You fight three hundred and thirty cage matches against bats, slimes, mummies, goblins, knights, centaurs, and a pig man. If you don't lose your mind, you get the opportunity to do it all over again but tougher. A raw deal if ever there was one.
I am old enough to admit that most criticisms I have had of this game over the years are not actually flaws. You can hate it, but you can't really say the Legend of Zelda dropped the ball anywhere. When it kicks your ass, it is trying to get you to find ways to kick back harder with timing, evasion, and upgrades. When it throws another maze at you, it wants you to find the cave person who knows the way through. When it buries the way forward under some bush, it wants you to talk to other players and research. It is not random, it is not cheating, it basically invented saving on cartridges so it could let you hold on to your victories. It did always want you to succeed. Sequels would change things to a way I preferred, but I hesitate to say anything was "fixed", and the experience has just about killed any instinct to argue about games "aging poorly" for me.
Beneath every future iteration of Hyrule is the grid of this game's overworld. Not only landmarks like Death Mountain or Spectacle Rock or Lost Woods, but the idea of a continuous world broken up into discrete pieces. Only Link's Awakening would explicitly keep the pure grid structure, but most future games are iterating on this core idea rather than deviating or evolving. The thing about the grid here is how it hides information; you know where you are relative to the world as a whole, you have your memory of the path that got you there, but unless you've stepped on any given screen before you have no idea what awaits you when you push on north/south/east/west. I wonder if Wind Waker was at some point aiming to recapture that mystique: only silhouettes of islands adjacent to you that you couldn't properly see until you made landfall, and anything could be hidden within or beneath. As much as Breath of the Wild aims to resurrect the spirit of this game, that crapshoot element of navigation and discovery is largely lost by virtue of players being able to see long distances and follow whatever path from point A to point B. I've avoided Tears of the Kingdom trailers and details as much as I can, but I wonder if the sky islands and underground hinted at in what I did see are a swing of the pendulum back in the original's direction.
It took a lot for me to come to appreciate this game. I had to play almost all of the rest of the series. I had to keep coming back after over two decades of abandoned playthroughs. I had to gain some skill in Gradius and Getting Over It, Hades and Hollow Knight, Doom and Dark Souls and Druaga. Even then I had to use save states regularly, rewind somewhat frequently, and follow a guide almost to the letter.
I still don't love it or feel moved by it, but I have learned to respect it. Many things I love about the series were either impossible at the time or it had no interest in implementing, and thus what matters most to me is what I can now see of this game in those I do love. It is a hard blade on a table; it only knows how to cut, but with enough ingenuity one can use it to build a house.
I am old enough to admit that most criticisms I have had of this game over the years are not actually flaws. You can hate it, but you can't really say the Legend of Zelda dropped the ball anywhere. When it kicks your ass, it is trying to get you to find ways to kick back harder with timing, evasion, and upgrades. When it throws another maze at you, it wants you to find the cave person who knows the way through. When it buries the way forward under some bush, it wants you to talk to other players and research. It is not random, it is not cheating, it basically invented saving on cartridges so it could let you hold on to your victories. It did always want you to succeed. Sequels would change things to a way I preferred, but I hesitate to say anything was "fixed", and the experience has just about killed any instinct to argue about games "aging poorly" for me.
Beneath every future iteration of Hyrule is the grid of this game's overworld. Not only landmarks like Death Mountain or Spectacle Rock or Lost Woods, but the idea of a continuous world broken up into discrete pieces. Only Link's Awakening would explicitly keep the pure grid structure, but most future games are iterating on this core idea rather than deviating or evolving. The thing about the grid here is how it hides information; you know where you are relative to the world as a whole, you have your memory of the path that got you there, but unless you've stepped on any given screen before you have no idea what awaits you when you push on north/south/east/west. I wonder if Wind Waker was at some point aiming to recapture that mystique: only silhouettes of islands adjacent to you that you couldn't properly see until you made landfall, and anything could be hidden within or beneath. As much as Breath of the Wild aims to resurrect the spirit of this game, that crapshoot element of navigation and discovery is largely lost by virtue of players being able to see long distances and follow whatever path from point A to point B. I've avoided Tears of the Kingdom trailers and details as much as I can, but I wonder if the sky islands and underground hinted at in what I did see are a swing of the pendulum back in the original's direction.
It took a lot for me to come to appreciate this game. I had to play almost all of the rest of the series. I had to keep coming back after over two decades of abandoned playthroughs. I had to gain some skill in Gradius and Getting Over It, Hades and Hollow Knight, Doom and Dark Souls and Druaga. Even then I had to use save states regularly, rewind somewhat frequently, and follow a guide almost to the letter.
I still don't love it or feel moved by it, but I have learned to respect it. Many things I love about the series were either impossible at the time or it had no interest in implementing, and thus what matters most to me is what I can now see of this game in those I do love. It is a hard blade on a table; it only knows how to cut, but with enough ingenuity one can use it to build a house.
Reviewed on May 09, 2023