The last emailer went a little easy on for some reason. You didn’t limit your comment to bottles so let me quote you.
“The player doesn’t get to decide anything in Modern Zelda. It is essentially a rails game.” Now if you limited your argument to the main quest I would agree with you, but you said ,”anything” and that is wrong. Certain items , like bottles, as well as upgrades for items are still optional in Zelda games. Changing your argument to these things don’t matter as much in the game is pointless since they never mattered much when it came to completing the game and it wasn’t what your original point was anyway.
But they DID matter in earlier games. That’s the point.
And you COULD do dungeons out of order. Well, many of them. When I say ‘on rails’, I mean guided by the hand. You have a Clippy who hovers around you and tells you where to go.
This is why I lose patience with you Zelda people. You aren’t making actual arguments. I have always been referring to the gameplay skeleton, not the trimmings and bells. When I say something like, “Zelda was never about the story,” I mean the gameplay skeleton did not revolve around the story. Not around plot twists and cutscenes. Meanwhile, a Zelda person would say, “That is wrong. There was story in the first Zelda.” No shit, Sherlock. But it was a different gameplay skeleton.
That was my entire point with the bottles. Miyamoto said he wanted to allow the player choice and freedom in the game. Wonderful. So why isn’t that applied to Modern Zelda? Modern Zelda does not have player choice and freedom as the earlier Zelda games did. The argument was not about the bottles as bottles between Classic and Modern Zelda. The argument was about player choice and freedom. If you do not understand the argument, it is why you would be thinking I would be ‘changing it’.
You have to know what the argument is. I experienced this same thing with Metroid.
When Sakamoto kept talking up the story in the upcoming Other M, I said, “Metroid has never been about the story.” Metroid fans said, “But it has. Look at the original Metroid and look at the story that flashes when the game starts.” That was not the argument. The argument was about the skeleton of the game. Metroid was Samus running around and shooting monsters. There was no soap opera in Metroid. She didn’t talk to anyone. But in Other M, she won’t shut up.
If I said about Zelda, “Zelda was not about stupid NPCs,” a Zelda fan would apparently say, “But what about the NPCs that were everywhere in Zelda 1, Zelda 2, and so on? You are WRONG.” But that is not the argument. The argument was that Zelda, the game, was not about stupid NPCs. In Classic Zelda, you can ignore almost all the NPCs. In Modern Zelda, you have to talk to them. You have to do inane things like save their cat.
And this would be part of the reason why I would say Modern Zelda is ‘on rails’. It is forcing the player to do things that were not done in earlier Zeldas. I don’t want to talk to Grandma. I want to go out and chop up octorocks.
You are correct about everything else in regards to Zelda. Nintendo has been taking away the adventure and challenge, but keeping in all the puzzles.
“Here is a question: why did ‘Malstrom’ become such a Big Voice when it comes to matters concerning Nintendo and gaming?”
Simple, just about every so called industry expert was screaming non-sense about Nintendo leaving the console business and even the forum dwellers had a better understanding of the business of Nintendo. You were one of the few if not the only person that looked into the business of the company and had a grasp of what was going on.
Now you make silly claims like the disinterest in the 3DS is why the PSP is selling so well. You were using a survey to make fun of the analysts for smartphones coming in at the 7th reason why the 3DS doesn’t sell, instead you should poke fun at yourself for satisfied by PSP coming in at number 8. You, Sean Malstrom are more wrong than the analyst. While you have a much better record than Patcher no one is always right.
Since you are so much smarter than I am, why don’t you do the blogging? I’ll be gone anyway.
And what you are saying doesn’t make any sense. The reason why I said the 3DS would cause interest in the PSP is because people do not like the 3d direction Nintendo is going. All the top marks in the survey confirm this. The PSP does not have 3d output. Neither does the DS. The fact that people worried about getting sick on the 3DS (that was like number 5 and 6) is a clear indicator people don’t like the 3d output.
But you don’t get my argument correct. I wonder if I am not communicating correctly. This worries me because I do much business in communication. But seeing how rare I get an email like this, I would say it is not a communication problem. When I say, “3DS is going to create more interest in the PSP,” everyone else seemed to understand that I meant that people, rejecting the direction the 3DS is going, will be looking more closely at alternatives such as the PSP. But somehow, you thought the argument was about interest in the PSP in and of itself, not as an alternative to disinterest in the 3DS.