“Maybe Ocarina of Time was not that good of a game in the first place.
Maybe people stopped playing the game not because the game was hard
but because they were bored and not having fun anymore.”
This is the biggest load of BS I’ve read in quite a while, Malstrom.
Good job on opening pandora’s box, you’ll be swimming in hate mail, no
doubt. Did you ever think that maybe, just maybe, Ocarina of Time is
so revered today not for it’s sales or it’s groundbreaker Z-targeting
system, but because a hell of a lot of people are fond of what they
thought was a really fun game? So it’s a completely different game
than the Legend of Zelda. So fishing in a pond, catching cuccos and
traveling through time isn’t your bag—who the hell are you to say if
it isn’t for other people? Because it is! I’m sorry you were bored,
but saying it isn’t a fun game and insinuating that most people who
played it didn’t beat it (how can that point even be established,
anyway?) or quit out of boredom isn’t ballsy, its dumb. You want proof
that the millions of people who bought the game still love it? Google
“Ocarina of Time” fan and do a little digging around in the links that
are fetched.
As an aside, is there really no “modern” Zelda game that you like?
Even Majora’s Mask?
You’re jumping to conclusions. This is the only email I’ve had on the subject (but I have gotten many emails about how I think Super Guide feature will create a more linear Zelda).
Miyamoto says that most or many people did not finish Ocarina of Time. It is truth, I can bare him witness as I didn’t finish it either. Miyamoto/Nintendo’s conclusion was that people did not finish the game because it was too hard. This is a logical conclusion to make.
So next we have Wind Waker. Wind Waker is much easier. However, the game had major problems. The art style was very controversial in the West and the drop in sales show it. The world being an ocean also was a major change in the series.
So, logically, Twilight Princess stays with a non-controversial art style and stays in a very Ocarina of Time type of game. But Twilight Princess doesn’t do what Nintendo wants especially in Japan.
Again, logically, Nintendo thinks that Twilight Princess isn’t exciting due to a tired Ocarina of Time “formula”. So now we have comments that Zelda: Wii will be a ‘departure’ and that Zelda: Wii will have “flying” and not have the relationship between overworld and dungeons.
Based on the pattern seen above, we can expect Zelda: Wii to perform OK but nothing truly “exciting” which is what Nintendo wants. And, logically, Nintendo will point to something like “Link not having a sword” as the reason the game didn’t excite or something else.
I’m all about challenging conventional wisdom (because conventional wisdom is often wrong). The “logical thinking” above keeps dancing around a single point: that Ocarina of Time has been overrated and that there are some substantial flaws in the game that, being passed on to modern Zelda successors, puts a ceiling on its sales.
No game is perfect. Even Super Mario Brothers 3 is highly flawed. Its biggest flaw is that the game ramps the complexity so much that many fans of the original Super Mario Brothers were left behind. Many latter NES games had this problem.
A console like the N64 or Gamecube, revered by some Nintendo fans, was realized to be highly flawed due to how they limited accessibility. Wii wouldn’t have been what it is without that controller re-boot.
I find the complaint that the Ocarina of Time formula is being ‘stale’ funny because that formula did not come about due to Ocarina of Time. It is the Link to the Past formula after all.
It is fine to love Ocarina of Time. But investigating its flaws and limits to sales/ why it had people not finish it will not make the game less lovable. And Ocarina is the center of things in understanding Modern Zelda.
As someone who just put down the controller in the middle of Ocarina of Time and said, “I have had enough. This isn’t fun anymore,” I don’t believe difficulty is the issue at all. The game is somewhat difficult evenly through the game. There is nothing game stopping like the Spider Ball boss or Boost Ball Boss in Metroid Prime 2.
My hypothesis is that Ocarina of Time relied too heavily on spectacle. Spectacle is good when it is the first act of the player. You need a strong opening to reign in interest. But if the play is nothing but spectacle, you just want to turn away. You lose interest to the conclusion of the play.
George Bernard Shaw’s play called “Don Juan in Hell” created a very interesting image of Hell. In Shaw’s Hell, it is everything you would think is ‘exciting’, tons of flourishes, like a never ending opening of a play. It just never stops with the spectacle.
George Bernard Shaw’s “Hell” is where Core Gaming is at now. The core games keep trying on relying on spectacles. A game like Mario Galaxy even exploded the entire Universe in order to gain a ‘spectacle’. In a similar way, flying in Zelda would be more of a spectacle than anything integral to the gameplay (as is horse riding, being a wolf, riding a train, sailing in a boat, etc).
It is a strange phenomenon that almost every game series gets a ‘boost’ in sales when the game goes 3d. However, then the game series often enters decline. Metroid Prime series is an example as is Final Fantasy. I believe the ‘boost’ that a game gets when going 3d is in the massive spectacle department. You are now *inside* the game world instead of viewing at it from a window. There is a sense of awe and majesty about it.
Keep in mind that I played Wind Waker first, then Twilight Princess, and then Ocarina of Time. Being removed from that time period when it was released, the game appears to me to be very spectacle focused (spectacles include the cinematics as well as unique boss fights, crazy dungeon themes, and so on). The game keeps trying to “wow” you.
The problem with a game, any game, is that once you are playing it for tens of hours, the game’s magic to make the player go “wow” subsides. The longer the player is in the game world, the less power the spectacle has. Once the spectacle collapses, all you have left is the core gameplay skeleton.
Here are two examples to showcase this. Think of Mario 64. When it is first played, the player goes “Wow!” and runs around in circles. But the power of the spectacle fades as the game goes on. Once the spectacle is gone, you are left with the core gameplay skeleton of finding stars and all.
Think of World of Warcraft. The first time the player is there, he went “Wow!” because he was now inside Azeroth. He would be amazed at the first time he entered Ironforge or UnderCity. But, eventually, the spectacle subsides and the core gameplay skeleton of dice combat remain. If the player finds the core gameplay skeleton fun, he keeps playing. Once it becomes not fun, the player stops playing cold.
Curiously, Modern Zelda has relied more and more on spectacles. In Wind Waker, I kept getting the distinct impression that the game was trying to say, “You there! Be in awe at the big ocean that is everywhere! Be in awe over the physics of the ship sailing. Be in awe over the animation and character expressions.” In Twilight Princess, I got the impression that the game was, again, trying to use heavy handed spectacle. “Player! Be in awe of the Twilight World. Be in awe that Link turns into a dog. Be in awe of horse to horse combat. Be in awe of being carried by a crazy bird through mountains. Be in awe how the dungeons look and feel.” Spectacle is the first thing that evaporates when a new game is bought. This could explain why Modern Zelda games start off with very high receptions but deflates massively afterward like air being released from a balloon.
The Zelda series trajectory is reminding me more and more of Star Trek. Star Trek began not taking its lore seriously. As the franchise grew more popular, a split between regular users and die hard fans grew. The “Trekkers” would debate among themselves the timeline of the Star Trek universe and endlessly debate the previous shows and movies in how it relates to other Star Trek shows and movies. But the Star Trek series began to get very sick and the only way the series responded to it was increasing the spectacle. For example, Deep Space Nine started off with very high ratings but eroded rapidly. Paramount’s solution was to jam as many space ships as possible into the screen and blow them up in constant battles. The ratings would still continuously fall, but the erosion was much slower. In Voyager, it started off with high ratings. As its ratings dangerously eroded, Paramount’s solution was to jam as many Borg ships onto the screen as possible as well as putting skin tight outfits on a supermodel. Ratings still fell but the erosion wasn’t as rapid. The shows at least went to their seventh season. Enterprise was another can of worms. It started off with high, but lower than other premiers, ratings, and as those fell Paramount used the old strategy of increasing the spectacle. In this case, the spectacle was “Earth is in danger! Oh Noes!” with many hostile space ships crammed in. In this case, it didn’t work and the cancellation marked the death of one of the longest running entertainment franchises ever made.
Eerily, the Zelda franchise seems to be following a very similar path. Zelda games are no longer creating “entertainment phenomenons” as they used to. Ocarina definitely was that phenomenon when it came out. But so were Zelda games prior to that.
Before I go off more on tangents on this post, what you quoted me saying was just that we should look at Ocarina in a more critical fashion. Every game has flaws. It is time to remove the pedestal.
Anyway, I just watched a very disturbing Aonuma interview. Every time Aonuma speaks, I fear for the future of Zelda. Everything he says I disagree with. “Story is the motivation for the player.” “Zelda is about the technology of the platform in making a realistic world.” What? Huh?
What I find interesting is that Aonuma first played Zelda with Link to the Past. Aonuma is DESIGNING Zelda games. And the focus for Nintendo is to expand the audience.
How do you make non-gamers into Zelda fans?
The only logical answer is to look at the games that made Zelda fans in the first place. Link to the Past already had an installed base of Zelda fans that were coming from the NES. I can see no other lantern to guide the path toward healthy expansion of Zelda but by what the NES games did and what they were about. But Aonuma seems to be going in the opposite direction.
So we have gone from Zelda with Boat to Zelda with Dog to Zelda with trains to what’s next? Zelda with hot-air balloons?