ILX Plays: The Legend of Zelda for NES

Zelda was good because of the mystery.

I guess I disagree here. I see Zelda, from the very beginning, as being more about romance than mystery, and in that respect OOT and Majora's Mask are completely natural evolutions. Given the ability to tell a richer story, that was the route Zelda had to go, and I think OOT and MM get the balance just about right.

kinda felt bad about blowing up the triceratops

I think we said this already on one of the poll threads, but it does seem a shame that there was never a third NES Zelda. The first game is three years into the Famicom life cycle, and the sequel was only a year later (!) - before the first game had even gotten its North American release! It would have been great to see a circa 1990 game that takes it back to basics but with the richer graphics and world --- the SMB3/CV3 equivalent. None of the Zelda-inspired games really did it for me - I just wanted more Zelda for crying out loud.

Still deeply annoyed about the guys I lived with in Columbus accidentally ("accidentally") leaving the house with my LTTP cart when we were all moving out three years ago. Not that it's massively rare or anything, just, y'know. Principle of the thing! At least they also got stuck with shitty Jurassic Park, and I made it out clean with Super Metroid and Yoshi's Island.

zelda oot is faultless

link to the past is the best zelda, followed by majora's mask.

@thomp - thats sort of interesting to me. i think the exploration in this game isnt that great tbh but i enjoy wandering around the hyrule of lttp. part of the problem is that color palette for a lot of screens is unappealing to me, theres too much brown. theres also a lot of empty screens which probably made the world seem larger in 1986 but just makes running around hyrule take too long now.

i will say that i generally like collecting heart pieces and finding random hidden items of little practical value (nice cape) more than i enjoy the dungeons of most of the zeldas.

as has been noted above, it's hard to believe how many of the standard rpg tropes began with zelda. minimaps, dungeon puzzles, push the brick to unearth the secret, boomerangs, lore...

- I had a hard time finding level 2. You need to take a left from a room that looks generic and has four exits.
- 2nd level is pretty simple. No staircase in it -- I checked a guide to make sure I wasn't missing anything.
- The level numbers are something the player can see but Link can't. Not that they really matter.
- Darknuts sure are hard. The room late in the game where you need to kill all the blue darknuts might be the hardest room of any Zelda game.
- This game starts out around the center of the bottom edge of a rectangular map. I wonder how designers decide on starting locations. Perhaps starting on an edge constrains the initial directional choices. Here's the starting points of the next games:
II: near the top left of an irregular map
ALTTP: center of a square
Link's Awakening: bottom left of a square
ALTTP seems like the odd one out.

i like how fast you can travel. if u need to get to the next dungeon and it is all the way across the map it will still only take you a minute to fly through 8 or so screens.

really appreciate being able to keep everything even after you die. encourages exploration.

also my B attack defaulting to the boomerang after i ran out of bombs. how considerate, Nintendo.

Even LTTP has almost too much story/dialogue

waaaaay too much of the latter. u cd cut every line after yr uncle bites it and the game would make perfect sense in dumbshow

i like the game boy one a lot. ofc it's also the only one i played as a kid for more than a minute

the sprite work in these games is pretty beautiful. the og one has the most appalling 2-bit Nintendo color scheme, lttp is objectively as good looking as any game ever made

i made a rule for myself whereby i can only play games i can find physical copies of, even if on an emulator, so instead of playing this i am going to go play landstalker probably

u cd cut every line after yr uncle bites it and the game would make perfect sense in dumbshow

i might extend it to the moment you exit the sewers with zelda but yeah definitely somewhere around here is the delineation point between an okay, overwordy script and probably the 15-30 minutes of absolute peak-zelda in terms of atmosphere and plot-integration: please help me. i am a prisoner in the dungeon of the castle. my name is zelda... i'm going out a while, link. [alternately: i'm going out a while, FUCKBALLS.] don't leave the house. the roar of rain on the roof. louder outside. (and beautiful. the snes showing off.) go home, kid!

after yr uncle dies (press B, then release it using the secret technique handed down by our people! FUCKBALLS, you can do it!) the best stuff in lttp is, absolutely, dumbshow: stepping into the master sword's clearing for the first time as woodland creatures scatter; the monkey clambering up the vine-encrusted temple facade to flip the switch for you; the flute boy gently petrifying. these moments are what put it at the top i think, tho arguments exist for link's awakening (unusual focus, weirdo atmosphere), majora's mask (formal ambition), and wind waker (gorgeous, swashbuckling). the lttp dumbshow is cinematic in the real sense: just images and movement. people are awful gassy in the 3D games. (i am firmly of generation ocarina and when i was 10 i thought the time-travel refinements it made to lttp's palimpsest world were just awesome and epic and even poignant--the way he winds up back in the garden at the end, etc--but nowadays lttp seems obviously better, simpler, more direct: light and dark, order and ruin. speaking of palimpsests and ruin, was ff6 before or after lttp?)

wordy stuff from various wise men aside, lttp's cinema is totally in the spirit of zelda 1 imo, not just because they share a pov but because zelda 1 contains primitive examples of the same kind of cinema: dungeon doors sliding open, stairs appearing, that kind of thing. (my favorite moment is when you get the raft and set off from one of the docks. all this country you've ranged over, and then the vertiginous thrill of setting to sea. landing somewhere else. PALPATING ITS PEBBLES TASTING THE PANIC AND SPLENDOR OF THE EVENT FEELING IN THE PIT OF ONE'S STOMACH THE SEPARATION FROM TERRA THESE FORM THE MOST ROMANTIC SENSATION AN EXPLORER HAS EVER KNOWN STOP.) these are all very brief moments of course, but most of lttp's "cutscenes" aren't much longer. and the reason the flute boy's transformation is the best-remembered one is that it has the least to do with the plot. cinema in zelda should imo be in the spirit of miyamoto's elemental boy-finds-a-cave premise: it should be stuff link sees, stuff he finds, weird stuff, scary stuff, sad stuff. zelda 1's hyrule is unpopulated and wild and way more dangerous than say ocarina's hyrule field, but because it's not as straight-up hostile as zelda 2--you don't dread long trips--crossing it feels like a lonely ramble. (a little like lord of the rings, another product of walks.) my ideal zelda is about that kind of a ramble--finding caves, finding rivers, fencing dangerous wildlife and haggling with hermits--while also witnessing, and taking glancing part in, strange and troubling events. like here's a word zelda should embrace: vignette. in 8th grade i maintained a small zelda fansite and wrote analyses of zelda in the unused back of the school paper.

a great thing about z1 (and the best, plot-lightest parts of lttp) is the seamlessness: except for teleporting to the surface of each dungeon after grabbing a triforce piece, the game just flows up mountains and down into caves and through layers of dungeon and into boss rooms and out again uninterruptedly, without any change of interface or stage-one/stage-two boundary, link swishing his sword without pause. metroid another series that made great, groundbreaking use of this. mario never did. (though if jumping through paintings involved a little less menu-navigation, mario 64 might qualify.) 3D zeldas were constantly interrupting you for lavish camera-capturing cutscenes, or fading to black, bethesda-style, when you opened a door.

I had some okay times with OOT and think very very highly of Majora's Mask, but I basically agree. Even LTTP has almost too much story/dialogue (but maybe just enough, and I think the elaboration of dungeon puzzles was a fine move); there's something about the first game that makes me think it really has a lot more in common with Mario than it might seem. Like, this is not a game waiting to become something richer, more dramatic and story-driven than it is: what you want to do is pop it in and be swinging your sword at some Moblins. Mario 64 'got it,' but the N64 Zeldas, despite being great games, maybe don't quite grasp "Zelda" as well as they might have.

― Doctor Casino, Wednesday, December 2, 2015 10:42 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

You all might want to check out this article?

http://www.gamnesia.com/articles/dear-sequelitis-theres-no-definitive-zelda-formula-its-about-finding-the-ba

In the video in question, Egoraptor is kinda yelly and stuff (he is a popular youtube personality, after all) but he makes some reasonable points about game design. I think the article as a rebuttal makes some better ones, but the whole debate ties in nicely with the discussion here.

a little like lord of the rings, another product of walks

this is a great link i had never thought of and i have been grinning and going 'huhh' for like a full minute

evan i got halfway through the first sentence of that article and no, we all do not want to check out that article, what the hell is wrong with you

There is something to be said for letting the epicness of the quest speak for itself, and there are certainly parts of Ocarina that beat you over the head with this. I tend to ignore cutscenes about the Triforce and goddesses, which feel too far removed from the action to be at all interesting. In general I would say the weakest thing about story in Zelda is not the characters or dialogue, it's the unnecessary framing, the suggestion that Link's quest is cyclical, that he's a boy of destiny, which on one level functions as an acknowledgment that these are franchise games with a repeated formula, but can also lead to this kind of excessive literalism:

http://www.zeldadungeon.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/ZeldaTimeline3.png

feel like dlh otm. i have never played through OOT though, something I should probably remedy ASAP. I hear so many good things about it. lol ive seen Sequelitis it has some good points but yes it hails from the hallowed YT video game critic tradition of YELLING EVERYTHING LOUDLY

lol, god help us (re: that timeline). one of those series where you sort of wish they didn't have the iconic elements (link + zelda + ganon + triforce + master sword) because they were starting to really become burdensome. i did a short, goofy paper in grad school picking up on this stuff particularly with relation to the geography of hyrule, which had relevance for semi-contemporary architectural concerns about indeterminacy, iteration, "anexact-yet-rigorous" sets, etc. it also had to do with the overlapping space of the dungeons packed underneath the landscape. fun, silly little project....

but yeah, what if the only thing they'd kept in the "legend of zelda" series had been... zelda? or zelda+triforce? so 3 you would have played some farmer with a bow and arrow, 4 would have been a monk with a staff...i don't know, just an idea. love the idea of series based in quality, confidence in production value: this label means it'll be a great action-oriented exploration game.

re: minimaps, dungeon puzzles, push the brick to unearth the secret, boomerangs, lore...

thing is, none of this comes from zelda (well, except boomerangs maybe). ultima was up to IV, wizardry was up to III, first bard's tale was out. i'd have to defer to crpgaddict on tracing exactly which features come from exactly which games, but i'm PRETTY sure the major stuff here was all in place, and those games were definitely known and popular with japanese gamer nerds! tokihiro naito's hydlide had already made the translation to a top-down action format - it just wasn't very fun or sophisticated. the genius of zelda is solving those problems, getting less stat-oriented but more satisfying in the action, with wayyy better level design, better control, infinitely better combat etc.

love the discussion of the script density in LTTP. great posts dlh. (and yes it's way before final fantasy VI (1991 vs 1994).)

lttp is objectively as good looking as any game ever made

Totally agree with this, by the way. LTTP and Wind Waker are the best looking of these games.

wd read dr casino's paper

re that timeline: i spent an hour on the zelda wiki, about a month ago, reading about the 'timeline', and i came to the conclusion that the people who play videogames don't deserve videogames

yeah, that era of 16 bit gaming basically locks down the way i want games to look, then and forever. see also ten thousand odes to pixel art and stuff but basically i want my video games brightly colored, carefully but not fussily detailed, with big expressive sprites. i think chrono trigger takes this a step further than LTTP in terms of detail, atmosphere, and basically "special effects." but LTTP is magnificent no question. seiken densetsu 3 and FF6 get more detailed and 'tough' looking which fits their epic quest vibes, but imo isn't near as pleasant to look at.

it also had to do with the overlapping space of the dungeons packed underneath the landscape.

want to hear more about that! so if you compare the layout of the dungeons with the space "above" them in the overworld, what does it look like? do any of the dungeons come close to each other in the underground space?

why are the games where he's a kid on the "adult timeline" and vice versa?

i just don't understand this series

It's amusing to me that the lake in Hyrule features not one but two evil island dungeons, basically right next to each other.

evan i got halfway through the first sentence of that article and no, we all do not want to check out that article, what the hell is wrong with you

― thwomp (thomp), Thursday, December 3, 2015 9:37 AM (59 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

?? OK. Is it the fact that it involves a discussion around a hard to bear nerd celeb? Maybe don't watch that video then. Otherwise it's a similar conversation. It's relevant.

xx-post: The timeline splits after Ocarina of Time, into the adult timeline, which is what the game shows, and a kid timeline, where kid Link manages to avoid the whole thing, and then goes missing in Termina.

rmde at timelines, plots, plotholes, etc. i cant believe how hung up people get on that crap. they need every single plot point explained, there is no room for their own personal imagination, or interpretation.

it also allows people to say "this thing in the game is unnecessary" because it doesn't connect directly and literally to the main narrative. as if there was anything necessary about a video game. as if the game didn't exist to be merely played but to instead accurately detail the adventures of the player character avatar.

it also had to do with the overlapping space of the dungeons packed underneath the landscape.

want to hear more about that! so if you compare the layout of the dungeons with the space "above" them in the overworld, what does it look like? do any of the dungeons come close to each other in the underground space?

― Karl Malone, Thursday, December 3, 2015 3:34 PM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3uzz1xlaqU

Argh, so what was wrong with the link? Does it not also discuss the emphasis and importance of story vs. freedom of exploration across the Zelda titles? Touches on the pros and cons of linearity and gameplay dynamics and all that junk. I'm going to assume it's because it hinges on arguments originally made by someone annoying. Right? Sorry, I hate being dismissed.

i haven't watched it (i'm at work) but i'm sure it was fine! if it involves a yelling videogame dude, some people have higher or lower tolerances for that kind of thing.

for my part, i am wondering what the let's play of Links Awakening which shows where to get all the items has to do with the layout of the dungeons in comparison to the overworld. there are many video-related mysteries on this thread this morning!

i made a rule for myself whereby i can only play games i can find physical copies of, even if on an emulator, so instead of playing this i am going to go play landstalker probably

if i send you a copy of langrisser ii can you play it instead?

Yeah, though the yelling videogame dude can be ignored, the article mostly allows you to skip it by summing up the actual points. Don't mean to be sensitive, though!

When you were asking about the overlapping dungeons, which game are you referring to? The first? They don't exactly match up with the above overworld as far as placement goes.

xpost

the first game! i don't know, i just thought maybe dr. c had some cool old documents he could share. i am always a big fan of homemade maps and diagrams and the like.

Well, you may know that the dungeons all interlock together, as this was a space saving technique the developers used. Though from experience rebuilding this whole game in a more immersive way, we were forced to make our dungeons accessible via "warp" to another location, as it was tricky enough to fit all of the caves below the overworld (these are accessible via literal stairs) alone, much less with a whole network of dungeons which didn't line up with their entrances anyway.

xpost well that answers the following! cool!

re: dungeon layouts - they're gibberish. i mean the main, lame point i was making at the time was that they're a bigger-on-the-inside-than-the-outside kinda deal. they cover the whole overworld and then some, and overlap each other crazily (though this could easily be explained by just saying they're at different levels or whatever.) i have it in a PSD file with everything layered up in its appropriate spot - this was used to make some JPEGs which i used to make a powerpoint file showing it layering up one by one. the powerpoint file seems to be lost however.

i wonder if they do "fit together" in the sense that, say, all the dungeons and extradimensional places in Ultima VII: Serpent Isle are actually in the same space as the overworld, if you use the debug tools to jump around, so they all have to fit in the same x-by-y grid of space. so they had to find a place to put the things, the dungeons couldn't just be whatever shape or size:

http://www.zerker.ca/zzone/maps/U7/sSIin.png

i just had a weird vision of dystopian google maps where you can look into people's houses and see the layouts of their basements

I'd post a map of the dungeons but I don't want to be spoiler-y.

I found the PDF showing them layering up - will Dropbox in a sec.

Is architecture in games something that interests you, Dr. C? I feel like there could be a lot to say about it.

Okay - it's up here. The Zelda stuff starts page 28 of the slides, the mapping exercise on p. 45, adding second quest at 55 I think. I haven't let myself reread the text, and don't necessarily recommend you do - suspect it is me at the absolute heights of dizzying architecture-school verbiage, really stoked on the far-out readings we were doing for that (generally awesome) seminar but not necessarily feeling the need to make a lot of sense or support any arguments.

I've never really gone into architecture in games as a "thing" though yeah there should be tons of potential there. I think, and this is maybe the distillation of the paper draft in that link, that games are maybe most relevant as places to inhabit and explore impossible forms of space, or just ones we've never experienced before, in a really comfortable, identifying way where you 100% accept that that's you in there. VR is actually sort of pointless in this respect.

Actually linking architecture in games up to real-life architecture gets a bit silly; buildings in games don't serve the same functions (technical, social, economic, whatever) as buildings in real life, so it's not surprising if they get their Gothic wrong or have no clue how a hydroelectric plant is actually laid out, because it's laid out to make an awesome FPS map, or for maximum spookiness for the villain's lair. In this they're very much like film or TV - was thinking about this while watching Executive Decision the other day - pretty sure planes don't just have massive, open, unused "attics" for John Leguizamo to zip around in, but hey, you need that for the scene. The difference might be that in games, again, it's YOU... so while it's sort of fun to discover that houses in sitcoms make no logical sense and bear no resemblance to any house you've ever been in, it doesn't have the real mind-expanding potential (IMHO) of seamlessly and comfortably inhabiting these baffling non-Euclidean zones, like how Pac-Man's world is clearly a maze seen from above, but we see Pac-Man and the ghosts in profile, and never struggle with that for even one second. That's neat!

Fans, of course, will screw this up, by putting ALL their effort into resolving the many Hyrules and Brittannias. At least Castlevania has the excuse that the castle just will be different each time, due to Dracula's freaky magic, but I wouldn't be surprised if some loon has systematically compared each version of the clock tower, etc.

Yeah, when building the overworld map, the little inconsistencies between the sprites and the intended perspectives start to really stand out.

ha okay so i fell down the rabbit hole of re-reading my own paper from seven years ago. and yikes is it high on archi-school stuff. i do still mostly stand by these bits though:

This indeterminacy is heightened and deepened by the fact that the storyline of the games is repetitious in the extreme – one always plays a hero named Link at the cusp of manhood, who almost always proceeds to acquire the Master Sword, save the princess Zelda, defeat the evil wizard Ganon, and recover the powerful Triforce artifact, not necessarily in that order. So in addition to the geography, the scenario of the games is reiterated, obviously with numerous variations in each game. What this means is that a long-term player of the games is invested not so much in a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end, but rather something more like folklore, in which the same tales are rehashed, recombined, and revived to respond to present circumstance. The “Legend” of the title lives up to its full implications of a nomadic text, a multiple or “minor” literature. (...)

While the Second Quest by its name seems to suggest sequence (and hence, primacy and originality for the “first” quest), there are two short-circuits to this logic. One is that the “first” quest is never actually named as such – it’s just that the other one is the second. Perhaps the one we first play through is the third or ninetieth quest! More convincingly: the second quest can be accessed without beating the first quest, if one enters one’s name as “ZELDA” on the opening screen. Given that the game is titled The Legend of Zelda, how many players may have unknowingly found themselves in the second quest the first time through? (...)

Thus, an expert player of the Zelda series constructs a nested set of irreconcilable mental maps, each taken at face value. Across the series, she knows a dozen Hyrules; within the game, she knows two Quests; within each Quests, she knows an overworld and a set of underworlds that do not reflect each other. The ultimate geography of Zelda’s world is anexact, not reducible to a readable or writable map – another lore, produced through exploration by the player.

wow thank you for linking this paper! really looking forward to reading this.

you just read the best parts! seriously, it's real amateurish stuff, clearly a lot of excitement but not a lot of...work. but thank you!

holy shit, that's bazonkers and interesting

haha thanks! one thing i now wish i'd added: the fractal quality of the triforce itself. somehow seems very fitting that you patiently assemble a triangle out of lesser triangles... and it's only one of three big triangles!

if the dungeons have different depths, they are not overlapping in space

perhaps somebody already said this

still a very fun map ty