I’m sure you’re inundated with emails about the 3DS price cut and all that. I thought I’d drop this little video on your lap regarding Zelda. It’s two old school gamers talking about the early Zelda games. It’s so interesting too, because they describe how the gold cartridge caught their attention, and how they had never played an action RPG before. Seriously, check around the 2:35 mark. The guy actually calls Zelda I an action RPG without hesitation. It’s cool stuff!
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You can tell how animated and excited they are by the very rich memories the games gave. It was true that the early NES days was like a ‘secret society’ thing. You’d be at someone’s house, and they would take out the NES. You’d be like, “What the hell is that? An Atari? Pshh, I have my Commodore 64.” And then your jaw dropped as you saw the games and played them. I think I told how there was one time where a guy I knew (he currently is a millionaire today) had this huge stack of NES games and began popping them in. He had great taste in games because they are all considered classics today. Castlevania, Ghosts and Goblins, Gradius, among others. These were Japanese games so I was not as familiar with them, and I had not been going around the arcade lately. But I recall being entranced by Metroid with how he was going up, down, left, right, and the haunting haunting music.
Note how they mention the gold cartridge and how that was important. And then the next thing mentioned was the music. I’ve described the NES as a ‘music box’ because it really was the music that gave the NES voice. Can you imagine Super Mario Brothers without its music? And if you thought we were amazed at the music of Zelda, imagine when we first put in Mega Man 2.
Or check out this song from Mega Man 3. Whoa. It is a strange mix of sharps and flats creating a type of music I’ve never heard before and haven’t heard since.
Above: This music quality is so ridiculously high, it is absurd.
This Japanese craftsmanship, which was absent on the Atari and computer games, minus the arcade ports, blew everyone away. I’ve never experienced anything like it then or in the future. At the time, people accused Nintendo of doling out the NES games like ‘Godiva chocolates’. Godiva chocolates is a good way to describe them.
I consider Zelda to be the very first ‘console’ game. Every video game has either been made for the arcade or for the home computer. Zelda is a game that could neither be on the arcade or on the home computer. It could only exist on the console. It was also the first console game in the west to have a battery.
He does describe it as action RPG. I think arcade RPG is more precise. Arcade includes the tactile feeling of the arcade as well as the stimulating music, sound, and graphics while ‘action’ doesn’t. Note how no one talked about ‘puzzles’ or even the ‘story’.
Note also how difficult these guys said it was for them to get these games. America was not as wealthy in the 80s, and parents didn’t have the money to get the kid the game they wanted (except for those few strange kids who won life’s lottery in that their parents seemed to buy them everything). In the comments section of the video, some people talk about how their fathers got into Zelda big time. It was not uncommon for 40 year old men to play Zelda. You never see a 40 year old man play Zelda today.
I was disappointed to hear they haven’t finished the Second Quest of the first game. They’ve had twenty five years to complete it. Come on!
They did talk about how absorbing it was to get into Zelda II. What really makes the Zelda II experience were the epic, epic palaces. The music is god quality, and the palaces were just so much fun. The Zelda II love largely revolves around the palaces. That Final Palace has never been equaled in a video game. That place still amazes me with its gold-like epicness and its scariness. In Zelda II, you always feared the blue Iron Knuckles because their swords would should at you. They were tough! But in the Final Palace, you find these bird head knights who not only had the power of the blue iron knuckles, they had the high jump! They would be jumping around and the screen was filling up with bullets! To this day, I’m still scared of them, and I run past them hoping I can slip away.
Above: This music gives a sense of finality and a song worthy of the end of Zelda.
When thinking about Link to the Past, one does think about the rain, pulling up the Master Sword, and entering Hyrule Castle. Those were very memorable. But you can also tell how easy Link to the Past is as the guy says he beat half the game in one day. Link to the Past is so ridiculously easy compared to Zelda I or II. I was really, really disappointed there wasn’t a Second Quest.
Above: This song plays in the sanctuary. While Modern Zelda feels like an extremely bad cartoon show, Classic Zelda has a type of gravity, a sense of weight which immediately comes when you hear music like the above. Link was a sort of “holy warrior”. This “holy warrior” is something we do not see in entertainment today, but Nintendo seemed to have embraced. Unlike Mario, who was common, Link was uncommon and had divine blood.
It’s clear that should there be another Classic-esque Zelda released, those guys would crawl on broken glass to get at it. Can you believe that the person in charge of Zelda today HATES the games those two guys talked about?
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