Email: Do we need ‘companions’ in the Zelda series?

That’s something I haven’t heard much mention of, and one major difference between the old style Zelda games and the newer ones.

All the older games had Link adventure completely solo, while all the latter ones have had him accompanied by some helper.  Ocarina of Time introduced it with Navi, and while the later ones were a bit better (aka, shut up for a lot of the game), there still seemed to be an element of annoyance about them.  Majora’s Mask had Tatl, Wind Waker the King of Red Lions, Minish Cap Ezlo, Twilight Princess Midna, Phantom Hourglass had Ciela, Spirit Tracks had Zelda herself…

Not sure why Aonuma would have made this change (best bet is that ‘topping Ocarina of Time’ led him to think he had to include everything from said game in every game hence forth), because it doesn’t seem like much of a story supporting mechanic, but it may have led to the game world feeling less ‘dangerous’.

Maybe the series would be greatly improved if they scrapped this idea and went back to Link being a solo adventurer who didn’t have some sidekick yelling at him every now and again? On another note, you say Nintendo never released any motionplus games or killer apps… well, they did try, I have a feeling the failed FlingSmash was an attempt to have a new ‘hit’ game, it’s just the game was pretty awful and no one cared for it.Those are not companions. If you want to see what a companion is, play an Ultima game (not 8 or 9) or a game like Planescape: Torment. A companion is supposed to mimic a person so there is no need for companions in a MMORPG since human players surpass anything a developer could put in.The ‘companions’ in Zelda are actually more like Clippy from Microsoft:

For the April 1st prank, Blizzard put a ‘companion’ called ‘Crabby’ who ‘assisted’ you on the World of Warcraft pages. It is mocking Clippy but sounds like the Zelda companions to me.

The real reason why there are ‘companions’ in Zelda is because the gameplay is broken. There is no reason to have Clippy companions if the gameplay skeleton actually worked. NPCs giving hints has been a staple of every RPG. But there’s never been a Clippy where an NPC hovers around you and doesn’t shut up. Nintendo probably thinks it is ‘immersive’ having a crappy character do all that.

If puzzle solving was removed from Zelda, there would be no need for Clippy. For the same reason why there wasn’t a Clippy in the first Zelda.

Above: If Nintendo ‘remade’ Zelda, this is how they would do it.