This
will probably become a semi-regular feature here on Jabber Blerg, like not
updating for a week.
In general, but
especially with video games, I enjoy things from a very strange era relative to
my age. Many games that I love and
regularly lecture people about for hours and hours about how great they are and
how back then _______ knew how to make good games, I never played at the time
of release. This was due to having been
either a small baby or a sperm at the time of their release, or due to my parents
being FUCKING FASCISTS and not letting us get a video game console other than a
Gameboy until FIFTH GRADE, therefore crippling me socially and probably forcing
me to become a serial killer at some point.
But for the past few years I’ve been fooling around with oldschool-type
games, heroically overcoming the crippling disadvantage my parents hoisted upon
me by not having me seven years earlier and only giving me some video games instead of all
of the video games. An upside to this is
that when I give long, opinionated rants about older games, I can be sure that
nostalgia doesn’t influence my opinions, because I’m not very nostalgic for my
senior year of high school. Prom
sucks. Thank God I had Angry Birds.
Of
course, the downside to this is when you play an older game that you walk away
from with a lot of issues, people will get mad at you. They’ll say you’re judging the game unfairly,
that you’re spoiled by modern games that hold your hand and make you tutorials
and brownies and would totally give you a blowjob if your wiener would just fit
in the disc drive. They’ll say that you
had to be around at the time to really
appreciate it, and that you have to look at it unconditionally by the standards
of its time.
Which
brings me to a game I played, and beat, for the first time very recently: The Legend of Zelda. The first one.
Does
anybody think I like being in this
position? It’s not fun, wanting to criticize one of the all-time sacred cows of
all of video games, especially a game
that innovated despite not aging very well.
It’s like eating a slice of the first loaf of bread ever made, and
complaining about how bitter and gritty it is.
I don’t want to be the guy saying that, not when there’s people around
who were around before, when all they ate was rocks and dirt. “Sam, you ingrate, look at how not-rocky it
is! You can eat this without breaking your teeth! Do you understand how great that is?”
Well,
you know what? That’s great for 1986, when bread was invented, but almost
thirty years later, I like bread that doesn’t have sand in it. I like bread that I can bite into without
worrying about a bug crawling in my mouth to lay eggs. I like my bread to include a map when it’s
entirely based around traversing a world where everything looks exactly the same.
Come on, Legend of Bread! I know you’re better than rocks, but 90%
of you is just light brown and dark brown! Why should I explore your world when
everything is brown? Answer me, bread!
Now
that my metaphor, much like 1986-era bread when exposed to butter, has fallen
apart and burst into flames, I should note that there are many things about
Legend of Zelda that I really like. I
like how if you can find somewhere, you can enter it, and that while they let
you know whether or not you’re supposed
to be in a dungeon, they still let you explore around. I like how puzzles are more focused on
maneuvering and combat, which works really well with the game’s controls. I respect the Hell out of the game for being
practically open-world at a time where Super Mario Bros was considered a
wide-open, adventure-type game. For its
time, the game must have been unbelievable to watch.
But
now we go back to the bread problem. For
its time, simply being able to explore in a world was enough to be fantastic
and revolutionary. But now, standards
are higher. Generally, an open world
game should be interesting, easy to traverse, and have some kind of overarching
goal to keep you incentivized on progression instead of simple wandering. And Legend of Zelda fails on every single one
of those counts.
There
are three types of “landscapes” in Legend of Zelda: light brown plain with some
shrubs and rocks, grey graveyards, and dungeons. The graveyard is maybe four or five screens
of the game, the dungeons are completely self-contained and required to go
through to beat the game, and literally the entire rest of the game is brown
plains. So already we have a big
problem, because visually there’s not a whole lot of variety for me to want to
discover. I know that the next area is
still going to be a brown plain; why should I get excited about it? Oh wow! The
shrubs are different! You made them brown too! You removed color! Good job!
If
the combat and searching for items and whatnot was super fun, that wouldn’t
necessarily be a deal-breaker, but the unforgiving, tight, maneuver-based
combat that works so well in the dungeons makes traversing the overworld
completely miserable. Without full
health, your laser-sword goes away, and you have no effective ranged
weapons. Your boomerang can only stun
people, and your bow uses money as arrows. And because game design in regards to items
is so baffling and obscure, to the point where some game-critical items require
burning a random shrub in a screen full
of shrubs that absolutely nobody tells you about, you want to keep every
rupee you’ve got. You need to buy some
items, and because traveling around is such a fucking pain you practically need
to have a potion on you to survive long enough to find out which random part of
the wall you need to bomb. Also, did I
mention that you have to do all of this without
a map? You have a grey square with a little dot that shows you
approximately which hemisphere you’re in, so that’s sort of nice, but that’s
like trying to navigate San Francisco when all you have is a map of
California. If anything, the grey square
is an insult, as if to say “yeah, we could
have given you a map. We clearly have
the technology. But we didn’t. Have fun!”
No, Legend of Zelda, I won’t have fun! I keep getting lost and murdered
by one of the maybe seven types of things that inhabit your world, and
everything looks the same, and if you don’t teach me that I have to burn random
shrubs with a lantern until I find a thing, I
won’t just start burning random shrubs.
But
even a bland, boring world and
frustrating gameplay can be overcome if your story is good enough. If you can’t motivate the player through fun,
motivating them through an interesting plot and sympathetic characters can be a
valid alternative. In Legend of Zelda,
you have the following characters:
- · Link
- · Zelda
- · Old Man in Robe
- · Old Woman in Robe
- · Merchant Guy
- · Hungry Gremlin that appears in one screen of one dungeon and is the sole reason the food item, which can prevent you from getting very necessary potions, is in the game
I don’t really
have any reason to care about any of these characters. I hate the Hungry Gremlin because I have to
haul around meat for eighty fucking years because he’s too dumb to just leave
the room he’s in and get some food. I
hate Link, because his dumb ethics prevent him from just murdering the Hungry
Gremlin and moving on. I’m ambivalent
towards Zelda, because she only shows up for two seconds at the very end. She didn’t attack me or demand meat, so I
guess she’s okay, but she didn’t heal me or give me a new weapon or
anything. The most likeable characters
are the two old people, who can resupply you with potions and give you swords
and items and stuff, but that’s just if you can find them and decipher their
riddles and lies (blow up the nose? WHAT NOSE? NOTHING LOOKS LIKE A FACE IT’S
JUST ROCKS) Same goes for the merchant guy, who in addition to being hidden is
also expensive. But all these guys have a leg-up on the story of the game,
which is crazy nonexistent. You have no story motivation of any kind whilst
playing the game, nothing to fill the
void left by the frustrating gameplay and opaque husks wandering the
world. I like how you can see how much
of the Triforce is left to pick up, but doing so doesn’t do anything for you.
Triforce shards don’t change the world in any significant way; you don’t
feel like your actions are beating back the endless legions of monsters. Even if the game told you what they were
for—saving Zelda and ridding the world of evil—that doesn’t gel with what the
game shows us. I don’t care about any of
the characters, the world is too boring to be worth saving, and it seems pretty
clear humanity is doomed. There are six
people left in the world and the soil is clearly fallow. I used the only food in the world to feed the
douchiest one of us. A happy ending is
not in the cards for Hyrule.
Before the crowd
of Zelda fans lynches me in the comments that won’t exist because nobody reads
this, I’m super glad Legend of Zelda
exists. For its time, it was
revolutionary. It changed the games
industry for the better and inspired an entire generation of game designers. Sandbox games, whether Grand Theft Auto or
Minecraft, would not exist without this game.
But being the first of its kind, it’s also one of the roughest. Legend of Zelda is important, and it’s
rightly hailed as setting the standard for modern games of its ilk. But you can’t butter it, you can’t eat it,
and you can’t even make sandwiches out of it.
And these days, that just doesn’t do it for me.
YOU DID IT IT'S THE LEGEND OF YOU
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