Wait... what do you mean by Zelda falling over in your last post? Personally I think it's been getting better with Breath of the Wild on the horizon, but I just wanna know what makes you feel it's so.
I’ve kind of had a falling out with the Zelda series over the past few years. The last Zelda game that I’ve had an incentive to play again was probably The Wind Waker, and even then I had some problems with the game that do keep me from going back to it right over again. I think that it’s a sense of focus that had me really lose a lot of interesting.
I’m one of the people who thinks that Zelda should be a series about exploration. It’s not about the destination, but the journey getting there. Unfortunately, in almost every main series Zelda game, things seem to become more streamlined with less incentive to actually explore. Twilight Princess focused more on story than gameplay I think, using (mostly) characters that we’ve already seen in a plot that we’ve already done. If you’re going to give us a Zelda story and have the game rely on it, you’re going to need something different than “Ganon is taking over the world so go collect the macguffins to stop him”
Think about how long it takes modern Zelda games to actually get started because they got so much plot to tell. In the first game, you get your sword in the cave and you’re free. 10 seconds. In A Link to the Past, you go through the sanctuary and then you’re free. About 10-15 minutes. In Ocarina of Time, you need to go through the Deku Tree and listen to the guy’s story, and then you’re free. About an hour.
And then came Wind Waker. First you need to get the hero’s outfit. Then you need to get the sword. Go save Tetra. Get the shield. Play a frustrating as hell minigame on the boat. Go through the Forsaken Fortress, one of the worst dungeons in the series. (As an aside, can we please remove these stealth missions from Zelda games. They’re always the worst part of the game). Then you end up on Windfall Island. Grind for ruppees to get the sail. Then sail for awhile until you hit Dragon Roost Island. Annoying bomb placements to the Ruto Village. Use Medli to get to Dragon Roost dungeon. Go through this surprisingly long dungeon. Get the Wind Waker. Sail for even longer to get to the Forest Haven. Go through the Forest Dungeon, another surprisingly long dungeon. And then, finally you can freely sail the great sea - the biggest advertised feature of the game. This takes about 3 hours if you know what you’re doing. If Wind Waker started with you being able to freely sail the Great Sea within 15 minutes, then it might have been my favorite game of all time.
But that’s the direction they continued to go with for games like Twilight Princess. And when Twilight Princess did open up, I didn’t get much incentive to explore. Besides like 2-4 bugs, what was really in Twilight Princess’s Hyrule forest?
I’ll admit that I haven’t played Skyward Sword, but that’s largely because everything that I’ve heard about it makes me think that I wouldn’t like it. A large explore able world with nothing in it? Saying “Ocarina of Time, but bigger” doesn’t make a better Zelda game. Saying “The Wind Waker, but with more useless islands” doesn’t make a better game. And then there are the helpers. A helper that only makes the game more frustrating because “3D Zelda games have to have that because Ocarina did.”
The helpers didn’t even work well in Ocarina of Time. I recently replayed Ocarina, and I know exactly why people hate Kapora Gabora - he literally tells you nothing except what you already know, and tells you to do what you’re already doing. The Deku Tree tells you to go to Hyrule Castle. The owl says that you need to go to Hyrule Castle. You’re in the Castle courtyard, he tells you that the princess is in the castle. You get a magic song, he tells you that there are other magic songs (even though you’ve learned 3 others already). He tells you that the Zoras will only open up for Zelda’s lullaby… after you’ve figured out that Darunia will only open up for Zelda’ lullaby… without help, on your own.
While the personalities of the helpers got better (except, from what I hear, for Fi), the idea never did. The games also got a lot easier, despite trying to be more and more mature. Ever boss has obvious telegraphed weak spots that are vulnerable to the item that you find in the dungeon. I also replayed A Link to the Past recently. Do you know how many bosses, out of 12, require you to use the item found within the dungeon to beat them in that game? 1. Besides needing to defeat Arrghus with the hookshot, each boss needs an item found outside the dungeon. It might sound a bit counter-intuitive, but Zelda bosses are better when this is the case because it adds to what the games are about.
If you want a good example of this, compare the Goht boss battle in the original Majora’s Mask to the one in the 3DS battle. In that one, they add an eye to Goht’s back to act as a weak point. In the original, you just keep rolling at him and never have to break momentum. Because they wanted to add “Zelda conventions” to a boss that originally didn’t have it, they made the boss worse.
From what I’ve heard about Breath of the Wild, it seems to be really good. A more open world experience is exactly what the series needs, in my opinion. I just hope, you know… we don’t get five hours of story and unskippable cutscenes before we’re allowed to explore it. And you know, there are things to find and do there.
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