…aaaaand returned (Gaming)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Tuesday, April 10, 2018, 07:46 (2424 days ago) @ CruelLEGACEY

The problem I have with Zelda is that it’s mostly been a regression since the first two NES games. I did enjoy Link’s Awakening, but that game adopted a very rigid design. You get an item which lets you enter a dungeon, then you get an item in the dungeon that lets you finish. Everything is designed around a more or less linear progression, where the challenges are tailor made to your abilities. This worked for a mobile game, as picking up and playing and not progressing would suck. But for a game you sit down and play, it’s not so good.

The Original let you explore and more or less find (and in some cases beat) dungeons in any order. I found 2 before I found 1. The challenges and world are not built around a linear progression and acquisition of items. There’s a lot of freedom, but more importantly it demands curiosity rather than a willingness to follow a script. I mean, In the later games bombable walls are visible. Like… where is the sense of discovery in that? Bombs weren’t unlimited, so you had to use contextual clues to deduce where secrets might be. There was a style to it after a while, so you could actually begin to learn the ‘rules’ for secrets.

The Switch Zelda supposedly brought this back which had me excited.