Note to the poor, unfortunate, Nintendo employee assigned to look at this website: this emailer is located in Japan which could explain the problems Zelda is having there.
I wrote this a couple of weeks ago, decided to scrap it, but forgot to delete it from the notepad. After your latest Zelda post, I decided to send this anyway.
It’s interesting how Aonuma wants to change everything that works in Zelda. At this point it’s good to remind, that the Zeldas Aonuma has been in charge of, are Majora’s Mask, Wind Waker, Twilight Princess, Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks. Minish Cap, Four Swords and the two Oracle games were outsourced.
The Legend of Zelda, The Adventure of Link, A Link to the Past, Link’s Awakening and Ocarina of Time are the Miyamoto Zelda games (though, Aonuma was the dungeon designer in OoT).
There’s a huge difference between the Aonuma Zeldas and Miyamoto Zeldas. Where Miyamoto made rich and dynamic overworlds, Aonuma makes poor and static ones.
From the first Zelda to Ocarina of Time, the overworld was growing, not (just) in size, but what you could do in it and what it held inside. The first Zelda doesn’t even make a difference between overworld and dungeons. The way how the game is played is the same (no puzzles to solve or anything), except the triggers where you have to kill the enemies to advance to the next room.
A Link to the Past had some puzzle elements in it, which mostly consisted of finding the master key to get to the boss, but beating the dungeon usually gave you something useful in the overworld.
Ocarina of Time had dungeons with frustrating backtracking, but getting the item usually gave a new way to experience the overworld (that was huge, full of content).
Majora’s Mask had lots of events in the overworld, but after the 37’th time you had played through the same events to see whether Kafei had checked his mail, started to become boring.
Wind Waker didn’t have much of an overworld, an island on each square of the map, shooting enemies with the cannon and what you could find was a treasure under the sea with your grappling hook. Getting a new item from a dungeon didn’t even allow you to experience the overworld in a new fashion.
Twilight Princess looked like a huge improvement and going back to OoT from the surface, but the game felt like playing the OoT Kokiri forest over and over again without the people in it and without surprises to find.
Phanton Hourglass had the same idea as Wind Waker, except that you had to solve puzzles in the overworld just as well.
As far as I’m concerned, Spirit Tracks can stay on the store shelf. I’m not buying it because it obviously isn’t what I consider as a Zelda game.
Everything in Zelda basically revolves around the overworld and how you can play it.
I didn’t write this despite of being a Zelda fan, I wrote it BECAUSE of being one.
Added today:
What’s next Zelda going to be? Link flying Zeldas private jet watching scenery, drinking beer and playing Professor Layton with his DSi, while the Hyrule army is beating the shit out of Ganon.
As Link drinks more beer, he gets more drunk that makes Layton harder and every time you beat a puzzle a cinematic about Ganon appear and the army advances further.
The game would have A METHOD OF TRANSPORTATION, PUZZLES, CHALLENGE and NOBODY HAVE DONE A GAME LIKE THAT.
You can sense the anger. It is not the anger of a hardcore fanboy but one who was around since the beginning and is watching the Zelda series, the game of the Golden Cartridges, be run into the ground.
I agree with everything said above. With each new Zelda game, we told ourselves that Nintendo was trying to be “innovative” which excused the screw-up. But that next upcoming Zelda game, boy oh boy, that is going to be THE Zelda game! Yet, we keep getting disappointed time and time again. We keep thinking that Zelda is getting back to its roots but it keeps going the opposite way.
It is very interesting to hear how the Zelda series is perceived especially if you are me who was frozen in time for over a decade and return to gaming.
This is the myth of Zelda:
Zeldas 1, 2, 3, and even Link’s Awakening were primitive, crappy games that were nothing but evolving prototypes to the one true Zelda game: Ocarina of Time. Ever since reaching the zenith of Zelda, we must now content ourselves with neat ‘innovation’ in Zelda. This means Zelda in a ocean, Zelda with touch screen, Zelda with choo choo train, Zelda with repeating every three days, and Zelda with motion plus controls.
This is the reality of Zelda:
Zelda 1 was a smash hit and entertainment phenomenon.
Zelda 2 was a smash hit and entertainment phenomenon.
Zelda 3 was a smash hit and entertainment phenomenon.
Link’s Awakening was a smash hit and entertainment phenomenon.
Ocarina of Time was a smash hit and entertainment phenomenon.
Every Zelda game after that has not been a smash hit nor an entertainment phenomenon. At best, they have sold “fine” as any other generic first party console game.
There is a HUGE GAP of time between Ocarina of Time and the earlier Zelda games when they were released. So from a young person’s perspective, they witnessed the Ocarina of Time phenomenon but not the earlier phenomenons of the prior games. So they logically conclude that Ocarina of Time is the zenith of the series. When these young people play the older Zelda games, such as Zelda 1 and 2, they are confused about the lack of “story” and “puzzle solving”. All they know is that they die all the time in them so therefore they are “primitive” and “bad”. These young people do not truly know what Zelda is or what a Zelda phenomenon is. They confuse the Zelda phenomenon with the Ocarina of Time phenomenon. Every Zelda game up to Ocarina of Time was a phenomenon. Even back on the NES, Zelda was so popular that the game was second only to Super Mario Brothers (and the Mario Mania at the time). Zelda had its own cartoon show and even had a cereal. Once could say that Zelda was a greater phenomenon back then than Ocarina of Time ever ended up being. Today, Zelda is rapidly becoming a joke.
I didn’t finish Ocarina of Time because I got bored of it. Now that I think about it, I did stop somewhere in the later dungeons. It was the dungeon design that was not fun to me. The Water Temple (which I did beat) was pure torture. I do remember enjoying the overworld. Aonuma was the wrong person to put in charge of the Zelda series, and it is beyond evident now.
Before I get furious emails demanding how dare I say this about Zelda, remember how angry some of you were when I criticized 3d Mario. And look at what is happening in the market today. In Japan, Super Mario Brothers 5 outsells ALL sales of Super Mario Sunshine (in its lifetime) in that market within four days. Super Mario Brothers 5 will outsell Galaxy in Japan within a week or two. The narrative of the “Game Industry” is now proven wrong. Mario never got ‘less popular’. It was that Nintendo moved Mario so far away from his roots. Fans didn’t abandon Mario, Nintendo abandoned Mario by straying so far.
Nintendo is doing the same with Zelda. Zelda doesn’t even remotely resemble anything of its past. People are currently saying games like Mario 5 are selling due to ‘nostalgia’. Those people are idiots.
Those who were alive during the 70s and 80s and playing games witnessed the birth of gaming. We saw non-gamers turn into gamers. These games were doing something that were converting non-gamers that today’s games were not doing. It makes sense that this past can be looked at for a comparison to the problems that have infested modern games.
Mr. Iwata says Zelda cannot be defined and that is a good thing. I say this is wrong. I challenge the President of Nintendo that Zelda can, indeed, be defined. Digging through over twenty years of dust, I have been looking as to what caused the original Zelda, which is a very complex and difficult game, to sell to non-gamers. Nintendo’s own actions then give a very different take on Zelda. This essence of Zelda really nails down how the first Zelda fans were born and why Zelda was very popular up and worshiped as masterpieces until the Aonuma Zelda games. The rich Overworld plays a significant part, but it a piece in the grander puzzle.
“Well, what is it?” asks the reader.
No, it’ll go in a “Casual Divisions” article. One thing I can say is that ‘puzzles’ are not even mentioned. How ‘puzzles’ became some definable trait of Zelda I will never understand. ‘Puzzles’ are only definable to Aonuma Zelda games.
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