was able to draw in new fans with each release, and enough of them wanted
shirts, hats, posters, backpacks, toy swords, shields, and figurines.
While not on the same level of ‘swag whore’ as Pokemon or Mario (and that
is meant with the most profitable respect), it was possible to show you
just how much you liked the world of Hyrule. Not just on the schoolyard or
street, either. Video game streamers and content creators typically film
playthroughs from their game room, which is adorned in proof that yes, you
really do love the Legend of Zelda, and have the credit card receipts to
prove it.
Heck, until detailed walkthroughs of games were just a Google search away,
strategy guides were also huge money makers because there was a chance you
would have to ‘give up’ on a game because you and your friends couldn’t
figure it out how to open a door in the Ice Palace. If you didn’t have the
guidebook, then there was The Nintendo Power-Line, which you could call
for advice, for $1.50 per minute (lasting twenty years). The people on the
other line had massive binders full of maps and information for scores of
Nintendo games, and could usually tell you exactly what you’re doing
wrong, noob (in a very pleasant tone).
Once again, this is a business that relies
on the release of high quality products and a dedicated customer base in
order to maximize quarterly earnings.
But when people care (more than if they were buying toilet
paper, avocados or diesel engines)...they care. They trust. They hope.
They get wildly excited over what might be on the horizon. They give you
money for pre-orders because of how happy a previous game made them ten
years ago.
A simple transaction (game for $$$) can have the
unquantifiable emotions close to the surface, especially for a series
where - as previously discussed – the point is to inhabit the empty vessel
that is the protagonist in totality, so that you indeed are the one saving
the kingdom of Hyrule time and time again.
The longer a series - hell, an artist - releases new material, the more it
is going to be judged on what came before, and ardent followers are going
to consciously and unconsciously infuse their own memories and past
experiences onto the latest thing.
Comedic institutions
such as Mad magazine,
Saturday Night Live and
The Simpsons are perfect
examples of being praised by longtime fans for being good at one time or
another, but not so much today.
When the creators stray
too far from one what someone thinks made the game great, there is
criticism over that. When they keep doing the same thing over and over
again, there is criticism about how it has grown stale.
Sometimes finding the balance is inherently impossible, and a game (or
movie or TV series or anything else) will be judged less on its own merits
and more on how the fans compare it to past entries.
In some cases a
single critical and commercial failure in a franchise can kill it
completely, or least keep it in cold storage for a very long time. The initial backlash over Wind
Waker’s cartoon-y aesthetic and ensuing lackluster sales was the
closest Zelda came to a pause.
Love is a fickle thing. Sometimes mistakes
only look like mistakes on the first (and second and maybe third) glances,
and it doesn’t take much for video game fans to absolutely goddamn hate
what they just saw or played…until they decide they love it.
Because you know what Zelda game Zelda fans
hate?
The answer is ‘all of them’ if you spent
some time on fan sites, message boards, or even youtube comments (all of
which wallow over various theories and game minutiae like kids in a ball
pit). The oldest games are too old and pointlessly hard,
Ocarina is overrated, everything after
Majora is too easy, every sidekick sux except for Midna.
Breath of the Wild strayed far from the Zelda formula, appeasing those who felt it was
getting stale by Skyward Sword,
while at the same time slightly upsetting those who wanted tweaks instead
of overhauls. The arguments can go on longer than the gaps between new
titles.
The Zelda series’ comparable wholesomeness
to other big money franchises doesn’t mean it’s free from the sort of
gamers who might have a tendency to let loose a profanity laced tirade in
a twitter post if a delay is announced.
But are we talking about it as fans, journalists, or critics?
There have been publications following the video game industry for
decades, but in the last few years, the criticism of the critics and the
industry itself has taken off. While Nintendo Power being published by
Nintendo can tell you all you need to know about its autonomy (I bet they
think all Nintendo’s games and decisions are great!), plenty of more
independent publications like Electronic Gaming Monthly and GamePro were
still beholden at some level to maintain a good relationship with hardware
and software makers. Which meant overly
charitable reviews of dreck and features on games because the developers
wrote a cheque. The same goes for today’s big gaming websites, but as long
as there’s regular traffic and clicks, the situation won’t change (and
some maintain it doesn’t have to).
With aggregates like Metacritic sifting for clear numbers in a review
full of praise or roasting, the peanut gallery will review the reviews
with curt agreement or flashy vitriol.
Even as there is a growing tendency to avoid scores altogether, readers
sniff for bullet points and concluding sentences to see if the reviewer is
generally giving a thumbs up or a thumbs down, and then compare that to
what they themselves believe the critic should have thought when
playing the game.
In a particularly
black eye for the Zelda community that would like to think they would
channel their inner triforce of wisdom constantly, fans were sending death
threats to Jim Sterling, a game reviewer who gave Breath of the Wild a…
7/10 (and consequently lowered its overall score on metacritic from 98 to
97). The Zelda community has no problem complaining about a single room in
a dungeon, a quest with an unfulfilling reward, and Link’s oddly
sausage-like lips in Skyward Sword, but when outsiders (or who they perceive as
outsiders) criticize the games or dismiss them outright as ‘kids stuff’
compared to Madden NFL 2021?
The followers of Hylia will react like
someone trod upon their flowers in front a shrine.
The ‘circle the wagons’ mentality doesn’t
end with reviews, either. Woe betide the streamer who plays
Ocarina, Wind Waker or
Breath of the Wild for all to see, and is suddenly being subject to
spoilers, demands of how to play, and mockery if they don’t figure out a
puzzle in the first two minutes of finding it. Zelda fans are like digital
nomads, trawling through Twitch, waiting for an unsuspecting streamer to
boot up Breath of the Wild for
the first time, and then follow their every step, reveling at the surprise
challenges and celebrating the triumphs as it was their own initial run
again.
It doesn’t take much to become a
self-professed expert at the video game franchise you love, and it
actually benefitted the series itself that Nintendo kept its Zelda lore
cards close to its chest.
Even after fan websites and message boards
took off (giving a place to get dungeon help and to revel in how much you
enjoyed the games), it wasn’t until 2011 that the company officially
released the Hyrule Historia in
Japan. Demand was so high worldwide that it published in other languages
two years later. Information regarding the timeline, characters, and
behind-the-scenes art was quickly disseminated to every corner of the
internet, and 2016’s Zelda Encyclopedia just further delineated the sand
between what is canon and what’s not.
Lore creates a breeding ground for further
speculation within any story crack or contradiction. With narrative
segments that are terribly brittle or soft as mush, you’ll have fans bend
logic over backwards trying to fit the goings-on within a game into their
assessment (and considering how wild the official Zelda timeline is, it’s
no surprise that fan theories are even wilder: some species (like Zora and
Rito) evolved from one another, the kokiri tribe is directly related to
the koroks, and yes, everything was just a dream…because most games begins
with Link waking up).
There is always endless speculation on what
is coming down the pipeline, and why it might save/ruin everything if it
has/doesn’t have this exact thing this particular poster or video creator
desperately needs in their Zelda experience. The online world is as vast
as Hyrule with fan theories, fan art (from cosplay to rule 34), fan
remixes of the music (lo-fi vaporwave Zelda playlists all the way!), fan
swag (tip-toeing the line between homage and copyright infringement), and
fan fiction (tens of thousands of them out there, from high fantasy to low
poetry).
Would people pay to read official additional
stories? While the short-lived American cartoon series from the eighties
is best forgotten (we’ll get to it), there are plenty of Nintendo-approved
manga that typically follow the plot of the games. These comics go to
great lengths to constantly frustrate Link-Zelda ‘shippers, and
controversially give Link a voice (underscoring the difficult of telling a
story outside of a video game where the lead character doesn’t speak).
At first glance the most unusual of the lot
is certainly the Shotaro Ishinomori’s twelve part take on
A Link to the Past (featuring an overly confident birdman creature
years before the Rtio and Revali), because it was first published in
English for Nintendo Power throughout 1992. Despite being
a Japanese game franchise, the North American and European market is much
more important for the Zelda series’ financial health. While it is
certainly popular in Japan, it does even better overseas (while BOTW is
the fourth best-selling Switch game worldwide, it comes in twelfth in its
home country). To help with this, there
are 14 language translations of
Breath of the Wild and as far
back as Ocarina of Time there
were over a dozen different languages available.
It should come as little surprise that a
game series focused on fixing a broken world by bringing disparate
characters and powerful objects together would become popular, but it’s
unlikely Miyamoto or Tezuka could have guessed how many people would
become enraptured for decades by an earnest, mute elf boy and his platonic
blonde friend. While Nintendo always stresses how they want to appeal to
casual gamers, the fan-service (in-game and out) for the Zelda community
feels like they know how special the series is.
Chapter Ten: Twilight
Princess - Why so Serious?
Growin' up is hard to do.
Just ask the incarnation of Link in
Ocarina of Time, where seven years immediately pass and he finds that
the world has pretty much gone to hell (and it's a little bit his fault).
But in Hyrule, there are destinies and rules put in place by the
benevolent goddess Hylia…who takes her marching orders from salarymen in a
big grey-ish/white box in southern Kyoto. The lines of code they fiddle
with are infused with firm direction of sales numbers across the world.
By 2005 the videogame landscape had changed, and not the way Nintendo has
hoped.
The Gamecube sold ten million units less than its predecessor, the
Nintendo 64, which sold seventeen million units less than its own
predecessor, the Super Famicom/Super Nintendo. Sony’s PlayStation 1 and 2
had bested both of them, and it wasn’t even close.
These console sales were reflected in game
sales as well.
The Wind Waker 'only' sold four
and half million copies, considerably less than
Ocarina of Time, and while its
critical standing was strong when it first arrived and had only gotten
stronger since, those numbers meant that a change was in order.
Even director Eiji Aonuma stated that after the lower than expected sales
of Wind Waker (especially in
Japan), the Zelda series was in danger of folding altogether.
He originally envisioned following the game with a sequel in the same way
Majora’s Mask followed
Ocarina; similar in style and
gameplay, but with enough improvements and enhancements to make it an
exciting and worthwhile endeavour (and also having a chance to make up for
the tri-force fetch quest, the game’s only blemish).
Instead he and Milyamoto
went back to the drawing board, figuring
if you were going to do the opposite of bright-cartoon-fantasy, you may as
well not just stop at graphics.
So this is the story of the making of
Twilight Princess. It is baked
into the game’s lore and it screams this stark difference in every way. Not just in comparison to
Wind Waker, but because 'stark'
is a good way to describe the themes and narrative of this game.
As soon as you get to the start-up screen,
the bright colours and cheery music of the previous title is replaced by a
dour sky and a troubled medieval landscape as a harrowing, heroic remix of
the main Zelda theme blares.
It was dark, it was somber, it was gothic, it was ugly, and it was epic
(both in terms of quality and the size and scope of the world you had to
explore).
Twilight is a fleeting, mysterious moment in
the day, a barrier between the known and unknown, the familiar light and
mysterious dark, and some moments of this title
wouldn't be that out of place in
Resident Evil
2. Torture chambers, dank prisons, haunted, abandoned villages
filled with shadow beasts (with blood-curdling
screeches), poison mites, skeleton poes and shambling gibdos (those last
two are Zelda mainstays, but have been made 100% more disgusting here).
Even Links actions are more violent. The
fatal blow has Link leaping in the air and impaling his knocked down enemy
in the chest. Wolf Link does this same thing with his maul attack, which
involves his biting the monster’s head and trying to rip it off at the
neck.
At one point a kid from the village is tied
to a giant stick as bait.
Engrossing and harrowing cut-scenes include
a series of dead-eyed Links stabbing each other in the back, a failed
execution of a familiar foe, and a shocking sacrifice halfway through the
game.
There were even some drips of blood when
Link slays a few different enemies (blood! In a Zelda game! Won’t Miyamoto
and Aonuma please think of the children?!).
It
is certainly a pivot from Wind Waker
in every possible way.
Whether you want to give credit to (or pin blame it on) what was then
considered quality graphics in the mid-2000s, lots of the character
modelling (save for Link, Zelda, and Ilia) ranges from slightly unnerving
to perfectly creepy.
But
after a while you start to appreciate it as an art-style befitting a
corrupted fantasy world. Themes of servitude, revenge and duplicity are
introduced. Two worlds are in peril, and Link and his new sidekick must
heal both. Our chief villain has Zelda imprisoned in a high tower in
Hyrule Castle, with power he has received from someone who he never should
have trusted (no guesses).
Despite all this it starts off similarly to
Wind Waker, actually, with Link
being a youth in a small village (which is also your tutorial section, so
you can learn how to wield weapons, herd goats and…ugh…fish) who is called
to action when monsters kidnap some of the local children. These creatures
are led by this one ugly motherfucker riding a giant armoured warthog (and
the fights you have with him throughout the game are exceedingly
satisfying on many levels), and this is where those ugly/uncanny graphics
work great, because your enemies truly look hideous and menacing.
Quickly it's no sailing on the blue sea with the sun shining above you.
Giving chase, you are pulled into a shadowy black portal door by a giant
monster hand and then transform painfully (a callback to the masks in
Majora) into a wolf. This is how you will now play the game when you
are in the Twilight Realm.
The Light/Dark world dichotomy from
A Link to the Past returns, and after fifteen years a graphical
blowout and an extra dimension makes a big difference. It is truly spooky,
and the disorientation of playing as a wolf adds to it.
To help you navigate
this new world, you get a sassy helper named Midna who seems to be using
you for her own ends at first.
Midna is a
magical imp and is a vast improvement over the
Ocarina/Majora fairies and the
King of Red Lions (Wind Waker’s
talking boat). The developers found that sweep spot between ‘character
development’ and ‘advice dispenser’, because she has a score to settle
even as her and Link’s goals continue to overlap.
When
you explore the light world she is ashamed of her appearance and hides in
your shadow (literally) because she does not want the citizens of Hylia to
see her. Similarly, Wolf Link causes most people to flee in terror (some
will even try to attack you), so you can be a pair of outcasts. However a
nice touch is that all the other animals will pleasantly chat with you in
this form and even give you some much needed help.
Controlling Wolf Link is a hell of a lot of fun (and he can follow
peoples’ scents), and they make his appearance more cartoony-dog like than
a scraggly beast, which makes it all the more amusing when Midna takes
control of a giant beakless vulture-creature and flies him around in its
claws.
After the immediate open world squareness of
Wind Waker, the map of Hyrule
unfolds as the plot does, and is a series of fields, valleys and villages
of all sorts of shapes.
Once you get into a groove, you’ll be
zipping across the land to find pieces of macguffins with assitance from a
research team that always meets back at a bar in Hyrule Castle Town to
compare notes. Help friends regain their memory, teach a Zora prince to be
strong after the death of his mother, fish several times to advance the
story, do a bit of jousting, snowboard down a mountain, and take part in a
late-game Wild West shootout sequence (using arrows of course) in the
Hidden Village to find Impaz (yes, the ‘z’ is intentional…for some
reason). On top of that the game holds the most m-rated moment ever in a
Zelda game, when an evil monkey spanks its naked ass at you as a taunt in
the first temple.
But
Twilight Princess didn’t completely turn away from the series’ past,
and you’ll find
plenty of influences from and nods to past games.
Like Ocarina, you live in a tree
(a very nicely decorated tree, mind you) in a small village away from all
the action of Hyrule Field. In that earlier game’s Forest Temple, you have
to defeat four Poes (ghosts), and you do the same thing in
Twilight’s Arbiter’s Grounds
dungeon (a spooky take on a massive Egyptian tomb, complete with a rat
surprise and amazing mid and end bosses).
Majora’s Mask
weirdness abides as well. You’ll be buying weapons
and ammunition from an ugly, shit-talking baby named Malo, and buying
health and lantern oil from a stand run by a talking bird (Trill) which
works on the honour system. There are a couple of garish clowns overseeing
a parachute game and cannon transport service down by Lake Hylia.
The palindrome-arific Ooccoo (has anyone ever tried to say this name out
loud?) is a bird with a human face that lets you warp in and out of
dungeons.
Skull Kid shows up in the Sacred Grove, but his
appearance and personality is similar to that of the Skull Kid character
in Ocarina, rather than in
Majora’s Mask.
Much
was made during the game’s promotion about how you can fight while on
horseback and that it will actually be fun (and it almost is). You start
the game with Epona, unlike in
Ocarina (where you had to win her in a race), and while you gradually
unlock warp points throughout the map, they are spaced out enough to make
riding her essential to get around the map, which is several times larger
than the Hyrule of earlier games.
Two worlds, two sets of macguffins (collect light essences, collect fused
shadow pieces), a mysterious sidekick with her own agenda, getting used to
having four legs, Twilight Princess
has a lot to throw at you, and much credit goes to it's design and setup
for never feeling too overwhelming, even with nine dungeons to stomp and
slash your way through.
And while they are
visually impressive, as Game Maker's Toolkit points out in their
'Boss-Keys' video series, the designs of all these dungeons are very
cookie-cutter and similar to each other in layout. The themes, puzzles,
and enemies are all unique, of course, so you don’t exactly notice their
repeated patterns. Standing apart from the bunch are the Goron Mines (with
some of the machinery giving a nod to the upside-down-ness of
Majora’s Stone Tower Temple),
the aforementioned Arbiter’s Grounds (great music to boot), and the
decrepit mansion that is Snowpeak Ruins, where you go on deadly errands to
make a nice soup (now that we mention it, Yeto is disturbingly larger than
his wife, Yeta).
The City in the Sky
‘dungeon’ really does feel like a city in the sense that it takes forever
to get from side to the other, and then from the lowest floor to the
highest point.
Inside them is a wild and wide range of
items, ranging from the usual bombs and boomerangs to a spinner (which
acts like a skateboard, but is absolutely a beyblade), dominion rod (to
have dominion over things, obviously), and a heavy but effective ball and
chain.
Without saying too much,
Twilight Princess probably the
best final boss battle in the series.
It was exactly what fans of Zelda as a whole
(and fans of video games) wanted and hoped for, and it exceeded
expectations in every way. A bit of puzzling, a lot of combat (including a
horseback phase) and plenty of drama.
Ganon(dorf) himself is
less developed than in Wind Waker,
but he finds the scenery delicious as he chews it.
There’s so much of everything in this game,
except for…Zelda.
Oh, she owns the few cut-scenes she’s in
(it’s stirring to hear her admit that because of her family’s own deeds,
others are made to suffer), and she plays a really wild role in the final
battle, but compared to the previous 3D incarnations (including her
disguises), it is sensibly the Princess of Twilight (Midna) who takes the
lead role over the Princess of Light.
You can tell that designers worked just as
hard with making sure Link and Midna develop an emotional bond (so that
players care about both of them) as making sure that Link’s classic green
tunic is actually dripping and a darker shade when he emerges out of the
water.
Another moment of clever game design: Link
can hold up to 300 rupees early on. As you complete the ‘Goron Mines’
dungeon you’ll almost certainly have maxed out on them. When you go
shopping in nearby Kakariko Village right after, it’s 200 rupees for the
awesome Hylian shield so of course you’ll take that. When go to the bomb
shop down the street and have to buy a bomb bag in order to carry bombs
for 120 rupees…you’re 20 rupees short. Which means you have to go out and
explore a bit more while always keeping a mental note to return, a good
way to start considering and balancing multiple tasks at once.
All these subtle experiments and tweaks don't come easy, and
the development of Twilight Princess
took it plenty of time. Work began in 2003 as a
Wind Waker sequel, then pivoted entirely, inspired by – as many have
noted – the recently released movie trilogy of
The Lord of the Rings.
The game was previewed to rapturous applause at E3 2005, and
was expected to be released by the end of that year, which the Gamecube –
the now four year old console having difficulty competing with PlayStation
2 and the Xbox – could really use.
This is the perception, anyway.
Certainly the Gamecube weren't selling as well as the Sony
or Microsoft consoles, but there was never a financial quarter where
Nintendo lost money (it helps that at this time the company is
transitioning from the very successful Gameboy line of handhelds to the
also very successful replacement, the DS).
If it wasn't a financial problem, then it was certainly a 'cool' problem,
and Twilight Princess was meant
to remedy that in time for the holiday season.
[it's 2005, but two first person shooter sequels from 2004 (Halo 2 and Half-Life 2) are
still the hottest thing in gaming for people who really
care about gaming. The first is all about the multiplayer deathmatch
experience (now available online) and the second is right up there with
Majora’s Mask as one of the
greatest sequels of all time. Everything that was good about the first
Half-Life was exponentially
improved in this one, especially the smooth and creative gameplay (all
hail the gravity gun).
Go one letter back and you’ll discover the
other big series right about now. Having hit the jackpot with
Grand Theft Auto 3 in 2001,
Rockstar games released a slew of them, with
Vice City in 2002 and
San Andreas in 2004, each one
selling over fifteen million copies.
PlayStation 2 had a
huge game library of 'mature' titles (plus the indomitable Gran Turismo
series, which never stopped selling), a DVD player, and
Guitar Hero, which becomes the hot new thing in the fall of
2005.
It was in this environment that Nintendo announced that their new console
the Revolution was coming 2006, and as the year reached its end they
delayed the new Zelda game for it.]
Consequently, Twilight Princess
would be polished up nice and grimy for another twelve months (which
Aonuma felt it badly needed) so it could come out on both the Gamecube and
the new, the funny looking and re-named console, the Wii. The only
difference is that the games are mirror-images of each other. Link is
left-handed on the Gamecube version, and right-handed for the Wii, because
developers figured that if you’re actually slashing the wii remote in the
air to attack with a sword, it would work better if it was in the hand you
are probably holding the wii remote with (sorry, lefties).
[so it's actually 2006. In November of that year both the Nintendo Wii
goes up headed to head with the brand new Playstation 3. And while
conventional wisdom was the PlayStation 3 would win outright (despite
Twilight Princess’s pivot to
grittiness and maturity that seemed to be the way the gamer winds were
blowing), Nintendo doubled down on appealing to gamers of all ages and
skill levels with the Wii.
When Nintendo president Satoru Iwata pulled
it out from inside his jacket at a video game conference that year, it
didn’t really look like a console.
But with motion control gaming suddenly
being the hot, new fad,
Wii would soon take
over the world, finally rivalling PlayStation in sales numbers and
bringing non-gamers into the fold, at least for a couple years.
Twilight Princess itself had great
sales…for a Zelda title. But it was nothing compared to the motion-control
focused games of Wii Sports, Wii
Resort and Mario Kart Wii.
If the PS2 got people buying video game consoles for the DVD player, then
Wii just raised the stakes by giving the same sort of non-gamers a reason
to try virtual bowling (like every industry, success breeds imitators, and
both Sony and Microsoft offered accessories like the Move and Kinect,
which did Wii-like things).
Because Twilight Princess was
designed primarily for the Gamecube, the motion control capabilities of
the Wii are not fully taken advantage of, and that actually ended up
working out for the best, because they never worked great for this type of
action adventure game. Perhaps you could say it’s a bit of realism that
not every sword swing would land the way you want, and accidentally
banging it up against a wall beside an enemy is part of the challenge (and
is like a foreshadowing of Dark Souls)!
The Wii had wireless internet connectivity built right in, and while that
certainly made online mini-games and
Mario Kart Wii a lot more fun if you were home alone, it also allowed
for something called The Virtual Console. It was an online store for
downloadable games from the eighties and nineties that would run on the
Wii. That meant that for the current gamer generation, all the home
console Legend of Zelda games from 1986 to 2000 could be played for a
couple bucks each. And for millions of new fans, seeing what all the fuss
has been about for twenty years is suddenly very easy to find out.
Outside of Hyrule and two months after the release of
Twilight Princess, the iPhone
arrives. It’s not the first cell phone that has a touch screen (and the
Nintendo DS was doing it for over two years at this point), but it makes
it easy to transition between a wealth of applications and playing quick
arcade-style games, and is consequently the first cell phone the world
collectively shits its pants over.
Its popularity – along with the popularity of the many imitators in its
wake – means there is no way to avoid acknowledging how these devices have
changed the landscape of video games, even if games played on phones are
quickly dismissed by console and PC gamers, and the people who play them
are labeled as forever noobs.]
Twilight Princess was the Zelda game that
everyone wanted, that everyone expected from Nintendo, the one that was
meant to be the true successor to
Ocarina of Time.
Games at this time were supposed to be getting more mature and
respectable, so mute the colours and turn up the foreboding. It’s what
many successful series (GTA, Resident Evil, Half-Life, Metal Gear, even
some Final Fantasies) were doing at this time.
And wouldn’t you know it, Nintendo playing it safe by following
trends…worked.
The response to the game was massive, with best ever sales, generous
comparisons to Ocarina (some
saying that with eight years of technological advances,
Twilight plays much more
smoothly and with fewer immersion breaks than the 1998 classic), and
cold-shouldering its bright and shiny immediate predecessor.
Oddly enough, while Wind Waker’s
stature has only risen in the nearly twenty years after its release,
Twilight Princess’s stature has lessened somewhat. Once again, this
is only true in the sense of comparing it to other Zelda games, because
when considering the industry as a whole, its remains one of the best
selling and most critically acclaimed 3D adventure games ever produced.
But there is a tendency in pop culture as a whole
for immediate and overwhelming praise (which
Twilight Princess received) to cool, and that which was criticized
heartily at first slowly garner adoring cult status as time passes.
Fortunately, the final assessment is that
the game is much more exciting (and considerably longer) than the story
surrounding it. Twilight Princess’s
dark tone was never a point of criticism, and by never fully stepping out
of Ocarina’s shadows, it
flourished there, and not just thematically. Forging an original path is
not always necessary for success, and few games play the ‘hits’ as well as
this one.
[Playable on: Gamecube, Wii, Wii U (HD
Version)]
Interlude: I am Error
Mistakes were made.
You don’t become a massively successful pop culture franchise without some
amazing successes AND some royal fuck ups.
Now finding fault in a single video game – even one you are very much a
fan of – doesn’t take much. That you didn’t know you had to move Darunia’s
statue in Goron City to access the Fire Temple is not an error on
Nintendo’s part (even if finally realizing it makes you feel so damn
stupid).
In politics, sports, business, entertainment, and plain existence, the
longer you last and the higher you fly, the likelier it is that you’ll
eventually get burned.
To winnow the Legend of Zelda’s most glaring fatal flaw down to one
sentence:
Letting other people take care of your business.
This sort of failure is not just limited to this series, or video games in
general.
Whether it is having a different producer coming in to (re)mix your album
(Phil Spector doing so to the Beatles’
Let it Be), having a primetime
variety show to celebrate your space opera film (the 1978
Star Wars’ Holiday Special), or
outsource your manufacturing or call centre work to halfway across the
globe (see: business), risks
grow exponentially when you are in not total control of the project you
started years before.
When success comes to an industry that still just might be a fad (and that
was certainly a possibility for video games in the eighties), you take as
much money as you can and run.
To start lets look at 1989’s The
Legend of Zelda, the animated TV series. Not anime, mind you, no this
was wholly an American enterprise made for American kids.
While the series is based heavily on both universal themes of good and
evil and Arthurian legend, this is a flat and forgettable Saturday morning
cartoon made at a time where such things couldn’t be serious and brooding
for more than five seconds (it took 1992’s
Batman: The Animated Series for
that). The Legend of Zelda
cartoon series was part of an hour-long block of video-based adventures
with The Super Mario Bros Super Show
as the lead in (at least that one has kitsch value, with wrestler Lou
Albano playing the live-action titular character), and gives ample
evidence for why Link shouldn’t speak and why he shouldn’t be portrayed as
a whiny jerk.
He fakes a cold to get out of chores, pretends to sleepwalk to get into
Zelda’s bedroom (uh), and at one point is tasked with fending off monsters
so a water park can be built (uh, but a different kind of ‘uh’). Ganon was
not an existential evil that had to be eradicated at all costs, but a
mischievous comic foil. And while it makes sense that you’d get this from
Saturday morning cartoons, it seems incongruous with a difficult, ‘stop
the apocalypse’ video game, even if it was also predominantly aimed at
kids.
Considering the graphics quality of video games at the time, the animators
loosely used the illustrations of Link and Zelda in the instruction
manuals of the first two games as the basis for the designs. Very loosely.
If it wasn’t for the names of the characters and monsters coming from the
video game, it could have just been any poorly written, corny, forgettable
sword-and-sorcery children’s series.
But at least that was just a short-lived Saturday morning TV show, and
hey, it got us all at least one meme, with whiny Link’s catchphrase, ‘well
excuuuuse me, Princess!’ (yes, even that line is a rip-off of Steve
Martin).
For a video game series, the true misstep has to exist within that very
industry, and while Nintendo has almost always given plenty of patience
and care when it comes to making sure the games meet their high standards,
you know that because ‘almost’ was used in this sentence, the exception is
coming.
In the early nineties, Nintendo allowed another company – one that had
barely any experience making video games – develop a series of Legend of
Zelda games for a non-Nintendo console.
These are the Phillips CD-I games, and like
the name of this system suggests, they were produced for compact
disc-based video game player. CDs held plenty of advantages over
cartridges (namely a lot more hard drive space), and their success at
supplanting vinyl records as the primary way to listen to music in the
late eighties meant that their future was bright (for the next twenty
years, anyway).
Nintendo was developing a CD add-on to the
Super Nintendo with Sony, and things got pretty far in the prototype
stages (one of the few that were actually made was recently sold for
$300,000), but it fell apart and
Nintendo entered into a
partnership with Phillips instead. They would retain the rights and
distribution to the games themselves, but because it was being made on
technology that Nintendo employees did not have access to, game
development would be in the hands of Phillips.
But not exactly, because that company makes
hardware, not software. Three games were ultimately developed, 1993’s
Faces of Evil and
Wand of Gamelon and 1995’s
Zelda’s Adventure, and Phillips farmed the job for the first two out
to Animation Magic, a company based in the United States and Russia. It’s
not a good sign when you’re a video game company but have the word
‘animation’ in your company name.
While there was animation included in the
games, the quality remains simultaneously impressive from an early
nineties PC computer perspective and horrifying right now. The characters’
movements in these cut-scenes are somehow more in the uncanny valley than
the actual cartoon-ish designs. The less said about what they say and how
they say it, the better.
It seems like the developers were more
inspired by the tv series (Link is a bit of a brat, because yeah, he
talks) than any of the video games. In fact, like the tv series, you’d be
forgiven for thinking that reading the game instruction manuals was the
only research Animation Magic did, not even bothering to pick up an NES or
SNES controller.
Oddly enough, while
Faces of Evil features Link as the hero,
Wand of Gamelon flips the script and has Zelda save Link. It’s a
nice change of pace, but both protagonists are controlled in the exact
same way with an identical attack (‘sword’). Using the side-scrolling
Zelda II as a launch point, the
graphics are decent for the time (as CDs would allow a lot more hard drive
space for detailed images) and the gameplay was oh so much worse.
Sometimes buggy, sometimes glitchy, and
blandly repetitive when you do figure out what’s going on.
Playing 1991’s
A Link to the Past and then
Faces of Death isn’t a step down, it’s a brutal tumble off a cliff and
into a field of broken glass. Even the original game (seven years old at
this point) plays in a more intuitive and smooth fashion compared to it.
Using a mouse for everything is a bad start,
because the movements are stiff, it’s impossible to target flying enemies,
and using the same button to attack, collect/use item, and return to the
overworld map in certain spots is chaotic.
The badly edited animated sequences are
either dull exposition or nonsensical.
There are no real puzzles (other than
something like ‘look in various houses to find the key’), so it is just a
slaughter-fest of enemies that march towards or fly into you, or throw
endless rocks or spears, sometimes from off-screen.
Even worse, there is little fun in killing
the same boar or lizard creature again and again until you can shamble
past the respawn point, and of course they can kill you by respawning on
top of you as you pass.
The background seems to be from a fairy tale
book from the 1950s, and the actual animated sprites are awkwardly placed
on top of it. While there is music for the overworld map, the game lapse
into awkward silence as soon as you are able to control your character.
1995’s
Zelda’s Adventure is terrible in a different way (with the
Bladerunner-sounding Viridis Corporation handling the work this time for
Phillips), with a bit of jerky live action acting to start things off
(it’s…not good). The backgrounds seem to based on photographs of natural
landscapes, which makes Zelda and the enemies she slays endlessly look
extremely out of place (many of them seem to ‘burp’ as they die).
Because it has a top-down perspective, you’ll be staring the top of
character’s heads the whole time.
Zelda’s Adventure has a stop-motion animation feel, which adds nothing
to the jerky gameplay or basic technical faults (freeze-like loading
times, sound cues overlapping or cutting out).
You never realized how much you took
painstakingly-made good video games for granted until you play a bad one.
Despite generally adequate reviews at the
time (yes, really), these three titles have been retrospectively labeled
‘the worst video games of all time’. A more accurate title might be ‘best
known worst games of all time’. There are several titles (E.T. The Extraterrestrial (1982),
Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties (1994),
Bubsy 3D (1996), Big Rigs
(2003)) that are also in competition for that unwanted label, but are also
more obscure because they don’t include characters of one of the best
known and critically acclaimed video game franchises.
The Phillips CD-I Zelda games are not canon (in official,
Nintendo-published Zelda books, there’s no mention of them), and thank god
for that. It was such a disaster that Nintendo happily abandoned CDs
and went back to their own cartridge development, even eschewing
(regular-sized) discs until 2006.
Which is a good time to mention that while
software mistakes can be amusing, hardware mistakes can be devastating,
costing a company a hell of a lot more money than one or two failed games.
If there was ever a Zelda title developed
for the terribly-received and therefore short-lived Virtual Boy (a
stationary VR headset Nintendo released in 1995 with super-basic, 70s era
graphics), you can bet we’d talk about that.
The Video Game crash of 1983 took out a lot
of companies trying to cash in on the video game craze of the first and
second generation wave. Too many consoles (Atari 2600, Odyssey 2, Vektrex,
ColecoVision, Intellivision (nice name though)), too many games ripping
off other games (Pac-Man clones, Donkey Kong clones, Pong clones, etc),
and personal computers that let you run programs other than games all had
investors thinking the console industry was dead.
While Nintendo got through the crash
unscathed and led the recovery a few years later, they just kicked the
moment of their hubris decades down the road. After their debuts in 2004
and 2006 respectively, the DS handheld console and the Wii home console
were incredible successes, each selling over 100 million units. So for
their successors Nintendo added a number and a letter, crowning them the
3DS and Wii U.
The public wasn’t sure what the difference
was. It didn’t help that both of the products look more or less identical
to their predecessors, with some people thinking that the Wii U was just a
gamepad accessory for the original Wii.
To add to the dumpster fire, Nintendo forgot
that it learned from its mistake regarding launch titles. Nintendo 64 had
Super Mario 64…good (and fun
game). Gamecube has Luigi’s mansion…bad (but fun game). Wii had
Twilight Princess…good (and fun
game). The Wii U had New Super Mario
Bros U…bad (and meh game).
Ultimately its collection of games had some
bright spots (Donkey Kong Tropical
Freeze, Mario Kart 8 and a…uh…), but the Zeldas were just High
Definition remakes of Wind Waker
and Twilight Princess, and even
the big Mario games were sequels to games introduced on previous consoles.
To stem the financial bleeding, Nintendo
heavily reduced the price of the 3DS system and added a collection of
games available for free upon purchase. It worked, and the 3DS greatly
recovered sales wise (and therefore is a success in the eyes of history),
but the Wii U didn’t.
selling only 13 million units.
It all adds up to why the console’s
successor arrived less than four and half years later, as the Switch
debuted in March 2017 with the Zelda game originally designed for the Wii
U as its launch title, which happened to be
Breath of the Wild (while also
being available on the suddenly old console as well, as a sort of send-off
game). Years later former Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime
said that if the Switch failed, it could have been the end of the company.
So obviously developing and publishing video
games is hard, and that means making concessions through the process
because of limitations of technology, of the team assembled, and even real
world events. Crunch or cut? Valiant effort or vaporware? Error or just
exhaustion?
Nintendo is a multi-billion dollar company
with a plethora of investors, and while executives give the Zelda team a
long leash, holiday titles must be released.
Once again, this is nothing new. This is not
a scourge of the last ten or twenty years of video games. It’s business.
It’s why the second game in this series was pumped out super quick after
the success of the first.
Now farming out a cherished franchise to
other development companies can go horribly wrong (see above), but working
much more closely with Flagship/Capcom (for some handheld titles) and
Grezzo (for remakes on handhelds) bore fruit.
But the series’ great success means that
‘business as usual’ for another franchise can be seen as true
disappointment for Zelda fans. A
Link to the Past is a true crowning achievement of fourth generation
console gaming, but because they've gone back to that well for several
games (Link’s Awakening, both Oracles Games, the
Four Swords sub-series, Minish
Cap, and the actual sequel, A
Link Between Worlds), there is no doubt that there can be diminishing
returns.
The Zelda series is known for re-inventing
the wheel so often that when they don’t, the results get flat, and even as
the graphics improve, the 2D dungeons, boss fights, and plot twists of the
games mentioned above start to blur together.
The same story setup is both the point and
the point of contention. Credit is due to the producers/developers for
changing it up as much as possible. While critics may be frustrated with
Miyamoto steadily dismissing the importance of story when it comes to
developing video games, focusing too much on that instead of gameplay
means you don’t have a game, you have a movie.
Miyamoto carefully overseeing the early
Zelda titles (and keeping a watchful eye over the later ones) is why it’s
a joy going back to play these old games.
So why do they make it so hard to play these
old games?!
A lack of easily accessible legacy content
that people are willing to pay for suggests a glaring blind spot that is
completely without explanation.
Notice how these articles are going on and
on about this great video game series, Zelda? Of the twenty main entries
into the series, you can only play six of them on Nintendo’s current
console, already four years into its lifespan. They are
Breath of the Wild, Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, the
Link’s Awakening remake, and the first three games (TLoZ,
Zelda II: The Adventures of Link, A Link to the Past) via the Nintendo
Switch Online service. No Ocarina,
no Wind Waker, no
Twilight, no pocket-sized handheld games brought over. It is doubly
bizarre since the Wii and Wii U had the wonderful online store, the
Virtual Console, where you could buy many of these games for the super
wonderful price of $5-10. It introduced a new generation to some amazing
retro games, so Nintendo not
offering anything like this (and rolling out older games so slowly on
Nintendo Switch Online) is baffling.
(if we were using memes for these articles,
here is where Futurama’s Fry
would be yelling ‘shut up and take my money!’)
That’s why while
the Phillips CD-I Zelda games are hard to play, maybe Nintendo’s real big
mistake is making their own Zelda games
hard to play.
Some people: A section on mistakes
and no Skyward Sword?
We’ll get to that.
Chapter Eleven: Love at First Touch – Zelda on the (3)DS
Let’s get this right out of the way to
start: The Nintendo DS/3DS line of handheld consoles was a beast
(officially discontinued in late 2020). The DS and its many iterations
sold 154 million units, with an additional 75 million when you add on what
the 3DS shipped.
The DS stands for both ‘Developers’ System’
and ‘Dual Screen’ but boy does only the second one really make sense.
That’s exactly what these handheld consoles offered in the form of a
clamshell-like design. One up and one down, and the bottom one is a touch
screen. Because you don’t want to get it all scuffed up with your greasy
gamer hands, it comes with a stylus pen that easily slots into the console
itself for convenient storage and removal.
It even included a microphone that many
games used as another input (get used to literally blowing at a game).
There’s also a rechargeable battery via AC adapter, internet connection,
its own DS wi-fi for other consoles in range, virtual surround sound, and
backwards compatability for the entire Gameboy line,
These changes were meant to be big. Even as
the Gameboy line sold better than the Nintendo 64 and the Gamecube,
Nintendo acknowledge that this successful product was stuck too much in
the past.
Then Nintendo President Satoru Iwata (taking
over from the seemingly eternal Hiroshi Yamauchi, who actually suggested
the two-screen design) promised this new handheld device would exemplify
the company’s bold steps into the 21st century.
The DS debuted in 2004 (and the 3DS followed seven years later), but there
wasn’t a Zelda title specifically designed for it until 2007. This was due
to Minish Cap arriving on the
Gameboy Advance in 2004 as a sort of swan song.
Despite technology better than the Nintendo
64 shrunk into something that could fit in the palm of your hand, it was
decided that home
consoles would continue to offer new 3D Zelda experiences, and handhelds
would give people more adventures in the 2D format.
Style and graphics-wise, these games would take a much more lighthearted
tone, with first two of them being direct sequels to
Wind Waker (which Aonuma was
wanting to make all along), its cell-shaded cartoon style was a perfect
fit for two dimensional limits.
By 2007, Flagship (makers of the
Oracle games and
Minish Cap) hds been swallowed
wholly by Capcom, and Hidemaro Fujibayashi, the director of those games,
had jumped ship and joined Nintendo’s house development team outright. He
helped direct 2007’s Phantom
Hourglass alongside Daki Iwamoto, who also directed 2009’s
Spirit Tracks.
That first one takes place shortly after
Wind Waker ends, with Link
teaming up with Tetra and her pirate crew, looking for a landmass to build
the new Hyrule. But when exploring a ghost ship, everything goes wrong,
with Link falling overboard and landing on a mysterious island sans pirate
crew, eventually finding that the whole region is under threat from a
giant sea monster. Oh, and Tetra’s been turned to stone by said monster.
Hop to it, wide-eyed hero!
Like Wind Waker,
Phantom Hourglass has Link sailing to various islands and defeating
monsters and helping inhabitants, and he is assisted by a cowardly
braggart captain (Linebeck) and his self-named ship. Linebeck doing all
the talking makes him the sort of charming rapscallion that you know is
going to redeem himself in the end. Meet some familiar (Gorons) and new
(Anouki) races, help an amnesiac fairy, do plenty of optional deep sea
fishing, give some new sneaking elements a try, and find out there is more
to the old man who gives you advice than at first glance (shock, horror).
Spirit Tracks takes place one hundred years later, with the previous
games summed up at the beginning by an elderly member of Tetra’s pirate
crew, who is trying to impart a bit of history to this young incarnation
of Link, who is about to become… a train engineer. Yes, they had found a new land and created a new
Hyrule that is crisscrossed with railway tracks, since trains are the new
ships. That us, until a suspicious member of the royal inner circle stabs
Princess Zelda in the back, takes her body for some nefarious evil-raising
ceremony all while making the railroads disappear because these ‘spirit
tracks’ are like chains that keep the evil at bay. Sounds about right. As noted previously, after five titles on the
Gameboy family of consoles, the series was running a bit on creative fumes
when it came to 2D dungeons. Fortunately, the DS’s hardware meant plenty
of new ways to play opened up, even if it was keeping the top-down
perspective and limited movement. With the touch screen and stylus, you don’t use
the directional d-pad to move Link around. Instead you drag the stylus
along the screen and Link follows it. Tap a nearby enemy and Link will
attack with his sword, make a quick circle and it will be a spin attack.
You’ll be using the stylus to go through the menu to use and equip various
items as well. You could also draw and write on the bottom screen, and
some quests and puzzles required you to do this, tracing a path for your
boat in treacherous waters that it would then follow (or your train over
remaining tracks). To remember the order of opening doors or chests, you
could write the numbers on the screen. Sometimes you had to sketch a
(thankfully simple) symbol or shape to open a door. With the built-in microphone, it allowed for some
big-eared enemies to be stunned by yelling into it (and can be amusing if
you yelled some non-sequitur), and to ‘play’ instruments like a flute. Whether piloting a ship or a train you would have
a cannon to fire at monsters that try to attack as you travel from place
to place, and you would press the tip of your stylus on the bottom screen
to aim and fire (Zelda’s take on a rail shooter game). Sometimes playing these games felt like you were
taking notes in class or fixing an old radio with a tiny screwdriver, but
it was certainly fresh and fun.
For the most part, the dungeons found a
perfect middle ground between the Oracle games’ old school ‘what the hell
do I do?’ and Wind Waker’s
bubbly lead-you-by-the-nose outings.
Mutoh’s Temple and the Temple of Courage
(from Hourglass) are standouts
there, with the former having a great Egyptian pyramid theme with
hammer-operated catapults, and the latter a boomerang paradise, where you
can draw the path you want the weapon to take on the touchpad (the boss is
an ugly ass crab).
From
Spirit Tracks, the Fire Temple is full of mine carts, and the Snow
Temple is a series highlight. Being able to make ice paths over frozen
water in the direction of wherever you throw your boomerang is really…cool
(puts on sunglasses).
A clever twist in both these games is that
once you find the boss key, it isn’t automatically added to your inventory
so you can rush to the proper door to use it. Instead it is a heavy
in-game item that you have to pick up and lug around with two hands, not
being able to use your sword at the same time.
For people who thought the dungeons were
getting easier, that’s a nice unexpected challenge for the wrap up, but
these two games do something else that turn this Zelda standard inside
out.
There is a central, plot-centric dungeon
that cannot be explored (let alone completed) in one go. It is a place
that you open up bit by bit, always coming back to when you have another
item or a bit more strength, always finding there are more and more levels
up or down, driving you mad because you never know when you are getting
close to the segmented end or true finish.
If you thought
Ocarina’s Water Temple was the height of brain-melting frustration,
Hourglass’s Temple of the Ocean
King and Tracks’ Tower of
Spirits would like to have a word (especially the latter’s final section).
Adding mechanics, the Ocean King has poisoned air you can’t breath in for
very long at first, and the Tower of Spirits gives you Zelda herself as a
controllable player.
Yes, your companion in
Spirit Tracks is Zelda in ethereal form, and it works great. She has
a bit more personality here than in other games, which really adds a
unique and entertaining dynamic to the usually formal partnership between
our two main characters.
In the Tower of Spirits you actually play as
the Princess in some stealth and combat sections (because she can inhabit
the bodies of burly phantom knights). So even if
Breath of the Wild’s sequel goes to a greater length to make the
game ‘dual-protagonist’, remember that the 2D games did it first.
Other characters in both these titles even
express remorse and seek redemption, adding a bit more character depth and
plot twists that are usually not seen in a handheld gaming experience.
Despite this,
Spirit Tracks is consistently rated as one of the weakest
single-player title in the series, which should actually be viewed as
proof of just how goddamn amazing the Zelda lineup is, because that game
is still a hell of a lot of fun (ditto
Phantom Hourglass, although
certainly how much you enjoy Wind
Waker will make these titles more appealing).
Not wanting to
(over)kill the goose that laid the golden egg, Nintendo ensured that there
was a two year release schedule for DS Zelda games. Remakes for
Ocarina and
Majora’s Mask came out in 2011
and 2015, and in between that was A
Link Between Worlds.
Wait, 3D home console games being remade on
a handheld?
Well in 2011 Nintendo introduced the
successor to the DS, by adding a 3 in front of it. The 3DS was much more
powerful and could easily run a specifically designed remake of the 1998
classic, and it earned its name by having a 3D effect that can activated
with a slider on the side of the device (no silly glasses required).
Other additional features were cameras that
could offer users an augmented reality experience, streaming services such
as Netflix, apps that allowed you to send text messages, and a fitness
tracker which could count your steps.
It was like the 3DS could do everything
except make a phone call.
Despite that, at first it seemed like they
trying to compete with the now-ubiquitous smart phones and the games they
offered on the side. But this was too daunting a task, because early sales
were below Nintendo’s expectations.
This led to the usually unflappable company to reduce the price of the
system, and add game bundles to them.
They
were willing to lose money up front with the hopes of making it back
later. And they did, in part by doing what always works: Make good games,
including a top-tier Zelda one.
A Link Between Worlds
is, on the surface, the most sequel-ish of all Zelda follow-ups. Even if
‘The Adventures of Link’ was subtitled ‘Zelda II’, and even though
Majora’s Mask came right after
Ocarina and used near identical
graphics, ALBW uses the same map, the same plot, and many of the same
items as A Link to the Past,
released twenty two years earlier. It’s also called
Triforce of the Gods 2 in Japan,
another nod to the 1991 game. But after that they throw several standards out
the window.
Despite being on a handheld console, it was by
far the most graphically impressive Zelda game to date (even if it skewers
on the cartoony side, but not exactly
Wind Waker-esque), with the smooth controls and fluid animation for
even the teensiest of actions. Turning the tables on exploration’s great enemy -
walls – the developers gave Link the ability to inhabit and walk within
them. It is a perfect example of a game mechanic informing its narrative,
because the premise is that the…evil wizard…is collecting sages by turning
them in paintings, and is also somewhat of an art critic himself (who
thinks Link is particularly ugly and worm-like). Just as art can be a reflection of society, the
reflection of the shining world of Hyrule is the dark world of Lorule
(yuk, yuk, yuk), who has its own princess (Hilda), trying in vain to keep
the kingdom from literally tearing apart as if it was made of canvas
paper. There is even a flipped version of Link, an opportunistic guy in a
rabbit mask (yep) who wants to rent and sell you items to use in the
various areas and respective dungeons. Wait, renting items? Isn’t the whole point of a
Zelda game is to slowly progress through the game’s story and get certain
items in certain dungeon in an almost singular order? Yeah, forget all that in this one.
In A Link Between Worlds you have the most amount of freedom since…its
1991 predecessor.
With A Link to the Past you could mix up the dungeon order once you have
access to the Dark World, although because they are literally numbered on
the overworld map from 0 through 9, it’s clear you are expected to follow
an obvious path. Not so in its 2013 sequel. Ravio rents the bow,
the bombs, the rods and everything else (if you die, he takes them back),
and just so you won’t be guessing blindly Hilda will tell you what item
will aid you when you go to a certain area in Lorule.
Exploring everywhere is worthwhile because there
are plenty of surprises to be found.
Majora’s Mask itself is hanging in Link’s house. You can even ‘wear’
it by entering the wall and standing behind it (and whenever you do
inhabit walls, the music gets appropriately tinnier). Another reference to that game is the giant bomb
you can buy to blow up particularly large boulders, but instead of it
entering your inventory, you lead it around like it’s your giant pet until
you find the right spot to ‘explodiate’ it. Like its predecessor, the better you do, the
sillier you’ll look, with a blue tunic giving you increased defense and a
pinkish-red sword that will deal extra damage.
One thing that is noticeable is how much easier
Worlds is, which can certainly
be explained by acknowledging that by 2013, stump-able puzzles have been
kicked down a notch in Zelda games. Plus the fact that because the
dungeons could be done in any order meant there was a limit to how
difficult the enemies (whether low level or bosses) could be in the game,
because you might have four hearts when you confront them, or you might
have twelve. The dungeons have old names and are in similar
locations, but are brand new on the inside. And boxier, to describe the
layout in one word. Typically a large central room with only a handful of
small chambers surrounding it. Its design is so cookie-cutter that they
don’t even bother with having to find a map (just the compass, which
reveals the treasure chests), outlining the entire space on the bottom
screen as soon as you enter. The one time it bucks the trend is the Ice Ruins,
where the ominous, endlessly churning elevator sends you up and down and
eventually onto precarious ledges, making it all the more memorable.
Since Worlds can just ‘be’ a bigger game because of better tech, the
lead-ups to the dungeons can be much more complex. The stealth section
before the Dark Palace is a good puzzle all by itself, and that particular
dungeon definitely benefits from having more graphical power and auditory
nuance (great music, of course) to add to the atmosphere.
Taken as a whole, ALBW is so good that it’s
probably the second best 2D Zelda game out there, with the only one better
being A Link to the Past itself
(oh, right, Link’s Awakening…).
[It’s 2007, and hold onto yer butts.
When the Wii was released in late 2006, the
DS was already the top handheld console, although its only real
competition was the PlayStation Portable (how’s that for a great name to
know exactly what you’re getting?). While it only sold about half as much
as the DS, that’s eighty million units, which is nothing to scoff at all.
Sony continued to update it with new
versions, each one looking more and more like smart phone. Which might be
why the PSP had trouble separating itself from this new breed of handheld
technical wonders.
Together the DS and Wii will crush Sony and
Xbox in terms of hardware and software sales for between 2007 and 2009,
but even when the Wii U stumbled after its 2012 release, the 3DS continued
to help Nintendo’s bottom line.
The same couldn’t be said with Sony’s follow
up to the PSP, which was the PlayStation Vita, arriving in late 2011 and
early 2012. While having much
more powerful specs than the 3DS (stop us if you’ve heard this one
before), Nintendo made sure there was a steady stream of excellent
handheld-only games to play on their console, while Sony was once again
giving good game priority to its home PlayStation line, and giving Vita
the scraps.
The divide between playing games on a couch
and playing games on the go was widening, and while Sony was winning the
former at this point, Nintendo was dominating the second.
After
Twilight Princess, the next two Zelda titles would only be available
on the DS, but there was no shortage of high quality video games across
the entire medium during the five-year gap until the next home console
Zelda experience.
2007 was a time of great creativity and
success in video games, and whenever the latter was found, more of the
same came down the pipe.
Super Mario Galaxy is one of
the greatest games of all time, no asterisk or ‘except for…’ necessary.
Its sequel is similarly lauded.
That same year, 2K Games pulled a
Half-Life and jammed a riveting
story and immersive world into a wild first person shooter, and the result
was another GOAT candidate, Bioshock
(you know it’s special when they put one of the bad guys on the cover).
Initially released for PC and Xbox to wild acclaim, it was eventually made
available on PlayStation (in 2008) and the Switch (in…uh…2020). Its rushed
sequel was pretty good, but the third entry (Infinite)
is equally amazing.
Portal is all about
portals and cake and the first title was a lovely surprise when PC gamers
bought Valve’s Orange Box Game Collection for additional
Half-Life content and found this puzzle game was enjoyable to start
and addictive to the end. So Valve took its time with a sequel and it paid
off, with the 2011 entry selling like hotcakes.
Also in 2007:
Mass Effect brought a newfound maturity to RPG storytelling…and
before you get worried that might get in the way of blowing something up,
don’t worry, it a sci-fi space epic with alien races, political alliances
and lots of guns. Its sequel three years later got even more praise.
The first
Assassins Creed game arrived as well (damn, 2007 was loaded), and
while it can be argued that after twelve games in thirteen years (!) with
superficial changes has lessened its impact, it was certainly an
open-world pioneer (and eventually a very bad expensive film).
The first
Witcher game offers a glimpse of what was to come,
Halo 3 pretty much cornered the
multiplayer market, the first
Uncharted game arrived for those who wanted a male Lara Croft, the
Call of Duty series steps into modern warfare with…Call
of Duty: Modern Warfare, Elder
Scrolls IV means the big one is on the way, and in case you were tired
of killing all the things, there was
Guitar Hero’s big brother, Rock
Band.
Whew. If you weren’t playing video games in
2007, what the hell, man?]
The
conventional wisdom is that games worth talking about are big, sprawling,
and are expected to be best enjoyed on a large TV as you sit in awe on
your couch.
It’s tempting to say that the four Zelda
games released on the DS and 3DS (the three discussed above plus 2015’s
Triforce Heroes) buck this
trend, but that was never the intended goal with this method of joy
delivery.
Making
Wind Waker a trilogy and giving
A Link to the Past a late but worthy sequel felt like gifts the game
developers gave solely for the Zelda community (sales for them all were
strong, but rarely got close to the numbers of the bestselling console
titles). Little twists on familiar tropes and mechanics gave longtime fans
a reason to give these games a spin or two.
Taking advantage of the unique (3)DS hardware were like fun diversions
from the ‘importance’ that always came with a Zelda home console release.
Today, people outside their homes are more likely to play
games on their phones than a dedicated device.
In fact, it’s fair to say that Nintendo’s slow withdrawal of support for
the 3DS coincided perfectly with the ever-expanding dominance of phones
that could do almost everything. Their plan was never to beat this
industry, and Nintendo certainly did join them (eventually), by offering
mobile game versions of some of their biggest franchises with
Super Mario Run, Mario Kart Tour and Pokemon Go (the latter taking over the earth briefly).
But they held onto The Legend of Zelda
series. It’s clear they didn’t want to sully its name with a freemium
experience chock full of in-game purchases, and
Phantom Hourglass, Spirit Tracks, A Link Between Worlds, and
Triforce Heroes were all exciting examples of how – much like Link
himself – something of small size could still offer up big adventures.
[Playable on:
Phantom Hourglass – Nintendo DS, Nintendo
3DS, Wii U via Virtual Console
Spirit Tracks – Nintendo DS, Nintendo 3DS,
Wii U via Virtual Console
A Link Between Worlds – Nintendo 3DS]
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Can you make yourself forget something, or does it have to happen passively? | |||