Honestly Aonuma Zelda is closer to NES Zelda then Shadowgate. Zelda is action adventure not adventure. All these puzzles that you and even Nintendo keep talking about, I just don’t know where it’s all coming from. When Miyamoto says defeating a deku baba in Skyward Sword is like a puzzle I see it as real time strategy. The only puzzles I think think of off the top of my head are the block puzzles, which have been in Zelda since the beginning .
Aonuma Zelda has no action in it. Aonuma himself states he hates action games and admits he cannot play Super Mario Brothers. Aonuma also publicly stated he could not finish Legend of Zelda. Apparently, he didn’t get past the octorocks. (That’s like someone saying they couldn’t finish Super Mario Brothers because of the goombas, the easiest enemy.)
This is what Aonuma says in his own words:
My first encounter with Zelda occurred in 1988 shortly after I joined Nintendo. After studying design in college, I began work designing pixel characters. At the time, I didn’t have much experience playing games, and I was particularly bad at playing games that required quick reflexes. So, immediately after I started playing the original Zelda, I failed to read the movements of the Octorock in the field and my game suddenly game to an end. Even after getting used to the controls, each time the screen rolled to a new area new Octorock appeared and I thought ‘am I going to have to fight these things forever?’ Eventually, I gave up getting any further in the game.
In the first bold, Aonuma was hired as a pixel artist and was already part of Nintendo before Zelda came out. Today, game companies know that you need to hire gamers on the development team. But Aonuma isn’t a gamer. That’s the problem.
And he couldn’t handle the octorocks! Even four year old kids could handle the octorocks.
the result was that I was under the impression that the Legend of Zelda was not a game that suited me. So what kind of games did suit me? Those would be text-based adventures. For someone like me who enjoyed reading stories, these were games that allowed you to participate in the story and letting you experience the joy of seeing your own thoughts and actions affect the progression of the story. Plus, these games don’t require fast reflexes and don’t require traditional gaming skills. So, I thought that if I were going to make games, I would like to make this type of game.
The games Aonuma is referring here are games like Shadowgate which requires no reflexes.
When Aonuma was hired, Nintendo was still an arcade game company. Why was someone hired at an arcade game company who hated arcade games?
The answer is that Miyamoto hired Aonuma because he made wooden dolls in college. “You would fit well in this company,” Miyamoto said. So this is how someone who hated arcade games ends up at an arcade game company.
Now Shadowgate was ported to the NES because Shadowgate was a popular PC adventure game (which was ported to every platform at the time). It is the type of game Aonuma likes.
The original Legend of Zelda is a game that Aonuma does not like.
This isn’t my opinion. These are direct quotes from Aonuma himself.
My point in comparing Shadowgate and the original Legend of Zelda is to illustrate that Aonuma Zelda is just a mediocre PC adventure game in Zelda clothing (like a Super Mario RPG). It is not actually Zelda. The Zelda franchise was not established as a PC adventure game. It was an arcade-RPG game.
Zelda existed as a franchise for a decade before Aonuma was involved. And ever since Aonuma has been involved, the Zelda franchise has been in decline. No one buys a Nintendo console for Zelda anymore. Nintendo has tried to point to the Wii as proof of that but Wii was sold out for three years in North America, Zelda had nothing to do with it. And as a launch day buyer, I bought the Wii for Wii Sports as did many other people.
There is an important reason why I keep repeating myself on the Zelda topic. The Zelda problem is similar to the Mario problem.
Mario was HUGE. Mario was established as a series for a decade (or more if you include Mario Brothers and Donkey Kong).
Then, in 1996, the Mario series gets re-defined as Mario 64. Gone is the arcade gameplay skeleton. What we have now is Mario maneuvering through a 3d world to get a star.
To the mass market, this was not Mario. It was spin-off game using the Mario character. An actual Super Mario Brothers 5 did not come out on the N64 or Gamecube. When those of us watched Nintendo’s home console marketshare collapse, it was obvious to us why. Why did they change Mario? Classic Mario was better.
Today, everyone knows Classic Mario is better because NSMB and Super Mario Brothers 5’s sales and hardware pushing power cannot be denied… not even by Miyamoto who despises 2d Mario.
We have the same problem with Zelda.
Zelda was always a very popular game series that had a huge amount of competitors. But somewhere with Ocarina or post-Ocarina, Zelda changed (which Aonuma admits). And now Zelda is considered an unhealthy franchise by Nintendo that is very expensive and doesn’t bring in the sales… in software or hardware.
I’m looking at this and having the same reaction I did watching Nintendo home consoles collapse with these ‘brilliant’ 3d Mario games on them. The problem is that Aonuma Zelda is not actually Zelda. It is just another spin-off. In this case, it is a PC adventure game taking place in the Zelda universe.
I have observed that modern Zelda fans have not played PC adventure games and do not seem to be familiar with their history. Adventure game genre died once it became more profitable to make other games (RPG, RTS, FPS, etc.). Modern Zelda has been relying on the capital made of the early Zelda games which has allowed it to coast the market this past decade. But Zelda started from the highest a game can go (only Mario has really gone higher). This is the reason why the fall was been so gradual because it began from such a great height.
I’m convinced there is an invisible market for Classic Zelda similar to the invisible market out there for 2d Mario. All I want is a single game to be made. Try putting one out on the handheld and see what happens. After the disasters of the last two DS Zelda games, this one cannot perform any worse. (And by Classic Zelda, it doesn’t have to be top down based. It must be Arcade/RPG for its gameplay skeleton. No crappy NPC characters. No puzzles [because Classic Zelda didn’t have puzzles. It had secrets and mazes, but not puzzles in the PC adventure game fashion].
I’ll mention Metroid here since its issue is similar but different from Mario and Zelda. When Metroid went into 3d, it was established that it was a spin-off series. This was the Metroid Prime series. Metroid Prime totally revived interest in Metroid once again. People can say it is Super Metroid in 3d, but it is very different. It is easy to see why someone who likes Super Metroid would not like Metroid Prime. And that is OK. So let’s make more Super Metroid (the audience cheers because everyone would like more Super Metroid).
But no, this would not be the case. Sakamoto comes out of nowhere and declares he is making the ‘sequel to Super Metroid’ which is a game that is nothing like Super Metroid at all. The market rejected this idea of Metroid. I think Sakamoto thought Metroid Prime was popular because ‘it was in 3d’ and figured people liked Metroid Fusion and Zero Mission because ‘of the story’. So if he combined the story and 3d, boy, would he have a hit! But Metroid Prime is liked because it has those usual Metroid mechanics (which Sakamoto thinks is ‘boring’) and Fusion and Zero Mission are liked because they were 2d (people just ignored the crappy story).
Mario, Zelda, and Metroid all are similar in that they were re-defined as a series when they went to 3d. And in all three instances, the consumers did not agree with the redefinition.
The differences in popularity in each series’ classic form masks the reaction.
Mario was more popular than Santa Clause. So when Classic Mario returns, DS and Wii sell more hardware than anything.
Zelda was not as popular as Mario. Should a Classic Zelda return, its market impact would not be as dramatic as Classic Mario.
Metroid, less popular than the other two, would have an even less market impact should its classic form be restored.
But the ‘new market’ for these redefinitions is only a fraction of the original classic form. So it makes sense that 3d Mario crowd would be larger than the Aonuma Zelda crowd and the Sakamoto Metroid crowd being last. The Sakamoto Metroid crowd is so small, it cannot support Other M. The Aonuma Zelda crowd could only support a few Zelda games as now the series is running out of market.
Should 3d Mario continue, I expect it to run out of market within the next couple of generations.
The spin-off series are not making Mario, Zelda, Metroid more popular, they are making them less popular. It cannot be denied that Mario was more popular in 2d Mario form. Zelda was more popular in Classic Zelda. And Metroid was more popular when the game wasn’t a character study on Samus Aran.
After the SNES generation, something changed in Nintendo. I think they got corrupted by the creativity myth (and the game god mythology).
What is the cure to this? I can think of only one:
Destruction of Nintendo’s market. The worse Nintendo performs increases my chances of receiving another Wii.
Malstrom's Articles News 