Email: “Platforming does not belong in Zelda. That is for Mario to handle.”

I wonder how he feels about Skyward Sword having 3D Mario’s rotten leftovers

It doesn’t get worse than those sections which are timed platform puzzles from hell.

 

I haven’t seen that part. Just watching that gave me a headache!

You’re going against a narrative. The narrative is that Zelda 2 is the ‘Black Sheep of the Zelda Family’. There are narratives all the time around us. They are heavily present in the news. The problem is that these are video games which are silly fun things. No one should care if someone likes one game over another or that someone doesn’t like a game everyone else is supposed to like. They’re just games. They are not life or death.

You have to understand that if narrative that Zelda 2 is not the ‘Black Sheep of the Zelda family’, that it was made up (by whom? By Nintendo devs), it creates a big problem. There is an emotional block I’m running against that no one wants to believe that Nintendo devs are capable of being selfish and making games for themselves. Maybe it is because we have successfully demonized other game companies from EA to Activision that a reverse of ‘angel-ization’ occurs with companies like Nintendo. I have to laugh when people say “Nintendo is not corporate.” Nintendo’s most admired third party company is actually EA. They love EA because EA brings in so much money (though it might have changed to Activision lately).

When Yamauchi ran Nintendo, you got a very different sort of games than what we get today. Iwata is known to say, “It is not the programmer’s job to tell the designer how the game should be.” I suspect this is opening the doors to tons of crazy shit from Metroid: Other M to Spirit Tracks that Yamauchi would never have approved. But who does tell the designer what to do?

I do.

And so does the incredible reader. The customers ultimately are the kings in the video game market. Disinterest is not expressed as much as interest is. So let us express it.

The ‘Zelda 2 is the Black Sheep’ thing really has nothing to do with Zelda 2. Everyone knows Zelda 2 is a great game including Nintendo. Zelda 2 must be the black sheep in order to legitimize Aonuma’s Zeldas. Zelda 2 is the antithesis of EVERYTHING Aonuma Zelda stands for. Zelda 2 has arcade action swashbuckling. Zelda 2 has hard RPG elements like leveling up and experience points. If Zelda 2 is a Zelda, then WTF is Aonuma Zelda? Aonuma Zelda is something alien. Aonuma Zelda is as much as a mainline Zelda game as Hyrule Warriors is. Aonuma Zeldas always feel like bad spin-offs made by a third party company. They are not masterpieces. No one has ever described an Aonuma Zelda as a masterpiece. And before Aonuma stepped in, every Zelda game was considered a masterpiece. NOT out of nostalgia. They were considered a masterpiece on RELEASE, and they have stood the test of time.

Zelda 2 is the most contradictory of the Aonuma direction so that is why it gets hit with the big hammer. Notice other parts of Classic Zelda games get hit with ‘little hammers’. The arcade combat of Zelda 1 and LTTP? Can’t have that. The way how Classic Zelda revolves around the sword? Can’t have that. The way how dungeons are like vast mazes with few if no puzzles? Can’t have that. The lack of handholding? Can’t have that.

Classic Zelda wasn’t wrong then, and it is not wrong today. But in order for Aonuma Zelda to be validated, they MUST be considered wrong. It is exactly like Sakamoto validating Other M by saying the lack of dialogue/story in the early Metroids was fine for its time but is *wrong*. It is *wrong* only because he filled Other M up with tons of dialogue and story.

Don’t you all see? Instead of Nintendo trying to make games to live up to the heights of the classics, they trash the classics instead. Everyone is either poisoned by ‘nostalgia’ (what Nintendo used to say) but now they say how *wrong* the original games are. Really? I’d much rather do another playthrough of an early Zelda game instead of anything Aonuma has made.

Since there is more awareness of this, I don’t think Nintendo can do that anymore. Notice how Nintendo tried to say how great Other M was and that games like Super Metroid aren’t really all that great? That “it was time for change”. Says who? Says Sakamoto. But Sakamoto doesn’t buy Metroid games, we do.

I don’t suffer from this emotional block of unwilling to believe Nintendo devs to be selfish and want to make games for themselves because I saw them cease making 2d Mario for a minimum of 16 years! The most popular video game ever made, and Nintendo just ‘stopped it’ because “Wah! Wah! I don’t want to make it anymore!”