The walking on walls bit was disconcerting for me as well, but after watching the demo videos a couple of times I noticed that the green bar in the bottom left is a stamina bar and the wall walking is tied to it. It turns out you have a limited amount of time to do the wall walking, so anything involving it is guaranteed to be a very short affair. If I need to deal with those short segments to help Nintendo get back on the right track with Zelda, I’m willing to do so. Also, the stamina bar has the potential to create some harrowing fights, as you might not have enough to swing your sword or use another weapon against a challenging foe.
It’s also refreshing to see that despite text boxes popping up whenever you get rupees from a chest or a small key they disappear just as quickly.
I’m optimistic about this one, but I want more information about it before I fully commit to buying it.
I despise the cave drawing. Strangely, there are people who hate everything of the new Zelda except the cave drawing. The only way I can explain that is that there are definitely two groups of gamers out there. There are the normal people and then there are the freaks. The freaks are people who are not integrated with normal society. They tend to spend their free time on gaming message forums posting gifs or trying to sound witty. They buy all the consoles. They stare at computer screens all day for recreation and for work. I tend to call them the ‘hardcore’, but they are more like living in a digital cocoon. Unfortunately for us, these people have invaded Nintendo and are the ‘developers’. Since Nintendo never fires anyone, we’re stuck with people who think ‘caveman drawing’ is an ‘exciting innovation’ for Zelda. It makes me want to jump off a bridge.
I really wish Nintendo would get their heads out of their ass and stop looking at innovation from entirely a gameplay standpoint. What about content innovation? Super Mario Brothers, Legend of Zelda, and Metroid originally became popular because of their content innovation. The gameplay was duplicated with every third party company (do you know how many 2d sidescrollers there were in the 80s?). But Super Mario Brothers had the Mushroom Kingdom where you would go underground, to the sky, in the water, and in castles. Zelda and Metroid just had so much content in it compared to the games at the time which is what gave them such a high value.
With Link to the Past having the ‘Dark World’, at least that was a content based innovation. It’s another world! Ocarina of Time chose 3d to make a larger and more epic world. Contrast that to Mario 64 who chose 3d to not make a larger world but to provide more gameplay gimmicks (replaying the same stage multiple times to get a different star, how lame and boring). It is interesting how Zelda increased in sales while Mario decreased in sales despite the 3d move.
I wish Nintendo would use technology to leverage new content innovation instead of gameplay innovation. Minecraft doesn’t really offer any new gameplay. But its random world generation and how the world never ends is interesting content innovation which gives the game value.
Which novel would you rather read? A book whose innovation is about worlds, places, and people you have never seen or heard about before or a book whose innovation is about altering the rhetoric of the sentences, the words, and the phrasings of the letters? Gameplay innovation is the latter and is why the more Nintendo pursues it, the worse their sales become. Gameplay is the ‘style’ of gaming, but it is not the substance.
With Mario selling well in various gameplay incarnations, only arrogance would say that it proves ‘new gameplay modes’ are what sells the game. What it actually shows is that the substance of Mario, i.e. Mushroom Land, sells despite the gameplay mode from racing to RPGs. Content is king.