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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 Eleven:
Skyward Sword – Back When
Motion Controls Were Yesterday's Future
Nintendo’s
predictable un-predictability is one of the reasons why it’s the most
loved video game company, and why it’s the one that can frustrate fans to
no end.
Sometimes they will
keep the same set-up over and over again, really beating that
not-dead-sales-wise horse (Pokemon,
Kirby, not just Mario, but
the individual Mario series
like Kart, Paper, Party and
Sports) until you’re begging for them to change it up. On the other
hand, sometimes after doing one thing that succeeded marvelously, they’ll
swerve again, and you wish they stuck with what you (and many others) were
loving for that short period of time.
In the latter case,
the mantra is: ‘if it ain’t broke, who cares, I want to change it up’.
Which certainly takes more an artistic bent over a financial one, closer
to how a musician or author might not want to replicate the same
crowd-pleasing music/story for their next project. That said, Nintendo
accountants will throw the financial reports back in the developers’ faces
if this experiment didn’t bring in the big bucks (since lackluster sales
is the clearest sign that fans in general have rejected this change).
Released on the Wii
in November 2011, Skyward Sword
is the most rigid, task-and-story-driven entry in The Legend of Zelda
canon, with the biggest change not what you do, but how you do it: using
motion controls for input. You’ll find many a longtime fan who will defend
and attack everything within this title.
When it comes to the
story, there are plenty of missions and detours and plot twists to move it
forward, and the cast is greatly expanded. The basics of Link, Zelda and
Ganon’s relationship is altered (the first two are childhood friends, and
the latter is not quite himself…yet), and many side characters have more
depth and development than in earlier titles. Consequently, because you
have to follow the story, exploration is severely curtailed, limited to
both the items in your toolkit, and because new areas may not be
accessible until you talk with a certain character who will ‘unlock’ it
for you. Sometimes to advance you have to return to places you’ve already
visited, with new information in hand.
But while this might
make Skyward Sword the most
drastically different title in the series when compared to the openness of
the original (which turned 25 the year this game came out), nothing
compares to what they did with the buttons.
2006’s
Twilight Princess was primarily
designed for the GameCube, which is why its release on the Wii did not
take full of advantage of the capabilities of motion controls with that
console. With that game’s massive success, the Zelda team went all-in with
making Skyward Sword a much
more interactive experience. Once you had the sensor bar set up atop or
right below your television, you were expected to get off the couch, stand
up and act like an actual hero of destiny with the Wii remote in one hand
and the nunchuk in the other.
It sounds great, right? Actually making slashing movement with the remote
like a real sword to slay your onscreen enemies? Shoot an arrow exactly
where you aim it, cracking that whip, guiding that drone as it buzzes
through the world. Raise your shield by pushing the nunchuk forward. Now
you really are Link.
Well…
Motion controls that work 90% of the time sounds like a good rate of
success on paper, but it's not enough when the devices making the motions
are in your hands and you’re flailing instead of kicking ass.
When you do something
minor like trying to shoot a seed pod out of a tree with a slingshot, you
don't mind if you miss the first time. But when you're low on hearts in
the middle of a boss battle and a sword swing just doesn't land, you are
rightly frustrated. It’s even clearer than when you press a button and
assert ‘I pressed it’, because you know you just swung your arm
horizontally, vertically, or diagonally. You felt it, you saw yourself do
it. But when that action is not reflected on the screen at a particularly
tense moment…you wouldn’t mind having an actual sword right then to halve
your console in two
(excellent
video game essayist 'KingK' says that he is okay with motion controls
working over 50% of the time, which seems to be a very generous rate of
acceptance).
It makes one wonder:
Were motion controls
meant to replace the traditional controller in every instance? The
incredible sales of the Wii and its accompanying games that focused
exclusively on these controls - Wii
Sports, Wii Fit, Wii Resort (just so you don’t forget the name) -
showed that was definitely an audience out there for a new way to 'video
game'. Outside these novelty titles, where you’re moving a remote meant to
represent a tennis racquet, a baseball bat, a bowling ball throw or a
steering wheel, success with other games could be spotty.
The basic-ness of the Mario series meant it was easy to incorporate motion
controls into Super Mario Galaxy
and its sequel, and was why they were both huge critical and commercial
successes (the eternally underrated Pikmin series also benefited from this
set-up).
But it didn't work so
well with Zelda, and motion controls fared even worse when paired with the
first-person perspective of the otherwise incredible Metroid Prime
Trilogy*.
*-the Metroid Prime trilogy is the collection of the 3D Metroid games, the
first two of which came out on the GameCube (and designed for a GameCube
controller). The trilogy collection was designed for the Wii, and required
motion control play for all of them, which…sucked. Which is a shame,
because the Metroid Prime series is amazing. It’s like Halo for smart
people.
At first it seems impressive that the sensor bar could tell the difference
between how you’re angling your slashes, and that it would be reflected in
Link’s movements on screen. Until it doesn’t work.
It is a much different learning curve for gamers of every level, based on
muscle memory not of a finger or thumb pressing a button, but the movement
of an entire arm (plus an oddly shaped controller in each hand). While it
is good on the developer’s part that they have a large area to safely
explore early on to get used to all this (similar
to how Ocarina of Time
acclimatized players to a large 3D environment), the beginning of the game
is paced quite slow, and you still might have difficulty with wielding
your virtual weapon dozens of hours in.
To fit in with the
game’s theme, your sidekick is a talking sword. Fi's robot-like speech
patterns were much more tolerable that Navi's 'hey, listen', but
she regularly breaks the immersion when she ‘rings’
(yes, with a
telephone sound effect)
to tell you when your Wii remote batteries were running low or that you
happen to be low on hearts (which you could see right on the screen). Her
biggest sin, however, is making you feel stupid by pointing out the
obvious and constantly repeating to you what other characters essentially
just said to you. Sure, adjusting the familiar Zelda feeling of ‘what do I
do next?’ is a good goal, but Fi is a huge over-steer with plenty of
dialogue you completely ignore.
Since she is a prim and proper AI, it’s left to LD-301S Scrapper robot to
bring the Midna-like sass. He’s got the hots for Fi, and nothing but
contempt for Link, calling him ‘Master Shortpants’. When doing some
mundane tasks like carrying items around the map he tells Link to get out
of the way and ‘see what a real hero looks like’.
So yes, Skyward Sword is weird,
but not in the dark sort of way
Majora's Mask was. Instead, it's a bubbly, shining, Studio-Ghibli sort
of weird. Lots of niceness everywhere, soft colours and much smoother,
pleasing character designs (the classical music soundtrack is incredible
as well, but that’s to be expected by any main game in the series at this
point). This was one of the ways the game took at hard left turn away from
the gothic creepiness of its predecessor,
Twilight Princess.
Aonuma has acknowledged that the pastoral pleasantness of Impressionism
was an inspiration for the art style, and this is apparent right from the
start in Skyloft, and it becomes more pronounced as you explore the sky,
forest, volcano and desert.
The initial setting of the game is a beautiful castle (town) in the sky, a
peaceful village far away from the dangerous chaos of the planet below. So
of course Link’s friend Zelda (no princess this time around) gets
kidnapped and it’s up to him rescue her as he travels to three disparate
lands beneath the clouds.
Going back and forth between the land and sky is possible by riding giant
birds, which is a fun and useful mechanic at first, but the novelty gets a
bit old since there’s not much to do in the sky (the treasure to find is
rarely worth the time searching for them).
There is not much exploring you can do down on the surface without
advancing the story, but fortunately it’s a good one. Having a teenage
love triangle early on is mostly played for laughs, which does a good job
contrasting the sometimes serious tone of the game when Zelda comes to
understand and accept the responsibilities she is destined to undertake (the
scene where she encases herself in a deep sleep in front of Link is one of
the most affecting moments in the entire series).
Impa‘s story coming around full circle was wonderfully done (while she
appears in several entries, Skyward
Sword Impa is the best Impa). Both her and Groose (the charming bully)
supporting Link after their initial doubts is also quite heartwarming.
On the other end of the blade, the sorcerer Ghirahim chews the scenery,
soliloquizes like Hamlet, and licks his sword after he lands a decisive
blow
It takes quite a while before you meet him because
Skyward Sword and its 3D
predecessor have slow starts, with plenty of exposition and menial tasks
(meanwhile, Majora’s Mask
starts with a kick to the face. You’re attacked, robbed, transformed into
a weird plant-like creature and left for dead in a small dungeon). Getting
familiar with Skyloft is important, however, as you will be returning to
this hub many times in your playthrough.
Backtracking can certainly be a hallmark of other critically acclaimed
game franchises like the aforementioned Metroid (including two dark horse
candidates for best game of all time: 1994’s
Super Metroid and 2002’s
Metroid Prime), but
overemphasizing certain locations and ignoring the big other (the sky) is
an imbalance of unrealized potential.
This disjointedness is compounded by the repetition not only of tasks but
of returning to the same three lands (Eldin, Faron, Lanayru) to activate
the next one.
Fighting the giant feather toe (better known as The Imprisoned) three
times is a grind. Even as its increased difficulty is matched with you
being able to utilize the 'Groosenator', the final fight generates a sigh
rather than a gasp from most players.
Zelda games can be seen as getting excessive praise because of its lengthy
pedigree, while at the same time getting harsher criticisms for the same
reason (after all, plenty of other popular games have you fight the same
boss throughout (from Tomb Raider
to Devil May Cry to
Sonic the Hedgehog)).
As the first game in the series’ timeline, this early repetition of
returning to lands already visited and fighting the same boss three times
is a thematic glimpse of what is to come in the future of Hyrule (and
matches well with Demise's ending curse), but narrative continuity in an
epic gaming franchise doesn’t make the game you currently playing any more
fun.
It also should be noted that despite being the first title
chronologically, the game makes it clear that there has been plenty of
civilizations and wars against monsters in the time before the game is set
(there are even abandoned mining facilities on the surface). Even at this
stage, it is assumed that the fight between good and evil is eons old (so
it goes).
While this cycle continues, few characters seem to be aware of this. Impa
answers some expository basics at the end of the
Skyward Sword that would come
to define the in-game premise. The past must become hazy and uncertain
(mythic, even), and the true power of the sword and triforce must be
hidden away until it is most needed, at which point a princess and
swordsman will conveniently appear.
Fortunately, whatever problems there might be with the motion controls and
repetition, the dungeons more than make up for any negatives, as they are
some of the best in any of the Zelda titles.
Uniquely themed and extremely memorable, the puzzle and enemy challenges
are perfectly balanced.
The Ancient Cistern
is a visual marvel, being a place of both serenity and terror. In its
centre is a massive Buddha-like statue, but beneath it lies a dark and
sinister underground that is somehow connected to the beauty above. This
dungeon’s boss fight is one for the ages, using your whip in shockingly
violent ways.
Lanayru Mining Facility has conveyor belts, mining carts, and railways, so
it really does fit in well with the idea that this is a place of industry
that you have to drive the monsters out of.
The Pirate Ship is swashbuckling perfection, and you are tasked with going
between two different time periods to save the crew before taking on
cycloptic sea monster.
Skyward Sword's
final dungeon (Sky Keep) is one of the most challenging across all the
games from a brainteaser perspective. Nine 'mini rooms' loosely based on
the environmental layouts of the areas you've already explored, where they
all exist in a floating block puzzle. You have to properly move the pieces
around (while you’re inside them) to properly line up doors to advance.
Some items you find in one area have to be used in another, and while it
can be a profane tirade or two before you figure how to line it all up,
you feel like you just earned a PhD (in saving a fictional kingdom) when
you complete it.
Some of the segments in between the dungeons are equally great. The mine
cart roller coaster at the Lanayru shipyard, swimming through Lake Floria
to meet the water dragon, and the heart-pounding sneaking missions to
collect sacred tears.
While time travel has already played a large role in the Zelda series,
Skyward Sword introduces it as
a unique game mechanic where only a certain region of space around a
crystal 'goes back' in time, showing what the barren desert looked like
centuries past. Sand dunes and broken machinery become grassy fields and
helpful/sassy robots. You can activate these crystals by hitting them with
various items, and because they are stationary, they are actually easy to
whack with your motion-controlled sword.
It shows that some uses for the wii remote is great, but also constantly
reminds the player that making it essential for combat is always a glaring
problem, no matter how good other aspects of the game are.
The Zelda developers should be commanded for crafting a huge, complex game
around motion control mechanics, but there is no doubt that many people’s
lukewarm reception to Skyward Sword
is because the technology just wasn’t good enough in 2011.
What is absolutely true is that our interaction with video games is
gradually going beyond traditional button mashing. In fact, as phone touch
screens can easily become a controller for mobile games, VR is going the
other way and making your every movement complimentary in the virtual
world you are inhabiting.
So while there can be problems and profanity as you raise your sword/Wii
remote to capture a bolt of lightning so you can strike down Demise with
an electrified slash, it was/is absolutely a taste of the future of
gaming.
You won’t just be using a sword, either, as Skyward has some of most
unique items in the series. The Beetle is a miniature drone that you can
pilot around to activate, pick up and drop items. It's also a great
surveying device, just so you can get a better idea of possible enemies,
targets, or places to venture nearby. The whip lets you unleash your inner
Indiana Jones, and you can search for all sorts of bugs and treasure
thanks to your sword’s dousing ability. The gust jar is back as the gust
bellows and it’s a lot of fun in three dimensions, and a nice example of
how these games have changed from when 2D was all you could really hope
for.
Growing up with Zelda meant you hoped/expected that the games would mature
alongside you. That's why the Wind
Waker was criticized for its cartoony appearance after
Ocarina/Majora, and why the
darker Twilight Princess seemed
to be a ‘return to form’, even if the true form of a Zelda game is
endlessly debatable. With this ‘narrative of the series’ in place, it's no
surprise that Skyward Sword's
light-hearted tone, hand-holding (I know, Fi, I know!) and strict
linearity is not as well regarded in the canon (and, once again, why
2017’s Breath of the Wild is
largely regarded as another course correction).
First impressions are
the most important, but ending sections also have a huge impact on one's
overall experience of the game. Even as you get more invested into
Skyward Sword as it progress, a
continued reminder of an empty sky as you pilot your loft-wing through it
is disheartening, and
a late game
fast flying tutorial is more aggravating than challenging.
There is also slight game design sin of requiring you to do a particular
attack close to the end that you learned very early in the game and
haven’t had to use at all since, meaning you might forget that it’s in
your repertoire at all.
But like movies are
'suspensions of disbelief' - both in the sense that they are a series of
still images meant suggest motion and are exaggerated or wholly fictional
representations of reality -
good
ones make you
'forget' that you're watching a movie, and good game design makes you
forget that you're playing a video game.
By 2011, games were popular enough that they didn’t have to try nearly as
hard to be relevant, but they did start to try doubly as hard to be
important, because they had so much more competition within their own
industry. The Legend of Zelda had the added challenge of having to compete
with its fans’ memories of past games, and
Skyward Sword tried to cater to
hardcore fans in subtle ways.
The kikwi hermit tells Link ‘it’s a secret to everybody’, a callback to
The Legend of Zelda (the
game!), the academy headmaster (and Zelda’s father) is named Gaepora, a
reference to the sage and owl of
Ocarina of Time, Kaepora Gaebora, the sky spirit Levias looks a lot
like Link’s Awakening’s
Windfish, and there is still ‘someone’ looking for some toilet paper in
the bathroom (ugh).
Other nice flourishes include brief clips of Zelda’s concurrent adventure
to Link’s own during the credits roll, and
the unimpressed wait
by Link and Fi after Skyloft’s bird statue fires its cannon is a moment of
well-delivered dry humour in a series that doesn’t have much of it.
[It's 2011, and hot off the heels of the massively popular Wii (which won
the seventh generation console sales war against PlayStation 3 and XBox
360), Nintendo announces the Wii U, which will come out in 2012 and
confuse people and not sell nearly as well. The novelty accessory that
this console comes with isn’t a remote and nunchuk, but rather a larger,
bulkier controller with a screen in its centre that also acts as a
touchpad (so it’s like a much less convenient 3DS console).
The actual Wii U console looks almost identical to the Wii, and since the
U isn’t a 2, many people aren’t sure if it’s a brand new piece of
hardware, or if the gamepad is simply an accessory to the original. So
from a branding standpoint, it’s already a bust.
On top of this, remember how for Nintendo the point was having great,
buzz-worthy games to play when launching a new console? And how they kind
of forgot that with 2001’s GameCube? Well they forget again in 2012 with
the Wii U.
Over the next few
years the other big consoles will hit some speed bumps, but all will sell
better than Nintendo’s stumble.
PlayStation 4
will release in 2013 and be very expensive but hey, it plays blue-ray
DVDs!
Xbox One will
release in the same year and its initial hiccups will be the red ring of
death (a light on the console which indicates it’s forever broken) and a
dearth of first-party titles other than
Halo.
But companies that only developed video game software (and didn’t have to
worry about hardware) were doing great. They were becoming the cool, rock
star-like companies that the big three used to be. And there was one type
of game that seemed to be getting everyone excited, and it was the exact
opposite of what Skyward Sword
was: the open world genre (something earlier Zelda games pioneered).
One week before Skyward Sword
arrives, another industry titan (Bethesda) will release a massive medieval
fantasy game where you can go anywhere and do anything, and it will become
one of the best-selling games of all time. It’s the fifth entry in The
Elder Scrolls series: Skyrim
(and if you wanted more, CD Proiekt Red’s
The Witcher III did the same
sort of thing in 2015 to similar commercial and critical success).
For some Zelda fans, this was the (even more)
mature follow up to Twilight
Princess that they dreamed of, and not just because you do whatever
you want and chop off a guy’s head as the blood goes ‘spissssh’ in slow
motion. And if you wanted that dark, medieval
Twilight Princess vibe but you
also hated yourself, 2011 also bequeathed
Dark Souls.
Two years later, Rockstar Games will release
Grand Theft Auto V, and make
over $1 billion in the first three days of its release (take that, every
blockbuster movie). It would go on to sell more than 135 million copies,
and because it’s about gangsters striking it rich in a vast open world by
killing people and then visiting strippers, the no-fun police complained,
making it forever cool (its online component has kept players returning
for nearly a decade at this point).
Even uber-linear story driven games were getting super serious, with
The Last of Us essentially
becoming a playable version of the zombie-rific
Walking Dead TV series with a
strong father-daughter relationship.
Skyward Sword’s
lead-you-by-the-nose, smeary-brightness was no match for these titles’
dark-tone realism (stop us if you’ve heard this one before.).
While the Call of Duty first
person shooter series began in 2003 (and focused on WWII battles), it
really took off with 2007 and 2009’s
Modern Warfare entries, each
one selling over ten million copies.
Sensing success, publisher Activision enrolled four different
developers to churn out new but not very different titles each fall, and
it became the third highest grossing video game franchise of all time
(trailing the plumber and the Pikachu).
Speaking of money,
Minecraft
released in 2011 and it's open world block design sold more copies than
any video game ever. Available on everything from Sony and Nintendo
consoles to your phone, its sandbox style of gameplay where you have a
huge, blocky open world to survive and craft whatever you want in was Lego
for the digital generation.
Similarly, the simplistic, repetitive and addictive world of mobile gaming
meant that by 2012 even your grandmother puts in enough time with
Candy Crush and a digital
version sudkoku on her phone to be considered a gamer.]
Until the release of
Half-Life: Alyx in March 2020
and its embrace of virtual reality, no other major video game franchise
changed up how you played the
game more than Zelda did with
Skyward Sword.
Results were mixed, but beyond swinging a remote around your living room,
the linearity
and exploratory restrictions make this one the 'gamiest' Zelda game.
Because it can make up for this is with a very good story - and some
lengthy, well put together cut scenes - it feels similar to other
action/adventure franchises of the time like
Uncharted and
Mass Effect, and less like a
Zelda game.
Of course, what ‘is’ a Zelda game? Very loosely put, it’s exploring a
world while helping people, killing plenty of bad guys and then pushing
your way through dungeons to kill a boss. The first two things
Skyward Sword does…okay, but it
knocks that third one out of the park.
Yet going up against
it’s own history and the ever-changing gaming landscape, sales suggested
this wasn’t enough (selling less than four millions copies, compared to
Twilight Princess's nine).
Coming at the end of the Wii’s lifecycle certainly didn’t help and it
wasn’t ported to the Wii U until 2016…and you still needed a remote and
nunchuk to play).
Similar to
Wind Waker, critics said good
things about Skyward Sword
while some fans were upset about its lightheartedness (especially compared
to what came before) and not being able to push buttons lounging on a
couch. General reassessment of Wind
Waker took years, and Skyward
Sword‘s moment in the sun might be on the horizon. An HD re-release is
scheduled for July 2021, and it will give players the option to use the
Joy-cons (the Nintendo Switch dual controllers) for motion control, or a
traditional button interface (oh, happy day!).
That it is so underrated means now it will more likely impress.
As Aonuma said when
announcing this re-make, it is a great opportunity for people who loved
Breath of the Wild and want
more 3D Zelda right away, so, as the old dragon in the Lanayru region
shouts:
ZINGA-DING-DING!
[Playable on: Wii, Wii U, Switch (HD version)]
Interlude: The
Greatest Again, Thanks to the Re-Make and the Re-Master
Dunno if you've heard somehow, but by popular and critical acclaim, the
greatest video game of all time is
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. It came out in 1998 on the
Nintendo 64 console. But...
And this is a big but...
(and we cannot lie)
You should play the re-make that came out in 2011 on the Nintendo 3DS
console. The graphics are better, it's easier to fire arrows thanks to
improved aiming, and the menu system is a lot less clunky.
Yes, recommending a
re-make instead the original. What might be heresy in the world of movies
and tv (and just plain ridiculous when it comes to music), it is a
practice that gamers are totally willing to accept if the final product
isn't a total piece of crap and instead fixes the sometimes slight,
sometimes glaring issues of the first incarnation.
Certainly the original game has to be good, since ‘having happy memories
playing it’ is a prime motivator to buying the new version.
For Zelda re-makes and re-masters, the larger narrative and overall
experience of the games are largely untouched, because players making
emotional connections with the characters they are playing as and
interacting with is a strong nostalgia juice squeeze. Which is what they
want to drink down when they buy a buffed version for sixty-plus dollars
of whatever blew their minds when they were ten (or twenty, or thirty…).
Games are limited not
by imagination but the current abilities of development software. In Jason
Schreier’s Blood, Sweat and Pixels,
he and developers stress that it is a massive multi-year challenge to
create a video game while the hardware and software used to make and play
said game is changing and improving while you do it. The comparison
Obsidian Games CEO Feargus Urquhart uses is making a film where you have
to rebuild the camera every time you start shooting a scene.
Which is why the
executives and investors in the gaming industry love the practice of
re-makes. For popular titles (usually ones in already established
franchises), it's practically a license to print money. It's a lot less
work because they're just fixing up a game that already exists (even when
starting from 'scratch', you still have a demonstrably successful
blueprint), and since the product is already known to the public they
don't have to worry about marketing as much.
Give the audience some time to love the original, and, once newer consoles
supplant the one the game in question played on, give them some time to
miss it as well.
There is no pressure for the re-make to have cutting edge graphics or
ray-tracing. It just has to look and play better than the original.
Can you still fuck it up? Yes, but the odds are in your favour that most
fans won’t figure that out until after they already pre-ordered the
super-limited special edition that comes with an art book that shows how
bare bones the original game was.
The Zelda series has
gotten players come back to previous titles in several ways.
The Master Quest was a mode for
Ocarina of Time (with re-designed, intentionally harder dungeons) that
was released as a bonus disc in 2002 if you pre-ordered
Wind Waker for the GameCube
(yes, the hallowed tradition of the pre-order went back that far, in case
you want posters, figurines, maps, and stickers in addition to the game).
That same year, a re-master of A
Link to the Past arrived on Gameboy Advance, which meant a graphical
upgrade, some items moved around, and some sound sample changes.
A true re-make wouldn’t come until 2011, when a vastly improved version of
Ocarina of Time
was released for the 3DS (made for Nintendo by third party developer,
Grezzo). It worked so well they did the same thing again with
Majora's Mask, getting its
re-make in 2015.
Now, Re-masters and Re-Makes are two different beasts. A simple analogy:
Re-Master: Renovating
various rooms
in a house.
Re-Make: Tearing down a house and building a new one based on the
original’s plans.
Because the technology to make video games is constantly improving – along
with computational technology in general – it’s easy to get under the hood
of older games if only because there’s a lot less code to go through. The
original Ocarina of Time
(having some of the most high tech gaming specs in 1998) took up 32
megabytes of data on its cartridge.
By contrast, the Nintendo 3DS console itself that the re-make plays on is
practically the same size as the cartridge mentioned above. You could cram
so much more data on a disc or a (much tinier) cartridge less than fifteen
years later, as the Ocarina 3D
re-make took up 512 megabytes.
The most noticeable difference right from the start is always the
graphics. Hopping one generation to the next doesn’t always seem like the
biggest difference in visual quality, but leaping from fifth generation
(Nintendo 64) to the eighth (3DS) can be very impressive.
‘Quality of life’ is a reassuring, multifunctional term that differs from
game to game, with goal of making the gameplay smoother, easier, and more
intuitive. When it comes to Ocarina,
you can aim arrows easier, have better camera control, and thanks to the
bottom touch screen, going into the menu is a breeze and switching items
can be done much quicker (especially when it comes to taking the iron
boots on and off (and on and off) so you can quickly sink or float in
everyone’s favourite temple).
These are little things that streamline the action just so. If the game
you’re re-making is already great (and
Ocarina of Time certainly is)
you don’t want to make the whole experience too different from the
original. While you want to rope in new fans by offering it years later on
a different console, longtime fans don’t want it to be unrecognizable.
Nintendo and Grezzo monkey-ed around with
Majora’s Mask 3D a little bit
more. With a different song you can choose the hour of time you want to
skip ahead to, your quest log is more specific and detailed, you can save
at more points, the transformation masks have slightly different
properties, and there is even a new fishing mini-game (hoo…ray).
The Wind Waker and
Twilight Princess got HD
re-masters (which stands for High-Definition, and means the biggest
difference you’ll notice right away is…get ready for it…better graphics)
for the Wii U in 2013 and 2016, respectively.
The former’s
quality-of-life improvements include speeding up travel (you can buy a
sail that lets you zip across the waves faster), quicker animation
actions, and you can use the Wii U gamepad for gyroscopic, motion control
aiming (or…not). The Triforce shard fetch-quest of the original wasn’t
hard, but it was dull, so in the re-master you needed to find fewer charts
to locate them in the Great Sea.
Twilight Princess HD
came out on the Wii U, and seemingly realizing the criticism
Skyward Sword had with
inconsistent motion controls on the Wii, the developers gave you the
option of playing the whole thing with a regular controller. Swimming
underwater became much easier, you can switch between Link and his wolf
alter-ego quicker, there’s an amiibo-triggered enemy gauntlet sequence
called the ‘cave of shadows’ that’s just for Wolf Link, and they added
‘hero mode’ (a higher difficulty where there are fewer health drops and
enemies deal more damage).
Link’s Awakening
is so good that they re-did it twice. Five years after its release on
Gameboy, Nintendo brought it to Gameboy Color in 1998 (with colour! And a
new small dungeon based on the fact that it was in colour), and twenty-one
years after that, a full on HD re-make for the Switch. This new version
is perhaps one
of the most beautiful claymation-style games ever made (cough*frame rate
drops*cough), with full 3D sprites walking around a 2D space.
Hyrule Warriors
was released on the Wii U in 2014, an expanded and updated version of the
game was ported to the more successful Nintendo console at the time (the
3DS) in 2016, and a definitive edition (it is literally called that) was
brought over to the Switch in 2018. What was additionally downloaded
content in the first two was immediately included in the Switch version.
Zelda may be the most prominent series that does re-masters and re-makes
(since they have a well-loved library that will get fans to fork over cash
to play them again), but they are hardly the only ones.
The 2018 PS4 re-make of the PS2’s
Shadow of the Colossus from 2006 is a great example of how to tinker
with a golden goose of a game without accidentally wringing its neck.
The new takes on Resident Evil 2
and 3 have become the new
standard for these titles, especially for gamers who hate waiting for
doors to open.
A fan-made 2020 re-make of
Half-Life called Black Mesa
(endorsed by Valve itself, as it is available for purchase on Steam) is
practically the ideal way to play the game (since the 1998 original is
clunky as hell).
On the other hand, the decision to stretch out the
Final Fantasy VII re-make over
two or three games meant adding plenty more filler content, and it’s
generally agreed that in the release of Part One in spring 2020, the good
stuff was the old stuff and not-so-good stuff was the new stuff.
Halo
had a neat trick when they released the original trilogy as one
collection, allowing players to toggle back and forth in real time between
the original 2001 graphics and the updated versions. It was an interesting
way to see just how much (and, depending on your perspective and
expectations, how little) the visuals would change over the last few
console generations.
The feast for your eyes is typically the easiest things to change. More
work has to put be into altering the game’s foundational mechanics.
Traversal in many of the early 2D Zelda games meant a constant onslaught
of enemies each time you moved into a new section of the map, or returned
to the previous area.
Obviously you were meant to slowly explore and find your way in new areas,
with fast
travel (or warping) is something you unlock at a later stage. In
A Link to the Past, a very
charitable owl will fly you to specific locations near dungeons (he will
reprise his role early in Ocarina
of Time), meanwhile in later 3D games it is ultimately a summoning of
advanced/mysterious technology that teleports Link across the map in a
jiffy.
All to acknowledge that sometimes traditional walking - or even
horse-riding - isn't all that fun after awhile, and that improved versions
of classic games sped up the process of getting from point A to point B.
Within the game itself, the interactivity of the tools and the details of
the environments you used them in were dependent on the strength of the
hardware.
Combat in Zelda was
typically item based (you'll almost always beat dungeon bosses using the
new tool you found in that particular dungeon), with a reverse-element
mechanic thrown in (use fire arrow on an ice enemy, and vice-versa).
While Zelda II is the one that
is typically associated with RPG elements, the original game gave Link the
opportunity to switch out various weapons and tools by going into the menu
screen and choosing what would be most ideal at the moment.
In later and re-made/re-mastered games, you could have several of these
tools available at the same time, no menu screen required, thanks largely
to simply having more buttons (or a second screen) at your disposal. It
made it feel effortless, like second-nature.
Technology improved
the immersiveness of film, and then did the same thing with video games,
just taking a little longer. In 1977
Star Wars took movie-goers to a
galaxy far away with its incredible state-of-the-art special effects, but
that same year, if the game wasn't called
Space Invaders, you might just
think it was just a bunch of shapes and lines zipping around on a screen.
But don’t let those shapes fool you, because almost every game was much
harder and
more frustrating in the past.
So when it comes to
re-makes and re-masters, how much can you change to make the game easier,
without sacrificing the excitement and challenge?
A couple extra save
points can go a long way. So too is making sure
enemies don’t hit as hard and that there are more power-ups (this can be
done by offering different difficulty levels). Maybe nudge people towards
the solution of a tough puzzle by including colour-coded sections or add a
hint mechanic (or character).
While older fans may lament these changes from the original, newer fans
who want a challenge just have to step back into the mists of time. One of
the wonderful perks about video games being a digital medium is that it is
(sometimes) not that difficult to find original versions of popular games,
and with a series like Zelda you can experience exactly what gamers went
through in the nineteen eighties and nineties. Like so much other media,
the repeat/replay value of video games is a huge part of their appeal.
It’s the pleasure of reading a favourite book or watching a favourite
movie, over and over, but for a grand and dangerous adventure (though
considerably less deadly than the first time around).
Even if you only half-remember how to get through a tough dungeon, it’s
still easier going than when you had no idea what would happen next. While
the wonder and excitement of newness is not quite there, you can certainly
appreciate what works so well, especially if what didn’t work in the
initial release is minimized or excised completely. The Re-Master or
Re-Make isn’t required to improve upon perfection, it just has to perfect
that whiff of nostalgia.
Chapter Twelve: Hyrule Warriors-
Slaughter on the Side
Killing things is central to oh so very many video games.
Whether done with a Mario-esque cutesy bop on the goomba’s head, or
slicing your fallen foe in two with a table saw…they’re certainly dead
now.
Steve Russell created one of the first ever video games in 1962, which was
called ‘Spacewar!’ (don’t
forget that exclamation mark). It looks and plays like an air traffic
control radar screen…from 1962.
And what do you in this landmark game?
Make war, not love.
It’s right there in the title, after all. And
Space Invaders, Doom, and
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive will follow in its footsteps.
But you know what’s cooler than killing a million enemies?
Killing a billion.
Compared to several other video game genres and franchises alike, the
Zelda series occasionally eases up on Link’s killing enemies of various
shapes and sizes in order to give your brain a workout instead of your
thumb. Sometimes it’s a puzzle in a dungeon, sometimes it’s just trying to
remember the advice that one NPC told you that might be very relevant when
figuring out where to go next.
But if you’ve got a half a mind left and two thumbs that are ready to
kill, you’ll be glad to know that this series eventually branched out into
bloodier pastures (but uh, without the onscreen blood).
2014’s Hyrule Warriors is a 3D
musou-style game, a genre also known as Hack and Slash, where there is
much less of a focus on exploring and puzzles and much more of a focus on
fighting. While it may take place in Hyrule and have familiar-ish settings
(forests, castles, death mountains), the level layout is smaller and more
limited, and the only thing you are tasked with doing is bring down waves
of several weak enemies or a few real tough ones. Mashing buttons in a
particular order to link together several combo moves can take out like
fifty bokoblins in one fell swoop and get you some of that sweet, sweet
xp.
The entire gameplay system is heavily based on the
Dynasty Warriors series (except
for the first game in that series, which yes, can make this very
confusing), with Zelda mainstays in place of the lesser-known original
characters (sorry, Cao Pi) of the former.
Many RPG elements are present (Zelda
II, thou art forgiven), such as experience points, weapons crafting,
and something you think will make a big difference but won’t so it irks
you how much time you spent trying to figure out the apothecary.
You might start off with two different moves, one for the x and one for
the y buttons, but the more you play, the more you can do with just the
two of them in conjunction. Maybe tapping x twice will land a strong sword
slash, and following it quickly with holding y might add a spin attack or
lightning strike.
Mainline Zelda games never required this level of familiarity/skill with
combat. A bit of z-targeting and then slashing at your enemy will usually
get the job done. Dodging and getting your shield up at the right time
certainly helped in the tougher fights, but it was usually whatever item
you found in the dungeon that was going to make the difference against the
boss.
Not only did Hyrule Warriors
upgrade the fighting, but also added elements of real-time strategy games.
They are found in missions objectives that might require you to balance
your time between playing as two or three different characters, going back
and forth from one outpost to another, sometimes sending reinforcements to
a different camp while you duel it out with a tough boss.
Sometimes the brainpower is used before the battle, figuring out what
weapon, armour, or potion boost would ensure victory. Sometimes you won’t
know until you start the fight, with the first run being more of a test,
so you aren’t putting in 100% effort or using/wasting any of your limited
items. Quickly realizing enemy weakness might have you changing up your
entire battle plan, bringing in a character good against fire enemies
while having others drop back.
For a Zelda fan, the idea of sometimes ‘not’ playing as Link might take a
moment to wrap your head around, but that’s part of its appeal. With the
first Hyrule Warriors arriving
over twenty-five years after the first Zelda game, there was deep well of
supporting characters available beyond the hero, the villain, and the
princess.
While the Dynasty Warriors
series was an early pioneer in the musou/Hack-and-Slash genre, it inspired
plenty of other big titles before Nintendo asked them to try adding Link
and company to the mix. God of War,
Devil May Cry, Bayonetta, Ninja Gaiden all followed in its footsteps,
and Hyrule Warriors would
follow in the path of those successful series.
Producer Eiji Aonuma was keen to expand the series’ horizons, because
there was a genuine interest to see how the Zelda experience could be
applied to other genres, but also for financial security. It was at a time
when Skyward Sword’s sales fell
well short of expectations, with A
Link Between Worlds shipping more units (an almost unheard of
situation, a handheld game outselling a home console one (4.16 million to
3.67 million)).
If anything, branching out this way was free advertising. Zelda super-fans
will certainly buy the product and ideally cover development costs. But
maybe some people who picked up
Hyrule Warriors because they were fans of
Bayonetta or
Devil My Cry would find something intriguing about the characters or
story, and then get into the main series.
While it’s likely that most people who play video games regularly have at
least heard of The Legend of Zelda,
it’s clear from sales alone that only a minority of people who buy
Nintendo products buy games from the series. Only a third of Nintendo 64
owners bought Ocarina of Time,
and even though Breath of the Wild
sold over 20 million units, that’s just a quarter of the people who own a
Switch outright at the time of this writing.
Leaving ‘The Legend of Zelda’ out of the title of the
Hyrule Warriors games is a key
categorization difference. By putting Link on the cover with a word that
only Zelda fans would quickly recognize, Nintendo was trying to ensure
that no one would pick up this game and be disappointed that wasn’t a
traditional Zelda game.
The Hyrule Warriors series is
what people who don’t play video games assume all video games are like,
and are what video game fans who don’t play Zelda games assume all Zelda
games are like.
It’s not even developed by Nintendo.
This isn’t the first time Nintendo allow an outside developer to create a
Zelda game, as Flagship made
Oracles of Ages/Oracles of Seasons, The Minish Cap, and
Four Swords (not to be confused with
Four Swords Adventures). And
although those can be seen as projects that were done for the (slightly)
lesser handheld consoles, Nintendo clearly liked what Flagship was
cookin’, because they brought the director Fujibayashi onto the official
Nintendo team.
Hyrule Warriors,
meanwhile, was made by Koei Tecmo, who almost exclusively make fighting
games. Like many of those, there are many different modes to try out. The
mini-games Link could play in Kakariko Village like target shooting or
destroying items in a set amount of time are brought to the various
battlefields in these games. Just completed this mission? Great, now do it
again in five minutes, and then do it by collecting all the rupees hidden
throughout the stage.
Since fighting games are better when you aren’t performing combo moves all
alone, it took advantage of the Wii U gamepad by allowing two people to
play the same missions at once, one using the TV and a controller, the
other using the Gamepad.
In most Koei Tecmo games there is certainly a story, but its quality
usually came a distant second in terms of importance. With the first
Hyrule Warriors, they continued
this tradition, because it’s a superficial train-wreck. It’s
Nintendo-approved fan fiction in the sense that all your favourite and non
favourite characters (and different incarnations of them) from across the
Zelda universe come together in a bizarre, over the top story. This game
is ridiculous in a series that is already pretty nutty (sometimes success
in battle hinges on bringing a giant whale spirit a big bowl of soup).
Of course there’s still a sorcerer (Cia) who wants to revive Ganondorf by
finding and fusing the four pieces of his soul scattered across Hyrule
(she’s also smitten by the hero of time), but at least she is being
controlled by the spirit of Ganondorf, and the physical manifestation of
her good side (Lana) tries to help Zelda and Link with a magic book that
ughhhhhh….
Some of the choices for the cross-timeline support team are odd.
Apparently Agitha, the pixie-dream-girl bug collector from
Twilight Princess who never
seemed to use her parasol in a remotely dangerous way is ready to
slaughter thousands of monsters.
Want to know what a female version of Link would be? Enter Linkle.
Want to see how well Medli would fare against Zant? Now you can.
One of the most impressive things about
Hyrule Warriors is how – while
being so over the top – it is able to balance out the art styles of and
thematic weight behind many of the different characters and iterations of
them across the entire series.
Marin fighting Ganondorf (who never even shows up in
Link’s Awakening) is not nearly
as immersive-breaking as it sounds.
The second Hyrule Warriors game
changed all this. Released in late 2020, when the Zelda fanbase was in a
froth over the possibility of the
Breath of the Wild sequel coming that same time, its subtitle –
Age of Calamity – made an overt
connection to the event that created the setting for the aforementioned
official title, making it a prequel (and pushing the sequel into 2021).
Considering BoTW sold so damn
well and was given the same amount of praise that
Ocarina of Time received,
Nintendo certainly figured a decent chunk of those new fans would buy a
related title if it gives them all chance to experience what happened one
hundred years before the setting of that game. In
BoTW Calamity Ganon’s rise is
alluded to many times, with several of Link’s recoverable memories
detailing the time before, and a couple during (one of which details
Link’s death, which has to be a weird thing to experience after being
resurrected).
Age of Calamity
fleshes out the story of what Hyrule was like prior to
BoTW, and gives an in-depth
look at how plans were made by Princess Zelda, Impa, Purah, Robbie, the
Champions, and an impressive knight in the royal guard who quickly climbed
the ranks to confront the looming catastrophe.
No cross-timeline pollination here (sorry,
Groose fans), instead you get cross-time
pollination. While this game takes place one hundred years before the
events of Breath of the Wild,
characters you’ll meet in that title travel back through time to lend hand
in Age of Calamity.
Their help is needed too, because there is… another… sorcerer (Astor)
determined to revive the evil spirit of Ganon, and he has the Yiga clan
wrapped around his finger, since they have the same goals. But who is
Astor? It’s never explored except that he is a generic evil wizard, and it
feels like while that can suffice in earlier Zelda games where the villain
motivation is thin, here it is a lost opportunity to give a big baddie
some background.
There was a chance for this to be one of the most depressing video games
of all time, since it was expected to involve experiencing almost all the
characters being horribly murdered by Calamity Ganon and its blight
brethren (which is alluded to in
BoTW).
While it’s disappointing in some ways that Nintendo blinked and twisted
their way into a happy ending, it’s hardly surprising.
Age of Calamity
doesn’t show these deaths. In fact they don’t happen at all. It fakes out
the death of the King, and goes right up to the moment were each
respective champion would have met their doom, but are saved in the nick
of time.
So…does this mean Breath of the
Wild didn’t happen? That Hyrule was spared from destruction and that
there was no need to put Link in a reanimating cryogenic sleeping pod that
he awoke from at the beginning of that game?
Slotting in Link’s memories from
BoTW of this period is difficult as well. While those recollections
initially have Zelda acting rather cold towards Link (not wanting to be
escorted everywhere), she is quick to appreciate Link at her side in
Age of Calamity. So which take
is the real one?
Answer: Just like Hyrule Warriors,
Age of Calamity isn’t canon, either, although still seen as a
sort-of-prequel. In a series that branches into three different timelines
for all its ‘real’ games, these two are in alternate universes.
Hey, Zelda developers are not going to abandon a game idea simply because
it doesn’t slide neatly into the fictional storyline of the world they
created.
Like myths themselves, how the Zelda games relate to one another will wax
and wane over time.
The idea of what is canon and what’s not is important to a fanbase, but
video game fans are much more understanding when it comes to loopholes and
shoehorning than films, tv series and books, especially when the gameplay
itself is plenty fun.
While in most games the distinction between watching a story cut-scene and
murdering hordes of enemies is cut and dry, The Legend of Zelda series
itself falls into a strange liminal position, as some story is told
through interaction with characters and exploring, and avoiding a fight to
reach your goal is sometimes an option. That’s not really a choice in
Hyrule Warriors, where it will
quickly lead to outposts being overrun and missions failing.
Which is why it’s important to remember that it’s not a Zelda game, it’s a
fighting game, featuring the Zelda universe. And hey, there’s something
hypnotic about slashing at monsters over and over and over, and- oh great
now it’s time to fight two Lynels at once (hope you got that flurry rush
mastered).
[it’s 2014, and it’s been a tough few years for Nintendo. The massive
success of the Wii was followed by the relative failure of the Wii U.
This was due in part to a lack of new games for
many familiar Nintendo franchises, including Zelda.
The Wind Waker and
Twilight Princess HD re-masters were nice, but there were constant
delays for the game that would ultimately become
Breath of the Wild.
This meant the first original Zelda game on the Wii U was 2014’s
Hyrule Warriors…and it wasn’t
really a Zelda game by most people’s standards.
While the Wii U Virtual Console online shop would allow people to buy and
download earlier games in the series onto the system and play them (just
like the Wii offered as well), to really get the new Zelda experience at
this time, you needed to own a Nintendo 3DS.
So clearly Sony and Microsoft were riding high, right? Well even they were
warily looking towards the screaming success of mobile phone gaming, as
the freemium titles Candy Crush
Saga and Clash of Clans
easily out-grossed entries in the
Call of Duty, GTA, and World of
Warcraft series in 2014. While money talks (and swears), these
repetitive, arcade-style-but-easy games were looked down upon by some in
the gaming industry. They were seen as being an experience far inferior to
the one available on home console, or even a handheld one (since a
PlayStation Portable or 3DS was at least designed with video games in
mind).
Between the blockbusters and the cash-grabbers were the games that didn’t
require a huge staff of people or a massive promotional (Raid:
Shadow Legends) push to develop and publish: Independent titles.
Games that look like a top of the line release from the early nineties
(say, just for the hell of it, A
Link to the Past) can be created (at least demoed) with development
software anyone can put on a better-than-average laptop.
So in 2015, when it comes to a story driven, fantasy-world adventure with
unique combat, you had Bloodborne
(from the Dark Souls studio)
one on hand, and Undertale
(from one guy) on the other.
The same thing happens in 2016, with
Persona 5 and
Overwatch as the Hulks with
Inside and the continued,
point-and-click weirdness of
Kentucky Route Zero (now Part
IV) as the Bruce Banners.
Skip to 2020: and after a Breath of
the Wild sequel was teased at the end of the company’s E3 2019
presentation, gamers waited with bated breath for over a year to get any
news. Which was Eiji Aonuma announcing in September 2020 that…they’ll be
an update later, but in the meantime, here’s
Age of Calamity, landing smack
dab in the middle of the release of the Xbox Series S/X and the
PlayStation 5 (ushering in gaming’s ninth generation).
While fans were a bit deflated about a sequel not being ‘rushed’ out
almost four years since Breath of
the Wild, after the debacle that was the release of
Cyberpunk 2077 at the end 2020,
everyone was reminded of what the creator of Zelda once maybe said: ‘a
delayed game can eventually be good, a rushed game is bad forever’]
A departure from many of the hallmarks that made Zelda famous, the two
Hyrule Warriors games take
fewer risks than the titles from the main series, which means the rewards
are not necessarily as bountiful. It pleases instead of pleasures, but
part of one’s enjoyment is to put aside your preconceptions of the
pedigree and kill hordes of enemies as a periphery character.
Spinoffs in TV and film typically mean focusing on a supporting character
(and some games do this, like the
Luigi’s Mansion series, and
Apex Legends taking place in the
Titanfall universe), but the
variety of video game genres means you can keep your protagonist(s) and
story themes and instead change up the type of game itself. This doesn’t
mean one should necessarily expect a Tetris-centric Zelda game or a
merging with Animal Crossing, but
Hyrule Warriors isn’t alone.
In 2019, a ‘sequel’ to the indie hit,
Cult of the Necrodancer – a
retro-style 2D rhythmic fighting game, where you do better if you attack
to the beat of music – arrived called
Cadence of Hyrule, and it
featured the hero of that first game, as well as Link and Zelda. It takes
place in Hyrule, with familiar Zelda enemies, and is in the style of (no
surprise) A Link to the Past.
If the Zelda universe expands with care and respect, there’s no telling
the many ways it could thrill current fans and bring in new ones.
Expectation can always be a difficult foe when it involves a series plenty
of people are fans of, but there’s no doubt that the
Hyrule Warriors series is a
good start.
[Playable on:
Hyrule Warriors
– Wii U, 3DS (‘Legends’ edition), Switch (‘Definitive Edition’)
Hyrule Warriors:
Age of Calamity – Switch]
Interlude: Z-Target Symbolically
"Video games ask for much more than other art forms." - Jesper Juul “Video games are an active medium. In that sense,
they don’t require complex emotions from the designer; it’s the players
who take what we give them and respond in their own ways.” – Shigeru
Miyamoto
The suspension of
disbelief makes stories work, because you conveniently forget how much
pivots on the bizarre luck and ‘just in time’ in old fairy tales (plus,
y’know, magic and talking animals).
The same goes for the
technology of the medium itself. Words on a page or in an audio-book
conjure up images in your mind, and a series of still photos rushing
through a projector create a moving image in a movie theatre. Ones and
zeroes make up every digital screen, and we can manipulate them with a
tap, a drag, or a push of a button.
Video games’ newness as a cultural institution means we are still building
a foundation of how to have a discourse around them. This includes the
discussion in their earliest years of whether they should even be
considered as art.
Of course, novels
were once derided. Early filmstrips were considered fads.
Every new
development in music is just a noisy racket to the old guard.
As Miyamoto himself has said, "Video games are bad for you? That's what
they said about rock 'n roll!"
Even though e-sports are growing - which seems to push the activity of
video 'games' into the world of athletics - they aren't just that.
Video games are too unique, too unpredictable, too varied in its
aspirations to just be a…game.
There is storytelling in video games.
That makes it art.
There is huge emphasis on graphic design, animation and visualizations in
general in video games.
That makes it art.
There is amazing music (and not just by Koji Kondo) in video games.
That makes it art.
But is it good art?
Now we’re talking!
Oddly enough, the manipulation of various inputs related to rapidly
changing but pre-planned conditions can almost place video games in the
realm of interactive art, as there are examples (from Marcel Duchamp to
Roy Ascott to whatever you bother doing at Burning Man) where the audience
is expected to manipulate or alter the art itself, giving them a singular
and unique experience.
‘Video game auteur’ is meant to infer the same level of expertise for
other aesthetic disciplines. It stresses the individual and suggests that
art can be analyzed within the thematic aspirations of its creator, but so
very few games can be designed that way (another reason to give mad props
to Toby Fox’s Undertale).
Teamwork is inevitable. Art, music, design, and programming expertise is
required, all of which has to come together to create a functioning game
from beginning to end (oh, and fun. It has to be that, too).
This combination of disciplines also creates plenty of challenges when
critiquing and reviewing video games.
We are accustomed to looking at narrative and language when it comes to
any sort of analysis of many cultural items. Two things early video games
certainly didn’t have much of, and even modern ones are mostly pedestrian.
If you just want an amazing
story, read a book or watch a movie. Because that is a passive form of
entertainment, it asks less of you in decision-making. Video games can be
engaging in much more interactive way, challenging you to use the
mechanics and abilities placed before you to make decisions (from jump to
attack to align yourself with the militia) towards a goal that doesn’t
even have to be story-oriented.
A great story in a video game can be still misinterpreted or thrown off
track by segments of gameplay that are frustrating, difficult, or seems to
be a complete contravention to what the story is about. ‘Ludonarrative
dissonance’ became a buzzword in the gaming industry roughly a decade ago,
meant to highlight the divide between play (ludo is its latin translation)
and narrative. When what you are doing by mashing buttons seems to have
nothing to do with the story of the game (or just leaves you with a bad
taste in your brain), that’s a paddlin’.
Sure, all of Nathan Drake’s enemies shot first or had it coming, but that
doesn’t change the fact that the dashing, charming family man has killed a
whole lot of people in the
Uncharted series. The reactor’s gonna blow and your team has to escape
quick but you can to meander through the plant and maybe even get involved
in some random encounters with enemies on the way (Fi reminding Link to
replace ‘his’ controller’s batteries isn’t exactly it, but that certainly
disrupts the flow).
We don’t wonder about Indiana Jones’ (Drake’s obvious inspiration) killing
sprees or how Schwarzenegger gets out of the exploding building just in
time because we are passive observers while watching these films. When you
are playing similar scenarios in video games (and pressing buttons to do
the killing), the dissonance becomes much more explicit.
Its preferred opposite is, therefore, ludonarrative harmony.
A meeting of a well
told story and easy-to-learn, difficult-to-master game mechanics. Games of
the early console generations had this in spades because the ‘story’ was
just to kill all the bad guys, and the gameplay was firing a laser at (or
jumping on the heads of) all the bad guys. Perfect.
But a more engaging and complex storyline in a video game is going to be
just ‘okay’ by movie standards.
For games to ‘look’ more like movies – namely in cut scenes, but also
during gameplay – the budget needs to be extremely high, typically in the
tens to hundreds of millions of dollars, which means only the major
AAA-studios can make them. And because they cost so much, to make any
profit they need to be as appealing to as big an audience as possible,
similar to blockbuster action or sci-fi films, which means storytelling of
that simplistic nature.
Smaller, indie-developers can buck trends and tell stories in more unique
ways, but they are also limited by their budget (and likely audience
size). You are developing a game after all, and that means you have to
typically focus on one mechanic to have it revolve around, and any sort of
story usually has to fit into that system.
Games can certainly change the way stories are experienced, but we are
still in an early period of exploration.
What Remains of Edith Finch and
Kentucky Route Zero are
examples of ‘interactive visual art narrative experiences’, rather than
games, because you are more of a passive witness or archivist than someone
who is in danger and has to make quick decisions to avoid death.
If you can’t even get a ‘game over’ screen, calling it a ‘walking
simulator’ is cynical but not necessarily inaccurate. Perhaps the term
‘interactive movie’ then, where you can choose how to weave the narrative
threads together?
We have sensibly
become overly familiar with story, and therefore wield our analytical
tools clumsily when trying to apply the same metrics to a video game’s
attempt at one.
Because what happens when we don’t all experience the same story?
More ways to experience an interactive, simulated world means a smaller
chance of experiencing it in the same ways as someone else.
For most of games in the eighties and nineties there was only one path to
follow to advance the story (and therefore game), but as technology
improved and game design itself became more complex (and complicated),
there were more to do than save the princess, kill monsters, and move
blocks around (and more ways to do that).
Within the Zelda series, it meant additional side quest diversions (for
improved weapons, more bottles, oodles of rupees) and a chance to talk
with other characters to get a more fleshed out idea of what life in the
world of Hyrule was like.
With Breath of the Wild, the
choices you make in how to explore this land will change how you
experience the story.
A perfect example is in this game’s depiction of King Rhoam, Zelda’s
father. While you have to interact with him in the initial portion of the
game, your choice of how to proceed afterwards can affect your view of
him.
If you go right to the final battle as soon as you can (good luck), you
learn little of the King (other than his own early exposition dump), same
too if you complete the four dungeons and then go to the final battle. If
you find certain memories, you will see him accosting Zelda angrily for
her shirking her responsibilities, and think negatively of him. If you
find his private journal while exploring Hyrule Castle in depth, you will
read that he felt terrible about doing this and was torn between his
responsibilities of a king and as a father.
Your perception of this character – of many characters – is altered
depending on how you play (and explore) the game.
These gaps – which are lauded in the sense that it can create a unique,
individual experience – are not exactly possible when consuming more
passive culture like a book or movie. It would be the equivalent of
skipping chapters or going to get something in the kitchen in the middle
of watching a film and not bothering to pause, missing possibly important
information.
Knowing basic
narrative tropes can help you appreciate them when they are used well in
stories, and will have you roll your eyes when they are used badly.
Just like knowing basic aspects of game design can help you appreciate
good and bad games.
This is 'video game literacy', and while there might be a handful of
truisms that stretch across all genres (like how the colour red usually
refers to health), many games and game franchises have their own unique
lexicon that you can only get by playing or by reading several long
articles about them.
Just like journalistic publications would have an arts section that would
include different writers to cover music, movies, TV, or other mediums,
and a sports section that has a roster of writers covering basketball,
football, hockey, etc., having one person covering all video games is an
impossible task.
That's not to say one critic can't dabble across fields from time to time,
but there's no way one person can do all the reporting related to all arts
or sports news and commentary everyday (not well, anyway).
Popular, conventional games and the odd titles which challenge conventions
get plenty of attention (just as books and movies that do the same). Now
that people’s clicks can be perfectly tracked on a website to know just
what they are reading, the owners and writers can deliver more of the same
content quite easily (for good and ill).
For big, triple-AAA blockbuster titles, critics and writers are expected
to say something more than how the graphics look and whether inventory
management is a pain. Is there an expectation that the story is more than
getting from point A to point B? You can compare the new game to what came
before, and whether this means it’s an improvement or step in the wrong
direction for fans and for the series as a whole.
Kirk Hamilton’s review of Red Dead Redemption 2 on Kotaku and Maddy
Myers’ review of The Last of Us: Part II on Polygon are excellent,
recent examples of game reviews that become critical essays on the medium
itself. Note that both of these reviews are of sequels, which means there
is already an intellectual foundation to build off of.
The Zelda series’
prestige, popularity, and longevity puts it in a rarefied class in which
only Mario can truly compete (with several other (much younger) franchises
arguably nipping at their heels). For the game critic or journeyman
writer, there are plenty of topics and subjects to work with. There is the
opportunity to recount the ‘story’ of Zelda and its release history, and
how the new title you are reviewing falls into the narrative of meeting,
exceeding, missing, embracing or rejecting expectations (whether your own
or the community’s).
You can get under the
design hood, like how
Mark Brown from the YouTube channel ‘GameMaker’s Tool Kit’ breaks down the
three types of Zelda dungeons and the games that offer them: Lock and Key
(TLoZ, ALttP, Oracles, Link Between Worlds), Puzzle Box (Ocarina/Majora,
Skyward Sword, BoTW), and Gauntlet (Wind Waker, Twilight, Phantom
Hourglass, Spirit Tracks). While there is going to be some overlap,
this is helpful way to arrange the games outside of their base
chronologies.
Fellow YouTuber Arlo's Breath of
the Wild review is over three hours long, and he readily admits that
it is not so much a review that will help you decide whether to buy the
game or not but a far-ranging assessment of all aspects of the title and
how it fits into the Zelda canon. Close to its end, he asks:
“What is a Zelda
game? How much can you change a game in a series before it doesn’t
resemble the other entries in the series enough to not be part of the
series anymore? How much can get thrown out, how much do you need to keep,
when is it healthy innovation and when is it compromising a series’
identity?
Breath of the Wild is very
different from the other 3D Zeldas but it actually has a lot in common
with the first Zelda on the NES. There we were just plunked down in a huge
open world and told to go, and it is also a lot like A Link Between
Worlds with its dungeons that can
be completed in any order and its items that you can access at any time.
If 3D Zeldas and 2D Zeldas are different in a lot of ways, does that mean
they need to maintain their own identities without spilling over? If
Breath of the Wild is wildly
different from every other 3D Zelda but very similar to the original
Zelda, does that make it the least Zelda-like Zelda game ever, or the most
Zelda-like Zelda game ever? If no other Zelda game had ever been created,
just the first one and this one, how differently would we look at it as a
continuation of the series? How much should a game be judged by the games
that came before it and how much should it be judged on its own merits?”
(3:06:49-3:07:47)
As video games are becoming more and more respected by the general
populace as a legitimate art form, then video game criticism and analysis
will become more nuanced and personal as well.
Incorporating theories from other fields will continue, as the idea of
Emergence –
where complex systems are created out of simple items or systems
interacting with each other – seem to be a good explanation of how you can
get so much endless fun out of titles like
Ocarina of Time or
Pikmin 3.
Concepts of Play have
been around for centuries. There has to be
an overall unimportance and frivolousness to the activity, although you
would not necessary think so for how serious many people take games, video
or otherwise. Like
sports, you know the expected outcome (a player/team will win), but you
don’t know the exact path to it, and that’s what makes each game unique.
It is an
opportunity to do/witness the unexpected (but possible) even when there is
a list of rules for the activity.
Jane McGonigal’s book
Reality Is Broken outlines the
slightly unsettling truth about modern society when commenting on video
games in the early twenty first century:
“Many gamers have
already figured out how to use the immersive power of play to distract
themselves from their hunger: a hunger for more satisfying work, for a
stronger sense of community, and for a more engaging and meaningful life.”
(McGonigal, 2010)
Single and
multiplayer video games offer all of this, and not simply in grand stories
involving ‘dangerous’ virtual combat, as the continued success of daily
life simulators like The Sims
and Animal Crossing: New Horizons
can attest to. That we have the power and control to change something –
even something that is not real in the same sense that one’s job or a
political movement is – cannot be overstated. It is a not-so-subtle
reminder that we exist, that when we make a decision to press a button, it
is reflected right away in front of us.
More recently,
Shigeru
Miyamoto has noted that: “The interesting thing about interactive media is
that it allows the players to engage with a problem, conjure a solution,
try out that solution, and then experience the results. Then they can go
back to the thinking stage and start to plan out their next move. This
process of trial and error builds the interactive world in their minds.
This is the true canvas on which we design—not the screen. That’s
something I always keep in mind when designing games.” (New Yorker, 2020) (Awesome side note: In the same 2020 interview, the
reporter asks Miyamoto what kind of boss he is, and at first Miyamoto
thinks the question is what kind of video-game boss he would be)
Those who absorbed
and reflected upon art were viewers and listeners, and now they are
players. One can watch Hamlet
and perhaps the titular character’s fatal inaction can spurn them to alter
their own life for the better, but the play itself remains unchanged for
all. While there are a finite amount of paths and outcomes in a video
game, that there are variations at all makes traditional forms and formats
of criticism insufficient.
What has so long
relied on words and occasional graphs and images to supplement the main
arguments is being replaced. It should come as no surprise that a visual
medium like video games would find people talking about it over clips of
said video games instead of simply writing about them (cough…).
Video game journalism
sites like ign, kotaku, polygon, or destructoid balance out written pieces
with video essays and podcasts. Many of them obviously have a presence on
social media as well. You would be remiss to ignore Twitch and YouTube
(the former being the biggest video game streaming site in the world, and
the latter being, well, YouTube) because that’s where the people are.
But there are also
other independent voices, and while in the past one’s opinions on the
movies they watched couldn’t really be shared easily outside their circle
of friends unless they were employed by a newspaper or magazine, today
anyone can upload a blog post or video going into great detail about
anything that tickles their fancy. Over time they can amass a sizeable
following that appreciates their unique approach to not only playing video
games, but talking about them (on YouTube,
the content creator ‘Videogamedunkey’
is practically the Lester Bangs of video game criticism, Maybe Joseph
Anderson is Greil Marcus).
Typically reviews are meant to indicate whether a cultural object is good
or bad in the opinion of the reviewer, and whether it might be right for
‘you’. Which is not necessarily an easy answer.
After all, who is the game for?
While split by genre is obvious, content and gameplay can also be a factor
when answering that question.
Video games with graphic violence and sexuality are automatically rated M
for mature, the equivalent of an R rating for movies. Despite this, many
of these games have very straightforward and simple mechanics that anyone
can master in a relatively short period of time, especially if you are
familiar with video games in general.
While the visual and story content is mature, the gameplay is for all
ages.
On the flip side of this, there can be games out of there with very
cartoony graphics and a childlike innocence to everything about it, while
the gameplay can be astonishingly deep, challenging and rewarding (maybe
frustrating at times), bringing players back to it again and again.
Zelda (and Mario, for that matter) has sustained for all these years and
never became a 'just for kids' franchise because so much care and
innovation is put into these titles that there is always something for
gamers of all ages and all skills to be excited for and challenged by.
No matter how fantastical video games can be, what lures us into this form
of play is something familiar to how we live when the console is turned
off. We bring our life experience to each game, and even if we’ve never
had to save a kingdom from a great evil, we have certainly had to
strategize juggling many tasks at once, and even do a bit of impressive
physical activity we might never have thought we were capable of.
The challenge is how
to balance real experience with ridiculous fun. From that same Miyamoto
interview above: “Within that experience, there needs to be a mix
between what is real and what is not. There has to be a connection to our
real-world experience, so that when you make a move in the game it feels
familiar but also, somehow, different. To achieve that harmony, you need a
dash of truth and a big lie to go along with it. “ (New Yorker, 2020)
These ‘lies’ are dealt with differently by each player. Creating a rubric
for critiquing video games may be of limited use, because while components
like art style and music have familiar foundations (due to how these
aesthetic forms have been analyzed for centuries and components like
technical and performance issues can be discussed as if reviewing any
other electronic product), the game-‘play’ is practically beyond
qualification and quantification.
A reviewer or writer can certainly describe how great a game looks and how
well the story works, but trying to understand someone describing how fun
playing something is can be a game all by itself.
Chapter 13: And Back Again - Breath of The Wild
Open your eyes...
Finally.
What would become Breath of the
Wild was announced in 2014 to be in development, with possible release
dates for 2015 and 2016 on the Wii U console.
This did not happen,
as producer Aonuma and director Fujibayashi and their ever-expanding team
made corrections and adjustments that pushed the release date further and
further back. They even 'switch'ed the system it was meant to come out on
(another reason this game is so impressive is the fact that it was made
for a five year old console!).
It didn’t take long after the release date of March 3, 2017 for the gaming
world at large to declare it was worth it.
It certainly helps that the story trailer - released only seven weeks
before the game shipped - is definitely one of the best trailers
of...anything, really. You can watch this and think it would be an
incredible animated adventure film. Which is why it excited so many
longtime fans because it was the Hyrule they always wanted to experience.
If Miyamoto's goal was to create an open world for players to explore and
1986’s Legend of Zelda was the
8-bit 2D version of it, then Breath
of the Wild (BoTW for
short) is its 3D equivalent.
The game’s
thin, practically optional story was a necessity for its open world
nature, just like the first title in the series, where there wasn't really
a story at all, just the goal of collecting the pieces of the Triforce
however you could, in any order you wanted, and then slaying Ganon.
For the first time in
what seems like forever, the developers have assumed you’ve played a Zelda
game before. The tutorial section (a mainstay for all home console games
since Ocarina) is well hidden
in plain sight as you start the game, but there isn’t a wide cast of
characters holding your proverbial hand as you are told which buttons to
press to if you want to talk to someone or open up a menu.
Instead
the game allows you to immediately explore and learn when it comes to
saving Hyrule.
When Link awakens without his memory – an excellent way to further
identify with him, as both of you have to learn about this world for the
first time – he finds that the one hundred years ago a calamitous event
named Ganon occurred, almost completely destroying the kingdom. Since that
time, the survivors are trying to rebuild, while Princess Zelda has been
keeping Ganon at bay in the ruins of the castle, so you are tasked with
helping her get rid of this evil once and for all (ha).
How you go about
saving Hyrule this time around has never been so open, and
Breath of the Wild’s design
revolves only around trying to make sure what the player is going to do
most of the time is…fun.
You’re going to be
climbing a lot, so developers brought in a more detailed stamina gauge
(first seen in Skyward Sword)
that depletes so you have to be careful how fast and far you try to go,
lest you come crashing down or drown in the middle of a lake. You and Link
will both be taking deep breaths at the same time while trying to make
that last lunge up the cliff count.
Since a lot fighting
is completely optional – in the sense that you can run away from many
battles at any time – the devs made the rewards you get from them
worthwhile early on and the slashing the hell out of moblins with a flurry
rush oh so satisfying.
As video games became
more popular and considered a respectful form of culture, more and more
talented people from other fields joined in. The dialogue in many early
video games (including Zelda, certainly) was wooden and exposition heavy,
so over time more comical, confessional and realistic lines were
introduced. Quirky, memorable supporting characters have been in plenty of
games since Ocarina/Majora’s Mask
onwards, and the NPCs in Breath of
the Wild are always worth listening to. Sometimes they give advice,
sometimes they lament their situation, sometimes they have something for
you to do, and sometimes they’re evil ninjas in disguise. Completing the
many, many side-quests in BOTW
rarely feels like a chore, in part because unlike chores, you never ‘have’
to complete them. If you want to ignore the quest and go check out that
strange pond over there, all the power to you. It is a virtual world to
truly live in, and not just because you can buy and furnish a house.
On the other hand, if you were in a rush, you could beat the game in less
than half an hour, but only after becoming an expert in all the different
ways you can become overpowered as quickly as possible. Its many unique,
interdependent mechanics allows for some mind-melting speedrun attempts.
These changes were
necessary if you were to ask developers and fans alike of these games,
because the Zelda series itself had become a puzzle.
Skyward Sword
was the most follow-the-dotted-line, story-beholden game of the canon, but
it just so happened that some of the stuff you had to do (dungeons,
fights, searching for specific items) were the best in the series.
Emphasis on ‘had’ to.
With
Breath of the Wild, the point
was to go in the opposite direction. As Aonuma himself stated during the
game’s development:
“As a player progresses through any game,
they’re making choices. They’re making hopefully logical choices to
progress them in the game. And when I hear ‘puzzle solving,’ I think of
like moving blocks so that a door opens or something like that. But I feel
like making those logical choices and taking information that you received
previously and making decisions based on that can also be a sort of
puzzle-solving. So I want to kinda rethink or maybe reconstruct the idea
of puzzle-solving within the Zelda universe.” (from Jason Schreier’s
review of BoTW on Kotaku)
This rethink was laid
out fairly neatly at the 2017 Game Developer’s Conference, which –
conveniently – took place the same week of the game’s release: Refreshing (appealing art style) and full-flavoured
(deep chemistry/physics engine), and they even include a photograph of a
mug of beer to emphasize their point.
Lead Director
Hidemaro Fujibayashi, Technical Director Takuhiro Dohta and Art Director
Satoru Takizawa
acknowledged the challenge of making changes to Zelda all the time. Having
to balance
simplicity in goal and complexity in the manner of achieving it,
along with maintaining a pleasing aesthetic appearance that offers
cell-shading cartoonish-ness and realistic movement of human and non-human
characters.
They showed off an early prototype of the physics engine that was designed
with simple 2D graphics that were very much like the very first
Legend of Zelda game, further
connecting the two titles, now separated by over thirty years.
By making Hyrule itself more of a puzzle – how to survive the elements,
how to forage and hunt for food, how to get across rivers and up cliffs,
how fight or sneak past this seemingly invincible foe, how to arrange
those suspicious rocks – there was less of a need to forcibly shoehorn in
more obvious ‘video game challenges’.
Searching for korok seeds scattered across the world is the perfect way to
subtly have players keep their eyes open at every step on their journey,
and making their collection essential for expanding your inventory means
they are extremely valuable. You
want to keep finding them.
A bunch of optional (there’s that word again) underground puzzle rooms
called shrines dot the landscape, all meant to test and strength the mind
and body of the chosen hero (how convenient for you).
This incremental system for becoming more powerful feels so much more well
earned and natural, because the matter is not
how realistic (that is, relatable to a human player’s actual experience)
can you make it, but how realistic should it be?
In the past Link could only hold so many items at a time, but
BoTW blew the door wide open on
this, allowing for a wide inventory and getting rid of bottles altogether,
so you could have so many plates of food that you would need a van to
carry all the stuff behind you.
It’s great that you actually need a wood and flint and have to strike it
with a steel weapon to light it and make a campfire, but do you want to
spend time pressing buttons that allows 'you' to make and drink coffee,
shave and take a bath, as 2018's
Red Dead Redemption 2 allows (and which can change how NPCs react to
you)?
What is ornamental and what is essential?
And what if ornamental is a hell of a lot of fun?
Zelda games have had
different gear before (in Ocarina
there is a red tunic that keeps Link safe from volcano-level heat, and a
blue one that allows him to breath underwater (which keeps the Water
Temple from being extra nightmare-ish)), but here accessorizing can be
just as much about style as utility. You can even dye your clothes
different colours, which means our hero’s iconic green…doesn’t have to be.
It is a game where the subtle moments are endless and amusing:
-Link’s various faces and poses when you go into selfie-mode on the
sheikah slate’s camera
-the koroks grunting when you drop rocks on their heads.
-nobody telling you anything about dragons
-how tougher bokoblins quickly kick your bombs away
-the original game’s theme slowly playing in the background as you gallop
across Hyrule.
-Shamae wondering if people ever lived in the sky, and wishing he could
ride a big bird up there
-watching the sunrise from the shore or the sunset from a mountaintop
-how the Lynel mask (briefly) works
-the way Zelda and her father both ball their fists at their sides at
tense moments in cut-scenes
-characters reacting differently to Link depending on what he is wearing
(or not wearing at all)
-the beauty of Hyrule in the rain
-the thrill and momentary relief of juuuuust avoiding a Guardian laser
blast
-how perfectly disorienting the desert sandstorms are
-after
completing all the Kass quests he will return to his home in Rito Village,
and when you talk to him there he'll tell you a story about his song
teacher that sheds light on Link and Zelda's relationship. It is also
quite nice when his kids from the Warbler's Nest side-quest come and sing
the Dragon's Roost song from Wind
Waker.
Most successful open world games were either based on some form of
grounded reality (you’re a criminal using present day, actual weapons and
items to fulfill tasks) or were in a magical, sci-fi infused setting.
Zelda merged the two in the sense that it is obviously a medieval fantasy
world (with light sci-fi nods, since there is ‘advanced’ ancient
technology), but with a relatively realistic and consistent physics
engine. This is best exemplified in the rune abilities Link has.
Predominantly stasis, where you can freeze objects in time momentarily,
whack them with your sword to build up potential energy, and after the
freezing ends they will release this now-kinetic energy, launching in
whatever direction you were aiming in.
The Zelda series’ world-building came on slow, as standalone titles slowly
added more and more tropes and lore, and the developers poured this over
the game’s open world sandbox like ramen broth over noodles. Like that
meal, this game is so, so much greater than the sum of its parts, giving
gamers a chance to get lost for hours on end in an experience many games
promised but that only this one delivered on.
Despite regularly communicating with ghosts and magical forest creatures,
the game feels like the most immersive and compelling incarnation of the
franchise because the detail to the world comes first, your interactive
abilities with it comes a photo-finish second, and the story comes third.
Some people would think giving a bronze medal to
BoTW’s story would be too
generous, as filling out Link’s missing memories (which can be found in
any order) doesn’t really create an exciting story with plot twists, but
just a slowly growing appreciation Zelda has for the knight who is posted
at her side for security.
Other
criticisms of the game include claims that features are underdeveloped or
absent (no true crafting system in a game where weapons break frequently),
and the occasional flare up of the Switch’s hardware limitations.
For all the years he spent cutting it for hearts and rupees, grass finally
gets its revenge on Link by being so plentiful that animating each blades
causes frame-rate drops in certain wooded areas (especially in Korok
forest).
The game has so much to do and it can be undertaken in so many ways that
another ‘minus’ is that the longer you play you’ll soon become so
overpowered (with plenty of powerful weapons and foods which gives you
amazing buffs) that only a few big enemies are any sort of challenge. By
playing a lot, your excitement for and expectation of seeing something
completely new and dazzling will start to diminish when you get to the
hundredth shrine or four hundredth korok seed.
To really get that extra ‘cheese’, you can rush into shrines after a blood
moon to stock up on powerful weapons, you can farm items quite easily in
certain places, and you can pause in the middle of any fight to heal.
But if you think any of this is detracting from the challenge or realism…then
don't do these things. You have so much freedom in
BoTW that you have an
opportunity to decide how to play. If you think it's too simple to become
a fierce deity, nerf yourself. Make rules like never fast travel, never
eat during battles, and never activate the towers (if you’re nuts).
The game says 'yes'
to you so often that it's up to you in some cases to say 'no' if you want
to add some spice to it.
As many
reviewers and critics have pointed out, this makes
BOTW feel unlike a Zelda game
in many ways.
Nothing pushes or drags you along like other games in the series. Gently
prodded yes, but overall you are finally…choosing your own adventure.
Any sort go-here-then-there story of would weaken the overall impact of
the open world freedom, especially the fact that you can rush to Ganon
right after getting off the Great Plateau. Because of this feature, no
story element (save for the spirit of the King giving you a bullet-point
lowdown and a paraglider atop the Temple of Time very early on) could be a
barrier or a gate. It all had to be superfluous.
Being able to speedrun this game necessities a sub-par story. It wasn't
done just for the sake of head-bopping shield-surfers, but a reaction to
previous Zelda titles (especially
Twilight Princess and Skyward
Sword) where story beats were barriers and chains.
You give up one thing (an interesting and twisting narrative) and gain
another (the whole damn land of Hyrule, and a passive form of storytelling
by slowly talking to its inhabitants and other miscellanea).
So there is some irony in that practically every other Zelda game you can
name Link whatever you want...and then follow the step-by-step adventure
the designers have laid out for you. Meanwhile in
Breath of the Wild you can go
around and do whatever you want...but you are named Link and can't change
that.
If it is not pioneering like the first game in the series or
Ocarina of Time, then it is
perfecting the elements that these titles introduced and several other
video game series picked up and ran with to great success.
It has become one of the most recent titles to be lauded with the just
maybe ‘greatest video game of all time’ laurel.
Is it?
Well it’s definitely one of the greatest gaming experiences of all time.
In fact, its weakest parts are the ‘gamiest’ ones.
Sneaking into an enemy hideout in one particular way where being
caught is (almost) certain death harkens back to every other similar
mission in previous games.
Zelda perfected time and time again the sustained and steady progression
of story and rising difficulty levels which ended with an extremely
satisfying conclusion. Until this ‘perfection’ became stale and
stultifying.
So Breath of the Wild tossed
out the window.
Stop saving the world for a moment and go find someone in it with a very
particular name. Why? Because Hudson the carpenter asked (not told, asked)
you to.
While BoTW utilizes so many
other gameplay elements that have come before (both in the Zelda series
and out), it still creates a unique and essential gaming adventure for how
well all these elements interact with each other. It is the most carefully
controlled detonation of game events and game mechanics across a massive
open world ever attempted, and succeeds marvelously. It’s an experience
all gamers lust for, which is why it sold twice as many copies as the
previous best-selling game in the series.
[It’s early 2017, and the plodding lead-up to this game is causing
longtime Zelda fans to go absolutely mad, while the rest of the industry
looks on with mild interest at the Nintendo Switch’s hardware.
A cheaper console, its initial price being the same as what the
PlayStation 4 and Xbox One were charging while being in the middle of
their life cycles. The gimmick was that it could go back and forth (cough)
from being a home to handheld console because it has a screen and
removable side controllers for when you take it out of the dock that’s
connected to the TV.
It followed the release schedule of 2006’s Wii, with a new Zelda as a
selling point on day one (and also available on the previous, intended
console) and a big Mario title coming in the holiday season (Super
Mario Odyssey, a game that brought the plumber back to his own open
world gameplay, and was also very well received).
Its success attracted third party developers big and small to the Switch,
because of course you want to have your game on a console that is selling
amazingly well.
While 2018’s big Nintendo game was
Smash Brothers Ultimate (becoming the world’s bestselling fighting
game), the re-booted God of War
and Red Dead Redemption 2 gave
the PlayStation 4 its best year yet (five years in). That same year,
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds
and Fortnite were huge hits for
the battle royale genre, where scores of players compete at the same time
to be the last one standing in a large map littered with weapons and
supplies. In 2019, both those games made billions.
In 2021 there are rumours of a Switch Pro eventually being released,
capitalizing on its initial success of selling 80 million by its fourth
anniversary. Which was a very good thing, because the future of Nintendo
hinged on the console doing incredibly well, according to former Nintendo
of America president Reggie Fils-Aime.
Would Nintendo have folded up shop completely if the Switch flopped?
Probably not, but it might have become a very different company, following
Sega’s slow shuffle off stage by abandoning hardware design for software
development only.
The real question today is how much of a role consoles are going to play
in the future of video games, as it seems like the industry is slowly
moving in two different directions.
One will be an experience requiring expensive and extensive virtual
reality technology to give a level of immersive-ness that rivals only what
we have seen in science fiction media. The other will be the opposite,
requiring less and less hardware around you. Cloud gaming requires only a
(very) reliable internet service, because the game data itself is in hard
drives far away from your living room. All you have to do is stay
constantly connected on your phone, computer or smart tv and play whenever
you’d like, whether a simple puzzle game or grind heavy RPG.
The future of video games in general is so bright we all gotta wear
shades, and maybe there will already be augmented reality tech inside of
them so we can play the next, next Zelda game while going out for a
stroll]
Breath of the Wild
shook up the Zelda formula and what came out was one of the most exciting
games of recent memory to live in. This could make it an early example of
a new sort of digital experience that will become even more commonplace as
virtual reality and AI tech get better and better. It worked because the
developers did not start with state-of-the-art graphics or a detailed,
sprawling narrative, but by experimenting with game mechanics that would
soon be mirrored by players in similar ways. Both groups asked ‘what can
Link do?’, and that the developers trusted gamers with coming up with
their own answers (with very light suggestions) was particularly
impressive for a long-running game series where the hand-holding was
dragging it down.
Winning several game of the year awards helped
Breath of the Wild reach a
wider audience, as
it is the bestselling game in the series by far, moving over 20 million
copies (for the first time, besting the big Mario game that came out
around the same time). Old and new Zelda fans are practically frothing at
the mouth at where the series can go from here (which is why the sequel is
so enticing).
All the titles in
this series are meant to be long, epic journeys, and in many ways
Breath of the Wild is both the
closing of one chapter and beginning of another in the story of the series
itself.
Certainly risks were taken, but almost all brilliant art requires that
action. Becoming Link has never felt so comfortable and natural, and that
makes his adventure your own as soon as you begin. No matter how clear the
destination, it is always about the journey, and this game gives each
player a unique one they’ll never forget.
[Playable on: Wii U, Switch]
Conclusion
Where there has been video game history in the last thirty five years,
there has been a Zelda game. At the same time, its storytelling roots
stretch back centuries, which is more strength than weakness, because a
formulaic narrative and characters allows for the games to focus on what
truly make it a unique experience and not just a story you can play:
Challenging and exciting puzzle and combat design in a fantasy world that
opens up wider to become more complex and engaging as you progress.
In other words, a decades-long adventure that few video games (let alone
video games series) could hope
to offer.
There is absolutely no doubt that The Legend of Zelda series is one of the
most important and well received in the history of the medium. At least
four times the developers at Nintendo – with the original
Legend of Zelda,
A Link to the Past,
Ocarina of Time and
Breath of the Wild – have
produced a game experience that has defined the generation and have made
the statement, ‘if you like video games, you owe it to yourself to buy
this specific console just to experience this game’.
There may not be a greater compliment to a video game than that.
Yet by focusing on these four, we are therefore
criminally ignoring the amazing, ‘insult-to-call-them-runners-up’ titles
like Majora’s Mask,
Wind Waker and
Twilight Princess. And by lauding praise on all of these main console
titles, we are forgetting how good the handheld titles are.
By no means is every game perfect. But every game is certainly unique and
brings something different to a player’s experience (sometimes just a bit
different, sometimes wildly so). It is what sets Zelda apart from many
other long-running franchises, from adventure-story (Final
Fantasy, Uncharted) to first person shooter (Doom,
Call of Duty) or even sports (Madden,
NBA2K
and
FIFA), where the next game is based so heavily on the previous one you
don’t have to play the older titles. For many games, adding a sequel (or
ten of them) is supposed to replace the previous incarnation.
It cannot be
coincidence that two of the best known series that have avoided this path
(Zelda and Mario) were made by Shigeru Miyamoto and the relatively small
group of like-minded game developers in Nintendo EAD (a department whose
letters excitedly stand for Entertainment, Analysis and Development).
The talents of
Miyamoto, Takashi Tezuka, Eiji Aonuma, Yoshiaki Koizumi, Koji Kondo and
many more all converged to create
Ocarina of Time and it would not be unreasonable to say that this
title ended video games’ golden age, perfecting the medium’s slow steady
learning curve and quickly becoming the template for single player
experiences from that moment right up to today, as well as helping prove
that video games are undoubtedly a form of art.
The first game’s
and Breath of the Wild’s open
worlds are separated by one additional dimension and thirty years of
technical innovation, but are connected by one of the
hallmarks of the Zelda series: exploration. Effortlessly harnessing that
basic human curiosity of what is beyond that next hill, around that
corner, or far, far up on the side of Death Mountain.
A good game can lead you by the nose and fool you into thinking that
you’re going off the beaten path, when you’re actually doing exactly what
the designers planned all along. If not specifically advancing the story,
then certainly finding or learning something that will aid you in your
quest. Zelda titles can make you excited for
more macguffins per
game than can really be healthy (get ready to have a temporary obsession
for collecting enchanted jewels, medallions, orbs, maidens (!), mirror
shards, etc.).
Its fantastical world
means it doesn't have to concern itself with the same practicalities of
amazing games like Grand Theft Auto
V or The Last of Us. But
its wide range of logic and problem solving puzzles adds a much more
engaging, intellectual element than simply swinging your sword.
That the series’ future looks to be just as a bright as its past shows
that its full history is not yet written, that it can continue to make a
massive impact on the medium of video games, even if it just gradually
pushes the boundaries on what these virtual worlds that we are inhabiting
more and more can offer. Its own legend means we will come back to it
again and again.
Over time a relationship inevitably grows between the experience and those
experiencing it, especially if it one that is so re-playable. Not only
just because one desires to experience it again, but because one can do so
with ease.
Our own return to
these games mirrors the return of our heroes and their foe(s).
The battle between good and evil, doesn’t have an ultimate winner, no
matter what it feels like when the credits roll. It is the manifestation
of the whims of the divine, and their timescale is not the same as ours.
The battle for the land of Hyrule is necessarily ongoing, with the
occasional thousand-year break between proceedings.
Ganon persists because Zelda and Link persist, and vice versa. The endless
battle is not a curse or a tragedy, it is all there is. A cycle that must
continue, an eternal recurrence that can only slow and temporarily push
back the chaos, not eradicate it. But peace and prosperity are on the same
wheel, as they cannot be permanent either. Without one there would be no
other. Once force rises, a second opposing force does the same to meet it,
and the third force ensures that these binaries are never on a totally
even keel.
Link does not
have to dwell on these philosophical musings and neither do you, although
the many incarnations of Zelda and her triforce of wisdom would imply that
she understands the weight of such intellectual burdens.
It’s unlikely that Miyamoto and his team gave much thought to these
concerns when they set out developing the original game in the
mid-nineteen eighties, or how influential that first title and the series
as a whole would be for the video game industry over the next several
decades.
But to create the excitement and memories that the Legend of Zelda series
has given over the years, one certainly needs plenty of courage, wisdom
and even power. What the hero does as soon as he opens his eyes, however,
is thankfully left up to us.
Epilogue: Tingle’s One Wish
In North Clock
Town, you will see a person floating in the air, clad in a green onesie, a
large red balloon holding him up. Pop it with a deku nut, and he will fall
to the ground and not be hurt or upset at all.
His name is
Tingle, and he is a thirty five year old man who claims to be the
reincarnation of a fairy, but in the meantime he is selling maps because
his father insisted he get a real job.
Before he can do
a similar task of interpreting sea charts on the Great Sea, he is wrongly
imprisoned just for being different on Windfall Island.
Sometimes you
will see him hovering over various areas of Hyrule, seeking treasure.
He even has his own adventures, and they are
joyously named, yes indeed! There is
Freshly Picked Tingle’s Rosy
Rupeeland, Tingle’s Balloon Fight, and
Ripened Tingle’s Balloon Flight of Love!
But these are
all distractions. What Tingle truly wants is to have a fairy of his own,
which is why he is enamoured with the magic that seems to surround you.
Yes, he loves it so much he will definitely give you discounts for his
services in hopes that some of your adventurous spirit will rub of on him.
Perhaps we are
all Tingle, helping guide the hero from a safe distance, wishing that we
could one day have the necessary skills, magic and helper fairies to save
our cherished land from evil.
Until then, it
is clear that only Tingle’s special words
- don’t steal them – can suffice:
Kooloo Limpah!
Sources, Notes, Links
(ha)
Some of these sources are directly related to information regarding The
Legend of Zelda series, some are about video games in general (or other
specific games). They have all played a role in making this collection of
four articles what it is. So a big thank you to the people involved in
creating all of them.
Online Articles
Yes, Metal Gear Solid is bonkers:
https://www.theringer.com/2019/7/18/20698585/metal-gear-video-game-hideo-kojima
“Lemme tell ya, Video Games get no respect, no respect”:
https://www.theringer.com/2019/10/25/20929604/the-mainstream-media-is-not-playing-games “I’ll take
‘Ludonarrative Dissonance for 200, Alex”:
https://www.polygon.com/2020/6/26/21304642/the-last-of-us-2-violence
Chuck
Klosterman takes a crack at the challenges of game criticism:
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a797/esq0706kloster-66/
Great article on ‘Link to the Past’ dungeons:
Dirt on the
Nintendo Price-Fixing Scandal:
https://www.ranker.com/list/breakdown-of-the-nintendo-price-fixing-scandal/jacob-shelton Jason ‘don’t
kill the messenger’ Schreier’s Breath of the Wild review on Kotaku:
https://kotaku.com/the-legend-of-zelda-breath-of-the-wild-the-kotaku-rev-1792885174 Kirk Hamilton’s Red Dead Redemption 2 review on
Kotaku:
https://kotaku.com/red-dead-redemption-2-the-kotaku-review-1829984369 Maddy Myers’s Last of Us Part 2 review on Polygon:
Hooray 2D
Zeldas:
https://kotaku.com/zelda-wouldnt-be-great-without-its-wild-2d-experiments-1835817487 New Yorker Interview of Miyamoto from 2010:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/12/20/master-of-play New Yorker Interview of Miyamoto from 2020:
Book-e-Wooks
Anthropy, Anna &
Clark, Naomi. A Game Designer Vocabulary. Addison-Wesley, 2014.
McGonigal, Jane.
Reality is Broken. Penguin Books, 2010.
Holmes, Dylan. A Mind Forever Voyaging. Createspace, 2012. Harris,
Blake. Console Wars. Dey Street Books, 2014. Ryan, Jeff.
Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America. Penguin, 2011. Schreier,
Jason. Blood, Sweat and Pixels. Harper, 2017.
Videos Japanese
Zelda documentary circa 2003:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVMCaflcwSI&t=1623s ‘Movies’
with Mikey Vid. Just great:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suiVi4kjvbI The Zelda Developers’ 2017 Game Developer’s
Conference speech:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyMsF31NdNc&t=3590s)
Ocarina of Time, A Masterclass in Subtext:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyUcwsjyd8Q
Majora’s Mask and the Art of Dark Symbolism:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kEFiocPLkI
Video Essayists ‘Cause they make a bunch of good ones. Arlo:
https://www.youtube.com/user/ArloStuff
(and here’s a
direct link to his “Big Fat Review of Breath of the Wild’:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgIdymgu0yo&t=11268s) Zeltik:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCudx6plmpbs5WtWvsvu-EdQ KingK:
https://www.youtube.com/user/KingdomKlannad Joseph Anderson:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyhnYIvIKK_--PiJXCMKxQQ Matthewmatosis:
https://www.youtube.com/user/Matthewmatosis Liam Triforce:
https://www.youtube.com/user/Darkmario1LPs Girlfriend Reviews:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2eEGT06FrWFU6VBnPOR9lg Videogamedunkey:
https://www.youtube.com/user/videogamedunkey Game Maker’s Toolkit:
https://www.youtube.com/user/McBacon1337
Streamers/Content Creators PK Sparkxx:
https://www.youtube.com/user/DatHottneSS DannyDinosaur:
https://www.youtube.com/c/dannydinosaur MissClickGaming:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCL8xjX-8RM6SY3r0yh8GqSQ Gab Smolders:
https://www.youtube.com/user/GirlGamerGaB DeeBeeGeek:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=deebeegeek Vinny (from Vinesauce):
https://www.youtube.com/user/vinesaucefullsauce
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