BulletPoints - Link to Better Games

When you’re someone who is considered a Nintendo fan, you have to learn to accept certain things as part of the package deal. You have to learn you need to overlook the poor naming scheme of the consoles. The names are only getting worse, and in the way which it becomes harder to find said device (see New 3DS) online because Google doesn’t fully understand New 3DS means the new New 3DS console, not just a new 3DS console.

It also means you have to accept the fact that certain properties, despite how old and tired they are will never change. Mario will always save Peach, fight Bowser, and jump into pits. Meanwhile, Link will never speak, he’ll always find a boomerang, and generally fight a big bloated pig-monster in the name of Zelda, Hyrule, or whatever. A few times Link fights other things, but most of the time we’re dealing with Ganon again. And while the Hyrule Historia and the role of Demise from Skyward Sword explain why that is, a bit, it doesn’t excuse the lack of creativity.

I’m one of few Nintendo fans who can happily say that I (on average) don’t give a single shit about Zelda games and generally don’t like playing them. This isn’t to say I think Zelda games are a complete waste of existence. I love the music from these games. I love the creatures you encounter in these games (usually). I actually think the expanded lore of the world and design of specific areas is pretty impressive. I find the change in art style from game to game a unique take on game design that few can get away with so easily. And I wouldn’t have such an issue with the story if they’d shake things up once in a while. Maybe attempt more Majora’s Mask style games instead of more Ocarina of Time style games.

What always kills the Zelda games for me would be the gameplay. From an action-game perspective, it’s slow, sluggish, and not all that engaging. This is why Hyrule Warriors was such a nice change of pace (even if it was outclassed by much better action games). From a puzzle-game standpoint, the puzzles are fairly rudimentary and pale in comparison to true challenges like Silent Hill 2 or Portal which are either mental puzzles or physics puzzles. Zelda is most just timing puzzles or block-sliding puzzles which have never really been fun… ever.

Zelda gets the adventure-game aspect down fairly well. But I want a more open-world style of game akin to Skyrim or Saints Row or even the original Legend of Zelda. Most Zelda games are insanely linear despite showing off this big epic world for you to explore. And Link Between Worlds was a valiant attempt to take things back in that direction, though not without stumbling a little bit. After all, certain dungeons need certain items to be beaten, so you still need to do them in a certain order unless you have all the money to buy all the items from the outset (which you won’t).

In short, Zelda is a mix of game-design ideas that never really seem to sit well for me because it never does any of them as well as games dedicated to those genres. It’s like Zelda is trying to be a jack of all trades, but a master of none, which leaves for a rather mediocre experience in general. Surely, the best thing to do would be to capitalize on one aspect in a Zelda game to make each more special, unique, and interesting. And, to a degree, I’d say they’ve come close a few times.

In Wind Waker, they doubled down on the Adventure-game style approach if a big sprawling ocean to explore. But the big ocean turned some people away and the linearity didn’t help it much either. On a puzzle-perspective, Four Swords was unique in its attempt to push for four-player simultaneous puzzle solving, beating Portal 2 to the co-op puzzle scene by a good handful of years. Only problem here is that the game required so many bits and pieces to be bought to actually make the Four Swords game work with multiplayer you wonder why they even bothered in the first place. And we already discussed how Hyrule Warriors was the action game rep that did its job well enough, but was kicked in the ass by Bayonetta 2 only mere seconds later.

So what can be done to improve Zelda? What can be done to make Zelda more interesting and fun again? Let’s take a look at individual aspects and see how they function and what they could do to learn and improve upon them.

The combat is one of the biggest problems. It really isn’t that engaging. And maybe part of that is the recent focus on Wii-Motion controls being integral to gameplay. But even before that, I never really felt like the combat in a Zelda game was all that enthralling. You lock on, wave your sword around until it’s dead, and that’s it. Sometimes you shield, but it wasn’t too big an issue and you could shield as long as you want. Looking at this, Zelda combat seems like a very child-friendly easy version of what Dark Souls eventually pushed for and succeeded with.

Combat is incredibly tough, but fair and it’s very engaging because you’re trying to avoid attacks, find openings, look for weak spots, and time your strikes and blocks accordingly to manage your stamina properly. Both styles are very methodical in their approach of slower pace and looking for weak points. But Dark Souls feels more rewarding and engaging because of its difficulty and how it requires more management of your actions. Every decision has weight and you have to plan your attack strategy carefully or die again.

Puzzles are the next big issue in any Zelda game that need tweaking. It’s easy to just say “fuck these shit puzzles” and not put them in games. But an elaborate dungeon without some kind of logic-defying puzzle just being there without explanation would be like a baby not crying for breasts. So, fine, let’s assume we need to have puzzles to appease the squid-monsters that live inside our brain and find a solution that merely improves them instead of obliterating them.

I won’t just say, “Copy Dark Souls,” again by utilizing their hidden-mechanism puzzles to activate thing. That’s really not a puzzle, but more of point-n-click game where you have to find the spot that progresses your game. Instead, let’s try making puzzles more worth doing. Looking at Silent Hill again, puzzles were all about using clues and piecing together information to find solutions to complex word problems/puzzles. So why not have that? You already have a musical instrument you can use for music-based puzzles (in most games). And there are several other items that can work too. You can then make puzzles that give items use in dungeons outside of the one you found them in so that hookshot doesn’t just sit around gathering dust all adventure.

Alternatively, there’s the Portal approach (and you can do both if you want). But with this, you make physics based challenges, you already have the building (push) blocks to do just that. Instead of having you just push blocks, why not have them and other objects (ragdolls even) work as weights for certain puzzles? Why not use arrows to move particular objects? Why not have the grappling hook function like it did in Wind Waker, forcing some kind of momentum-based puzzle/platforming? There are plenty of ways to use items and concepts that already exist in the game to expand the scope of the puzzles for a Zelda game.

But to go farther, you can obviously add new elements to make the puzzles make more sense. We’re in a world of magic and wonder. The ability for Link to cast spells and other types of magic to perform more complex puzzles would certainly be a welcome change. This would give Link more things he could do beyond smacking things with a sword or hammer. But now that we bring it up let’s get to the adventure aspect of a typical Zelda game adventure.

We basically need more things to do in a Zelda game. The new Zelda WiiU looks to be aiming for that specifically. But let’s assume it fails or doesn’t live up to the hype so we can speculate precisely what we want to see. First off, I want options beyond straight-up warrior combat. I want to cast magic and stealth around. For a truly open world and open ended experience, I want options on how to tackle challenges, puzzles, dungeons, and bosses. This is what made Deus Ex great. It really is what made all sorts of open-world game great because you could tackle challenges in the ways you felt most capable of doing (within reason). Plus these new abilities and skills would give players more types of things to do.

But aside from that, I really just want Hyrule to function like the world of Skyrim. I want to be able to go anywhere I can see and explore for hours, getting lost on sidequests and strange new lands instead of being stuck to a linear plot of dungeon, princess, dungeon, princess, dungeon, ganondorf, princess. When you have such a big world out there and you aren’t really encouraged to explore it, then it feels like a waste of space. Zelda WiiU looks to be changing that and I hope it truly is because that has my attention right now.

That’s all I have for this week for explaining my issues with the Legend of Zelda series. It has a lot of potential to be something bigger and better and I’d love to see it try and get there. In the meantime, I’ll try and enjoy the unique gem that is Majora’s Mask for the 3DS. Come back soon for more amazing content and be sure to like, share, comment, and subscribe if you enjoyed the aforementioned complaints about Legend of Zelda. See ya next time!