Email: Legend of Zelda

Hey Sean,

I was once a hardcore gamer. I debated for more story, realism and other ‘Hardcore’ things for ‘The Legend of Zelda’ for the longest time. Then I was linked to your articles. It took me a very long while before I found myself agreeing with you, but now I am seeing the gaming world through clearer eyes. Thank you.

But I have to ask. You say that 2D Mario is the best Mario has ever gotten. You also (correct me if I’m wrong) have said that Metroid gameplay peaked in Metroid Prime (I agree on this point)…but where did Zelda gameplay peak? Was it with the original or was it Ocarina of Time? Or was it some other game?

Thank you for your time, Mr. Maelstrom.

I look at it in terms of phenomena. For Nintendo (and for us), the idea is to create a game that creates so much excitement that it ripples through society and causes people to buy the game.

PONG was a phenomenon when it came out. As Nolan Bushnell put it when the game was first put out, a woman asked how the signal could get to the TV studios and back in such a fast time. The idea that the changes in display were occurring in the little machine did not occur to her.

There are better games today than PONG, of course. And they have much better gameplay than PONG. But none of the PONG sequels ever matched the phenomenon that was PONG. If you play PONG today, you would wonder what the fuss is about. One had to have been alive at that time to understand the phenomenon.

Another example is Wii Sports. Wii Sports created a phenomenon where people had to buy the Wii because Wii Sports promised a New Era of video games (of which Nintendo has not delivered causing the excitement of the Wii to die). Wii Sports Resort has better gameplay than Wii Sports and is a better game. Wii Sports Resort is selling very well. However, it cannot match the phenomenon that Wii Sports did. Wii Sports is definitely a stronger phenomenon than Wii Sports Resort.

Super Mario Brothers was a game that was a massive phenomenon. Super Mario Brothers 3 and Super Mario World are much better games with much better gameplay. They sold very well too. But they did not match the phenomenon as the original Super Mario Brothers.

Often, the first game tends to be the strongest in phenomenon. But there are many exceptions. Grand Theft Auto 3 and its PS2 sequels were phenomenons. However, the phenomenon is not carrying over with Grand Theft Auto 4 despite analysts thinking it would.

Why a phenomena occurs is one of the biggest mysteries of gaming. Nintendo’s best brains are at work trying to figure out how an entertainment phenomena breaks out. Also, Nintendo is very keen on identifying entertainment phenomenas in the middle of hatching. Monster Hunter became a phenomena in Japan so Nintendo did what they could to steal the game. Nintendo will spend money to take away someone else’s phenomenon. When Final Fantasy games on the WonderSwan were doing well, Nintendo took those away too! The phenomenon that was Street Fighter 2 was targeted by Nintendo so it would arrive on the Super Nintendo first.

When I think of Mario games, for example, I think of the Mario phenomenon. I think of Mario Madness (look on the Super Mario Brothers 2 box where it will say ‘Mario Madness continues!’)! Super Mario Brothers created a phenomenon and truly made Nintendo the big company it was. When Super Mario Brothers 2 came out, the game was sold out everywhere and people were driving from different states in order to get it! When Super Mario Brothers 3 launched…. oh baby. To the NES Generation, the launch of Super Mario Brothers 3 is the equivalent of the Second Coming. And when Super Mario World launched, with the SNES, it also created a huge phenomenon. Everyone rushed to get the game. I think it sold it within days in Japan.

You could say that Mario 64 was a phenomenon, something I wouldn’t disagree with. But it certainly wasn’t on the same level of intensity and excitement as previous Mario games. Super Mario Sunshine was definitely no phenomenon. Super Mario Galaxy wasn’t really a phenomenon either. Galaxy 2? Nah.

Mario 5 definitely was some sort of phenomenon. The game was consistently selling out and rocketed Wii hardware out of nowhere.

With Metroid, the biggest phenomenons were the very first Metroid and Metroid Prime. But Metroid has never been a mass market phenomenon as, say, Mario was.

The first five Zelda games were phenomenons of some degree. The ones that followed were merely well selling games. No one became so overly excited they had to buy a DS to play Spirit Tracks, for example. This is why I consider the first five Zelda games as the only real Zelda games. Everything else appears to have been a type of spin-off.

Out of these five, the two phenomenons that stand out the most would be the original Legend of Zelda and Ocarina of Time. I’d have to give the nod to Ocarina of Time because it created such a phenomenon that turned Zelda fans into almost a sort of cult. There were always Zelda fans but not like Ocarina’s Zelda fans! People wanted to buy a N64 just to get to Zelda. Ocarina remains the best selling Zelda.

Since Ocarina was the strongest Zelda phenomenon, it makes sense why Nintendo keeps trying to emulate it. (Let me annoyingly note that each of the five Zelda games, with perhaps the exception of the Gameboy one, offered new content that re-defined the Zelda mythos. Think of the first five Zelda games being like the first few series of Star Trek with the later Zelda games being like Voyager and Enterprise. They fit the ‘timeline’ but… no one points to them as definitive of what ‘Star Trek’ is. When someone asks, ‘What is Zelda?’ Most people will point to Ocarina of Time.)

In order to create another Ocarina like phenomenon, the earlier four Zelda games need to be looked at. After all, when Ocarina was being made, all they had to go on was the first four Zelda games. Copying Ocarina has so far not made any real results so perhaps Nintendo should try something different.

I keep pointing at the first few Zelda games, not so much because I believe they are the biggest Zelda phenomenons, but because I believe they hold the antidote to the decline of the Zelda franchise. This is why I keep bringing them up. Those first few Zelda games feel like they belong to an entirely different series compared to the modern Zelda games. But I think this illustrates just how far off track the Zelda series has gone.

The original Legend of Zelda was marketed as a hybrid game between arcade coin-op gameplay with the depth of a computer RPG. If you ever wonder why Zelda 2 had experience points and had a map similar to Dragon Quest, it was because they were stressing the RPG elements more in that one (with its arcade-like combat system).

Today’s Zelda seems more like a hybrid between puzzle gameplay and adventure gameplay. (For adventure gameplay, think of the old Adventure games like Shadowgate or King’s Quest.) I think if Zelda returned to its arcade roots with rpg like gameplay, it would become a phenomenon again similar to how Mario 5 and NSMB DS became the most popular Mario since… Super Mario World.

The Motion Plus controls are giving the opportunity for combat to be arcade-like (which is good. We all know how much fun Wii Sports Resort is).

But what about the other half? What about the RPG side? Not knowing how successful Zelda Wii will get the arcade combat right, I do know it will not get anywhere close to the “computer RPG” style that the older Zeldas had. I expect it to have the same ‘adventure gameplay’ skeleton that Twilight Princess had. I bet that stupid girl hanging around Link won’t shut up the entire game and keep giving you ‘hints’ and will explode into ‘dialogue’ when the script calls for it.

Rampant romanticism, as talked about in the post below, is my latest guess as to how Zelda got away from its roots. The more ‘romanticized’ Zelda became, the more linear it got, the more it focused on ‘story’, and the more it put in cutscenes.

And for anyone wondering, the reason why this site has shifted very much into exploring the whys and hows video games sell or become phenomenas (instead of just talking about Blue Ocean Strategy and disruption) is because this is also integral to the sales of video games.

I realized I was an odd type of customer since I fit the ‘Expanded Audience’ (but of the type who played games and stopped rather than never having played games at all). So all I am doing is relying on my memory and experiences of the past (such as the 80s and early 90s) to try to backward engineer the customer experience. Miyamoto and all are not customers of their games. They can only guess as to what the customer experience is. We, being customers, know the experience. The challenge is how to express the experience in words.

So with a game like Spirit Tracks, we can say, “This is not a Zelda experience.” At least, not the experience of Zelda as we understood Zelda. When each new Zelda game introduces more crappy friends to Link, we might say, “The earlier Zelda games didn’t really have Link having crappy friends. Well, there was that monkey in Link to the Past. But he was more of a thief that illustrated the character of the Dark World, not a “friend”.

I think gaming is in crisis. There is nothing magical about today’s games. So consumers are getting bored and doing something else more productive with their time.

Are today’s Zelda games making the same impact on you as Ocarina of Time did? I don’t think so. It does feel that with each new Zelda game, the magic keeps diminishing. It is now described as ‘a good game’. But back in the day, Zelda games were described as ZELDA GAMES. Zelda games were such quality that we had to invent a totally new genre just to put them in. They became the ‘Zelda genre’.

Zelda is unknown to the younger generation. My nephews have no concept of what Zelda is. They do know what Mario is. They love Mario Kart. They love Mario 5. Unless Zelda becomes magical again, the Zelda franchise will end with the Ocarina of Time generation.