Legend of Zelda A critique on Zelda

http://tevisthompson.com/saving-zelda/

This article really articulates very well why I was dissatisfied with skyward Sword and each successive zelda game after link's awakening.

It's a long read, but the author is very critical of the scope of the world in each zelda game after zelda 2.

There is really some magic there; Zelda has not survived so long by chance. The pleasures it first offered – those that come with being an explorer, a pathfinder and labyrinth conqueror, a fighter and survivor, a finder of secrets – remain completely viable in modern games. They’re just not present in modern Zeldas. Instead, we are given an unconvincing world, unfocused gameplay, unsatisfying difficulty, and an unnecessary story. Skyward Sword is guilty of all of this and more, and yet as the proclaimed future direction of the series, it is unapologetic. This is Zelda, they say, and you can hardly remember a time when it was much different.

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Read this last night, I agree with some of what he says in principle but I heartily LOLd at holding the original on such a pedestal while lobbing so much criticism at LTTP and the 3D games, the 3D games were going fine until Wind Waker.

He only briefly touched on it but I believe the core problem is more the shift of power from Miyamoto to Aonuma, I think Aonuma is more of a good storyteller than a game designer, hence the games becoming more cinematic while making more and more game design blunders. I don't agree that a linear game is inherently bad, it is a necessity to focus on plot and games that are very linear like Metal Gear Solid and Final Fantasy are also excellent, but Zelda does have a problem where they try to give you an illusion of it being otherwise and the way you can see through it is frustrating and makes you feel like you're doing chores.

The games also increasingly have rhythm problems which he mentioned as they have more of a stop and go element, this has been creeping for a while but really reached the breaking point in Skyward Sword. The game is -constantly- interrupting you, there's slow unskippable text, Fi has to comment on everything, cutscenes happen for things that shouldn't have cutscenes, camera has to zoom in on things because they assume you're too stupid to notice it yourself- not only is this all insulting to your intelligence, it breaks the flow of the game. This is something I will applaud the original for, no assistant, no constant interruptions. "It's dangerous to go alone, take this" and then it's you vs the monsters. There is also gameplay implications for this mentality that he goes over, but it is far less egregious than the times the game literally takes control away from the player for no ****ing reason.

While I would appreciate a more open world with secrets and such, I'm not sure "bomb every wall and burn every bush in the world until you find the next dungeon" is the way to go about it, the praise for the original LoZ here is unwarranted. If Skyward Sword has fallen too far in one direction on the spectrum, the original Zelda is equally at fault being on the complete opposite end. Games like LTTP, LA, OoT, and MM were able to find a good happy medium, they just need to get back to that balance. I think having a semi-open world where SOME areas are restricted for later is a good compromise, you don''t get a sense of progression if everything is literally available from the beginning. I also love the way Super Metroid and Metroid Prime do this, there is an obvious path that you can follow, but there are also many ways to break it if you choose to do so.

I also have to question whether or not being a big budget AAA series is actually a good thing at this point. Skyward Sword is a very cacophonic game, there are some great ideas that are then completely countered by something else. Running and leaping when you're climbing? Good improvements to the flow of gameplay, while there are about 10 things added in that slow the game down even more. There isn't a single, coherent design philosophy anymore, could it be that there are too many voices in the room now? Looking at my favorite games in the series, I don't think giving a massive team 5 years to make a Zelda game has produced the best results, the better games to me were more impromptu and concise.

I skimmed that yesterday. The author has some points, but the article is so overwrought as to basically be unreadable.

It's laughable for him to suggest that every Zelda game since the original has gotten worse. Yeah, the 3D ones have made some mistakes (big ones at times), but things didn't get really bad until Skyward Sword. They basically gutted all the improvements in 3D gameplay, like L-targeting and camera control, to cram motion controls down our throat. That makes me very pessimistic about the direction of Zelda in the future, and gaming in general is this whole motion control thing continues.

I think Skyward Sword had enormous potential, I don't want to generalize the entire game being bad because some aspects of its design were out of control. There's still something very good there underneath all of the bad game design, they just need to stop and think about where they're going for a bit and focus their direction better.

Maybe reading too much into it but I also think the insistence on using motion controls where not necessary is Iwata meddling, this even happened in DKCR and I know western developers were NOT thinking "no CC support and forcing motion controls for wiichuk when there are unused buttons is a GREAT idea", I'm 99.99% certain that was forced on them by NCL. There's clearly a directive at Nintendo I think about hawking motion controls wherever possible and this needs to stop if they want to regain their form, let your game designers design games, marketing people.

The funny thing is that this is pretty much exactly why square isn't good anymore, they could have survived firing Sakaguchi as they had a lot of great talent, but their marketing heads have too much creative control in their games now

I have not yet played Skyward Sword, but I imagine that it's very similar to Twilight Princess in that it generally seems dull and uninspired, but has a few moments of glory.
Despite that, I can see where the editor is coming from, but at the same time, I don't.

The guy's definitely right on a lot of aspects about what's killing Zelda--and modern gaming--in general. It's something I've been complaining about for a while not, too: scripting. Though, I think he should've made a distinction between ALttP and more modern Zeldas, as not all linearity is similar in nature.

In ALttP, its path and flow is generally pre-determined, but there definitely does exist a difference between a game whose world shamelessly prevaricates itself as non-deterministic when it's really just a deceptively large vacuum like in TP, and one that doesn't pretend to present a massively open-ended game, but justifies its quasi-linearity with strengths in other areas. In ALttP's case, its justification lied in the fact that you had to at least legitimately make an effort to deduce your options to discover the correct path, instead of having the isolated path be laid bare for you like in TP and SS.

Most modern gaming is responsible for doing this crap, some are just better at masking it than others. Then, conversely, there are games whose worlds are so open-ended that the game loses focus and the objective typically entails aimlessly meandering a world of "much mystery" but little splendor. It's definitely a temperamental balance to be achieved, so I can't bust balls too much, but the almost five-year repetition of the same mistakes is deserving of a little criticism, I think.

I still stand by my word that a lot of games in recent years possess an impressive degree of engineering, but a sorely lamentable lack of depth. Space used is becoming more important than use of space, which is especially true of TP and SS.

I think everyone is too accustomed to the thrill they got the first time and everything else cannot seem to compare to an old memory.

That's pretty much never the case for me, I think Mega Man X is the only time the first game from a series has remained my favorite. I never liked the "nostalgia goggles" argument, especially in a case like this where he does lay out a lot of valid criticism, it's lazy to just dismiss it like that.

Xeylode said:

I think everyone is too accustomed to the thrill they got the first time and everything else cannot seem to compare to an old memory.

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What Etecoon said.

To this day I still keep playing old SNES games that I never got around to when I was a kid, and I legitimately enjoy them far more than most modern games being siphoned from the chapped teats of the industry. 80% of my favorite iterations of a given series have been played later in my life rather than earlier.

Some people just have an acute awareness when playing games and can detect subtle flaws that compound into a big one. The rose-tinted glasses contrivance is too old and too common to have not encouraged new-school critics to revisit their past "loves" and objectively evaluate them for what they really are. I'm personally perfectly willing to admit when a particular game was poorly-designed and my fond memories just obscured the truth of its quality (see: Mystic Quest), but in most cases, it's not just nostalgia. Whether a person likes a game or not is up to them, but whether or not the game meets a design criterion is demonstrable, e.g. living in a cardboard box may behoove some weird breed of folks, but one can openly critique where it fails as a living space, which can be likened to the comparison between old and new school Zelda.

This is also the true of me, LA is my second favorite game in this series and I never played it until 2006. SMRPG is the only SNES RPG I played "back in the day" but Chrono Trigger and FFVI are still two of my favorite games. Never had DKC2 as a kid in spite of loving the original and yet I still consider DKC2 my favorite platformer, I love Mega Man 2 and 3 but I never played them until MMAC came out(2005 IIRC), I have lots of other examples...

To add to the nostalgia factor;
It's pretty widely accepted that if Zelda was not a long running series and OoT came out today as its first title, it would get high sixties. However, the nostalgia goggles cloud over the game's flaws (simple combat, huge empty spaces, bugs, low production values) and make people believe it's the best game ever.
I enjoy OoT as much as the next person, but MM and WW are much more "innovative".

That is not widely accepted at all, and there are games that have those same flaws that are highly regarded(SotC is considered a masterpiece by many with simple combat, WAY worse huge empty spaces, buggyness everywhere, shoddy controls...).

FFVII usually is mentioned in the same breath as OoT on this subject, the character models are too lego-ish, the general MIDI is too lo fi, the battle system is old and obtuse, the characters aren't really that great etc and that people just love it because of nostalgia. I didn't own a playstation until 2004 and I ****ing loved it. I don't think great games magically become bad or obsolete over time, the production values becoming outdated doesn't take away from everything else these games did well...and to some extent that aesthetic can even be appreciated, people still make games with pixelated graphics out of artistic choice too(Cave Story is a great game if you haven't played it)

Games, just like any other art or entertainment, have to be considered in their era. In 1998, OoT was special, and it should be remembered for that. At the same time, there have definitely been better games since (and I would say better Zelda games as well), so it's kind of crazy to continue calling it "The Greatest Game of All Time."

(Cave Story is a great game if you haven't played it)

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I indeed have. It's probably my favorite indie game.

R h y m e said:

I indeed have. It's probably my favorite indie game.

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technically any nintendo game is an "indie" game since everything is done in house and without the assistance of any publisher.

All I can say is, the following games were actually enjoyable to me:

Link's awakening/DX (I like it due to the whole freedom / exploration factor)
Ocarina of time (though not hard, was fun fun and full of exploration)
Majora's mask (thought it was amazing; I just loved all the content to the last mask)
Oracle of Ages + Seasons (I thought both were amazing and just as good as LA)
link to the past (seemed enjoyable; maybe not on the same level as LA/oracle games.)


beyond that, none of the other games were that memorable or fun to me like the above ones, whether due to difficulty or lack of secrets etc. Too bad for me I guess. At least there's Metroid Prime.

Vionce said:

technically any nintendo game is an "indie" game since everything is done in house and without the assistance of any publisher.

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One person made Cave Story.

Kinda dilutes the term "independent" to apply it to the biggest corporate videogame publisher in the world.