So, Chrisbg99 and I were talking last night about Skyward Sword and how I was going to mention in my future review of it how I actually liked Twilight Princess.

He told me that contrary to the loudmouths that dislike TP, it was really well-received, it's just the vocal fans that dislike it.

But now I'm starting to see people comment with 'TP is the most underrated Zelda game' on videos of the Medley of TP from the 25th Anniversary Soundtrack.

And that got me thinking... doesn't this always happen?

I mean, every time there is a console Zelda released, we have these fans who say, 'It will never be as good as OoT', and then afterwards, when the next console Zelda releases, it ends up becoming an underdog in a few fans' eyes, and eventually starts to get it's own loving fanbase.

It happened with Majora's Mask
It happened with Wind Waker
and I'm starting to see it happen with Twilight Princess.

Then there are the fans that just want the 'next OoT', but really... there won't be another OoT. So those fans' expectations are always shot no matter what you give them.

What are your thoughts on this?

Reminder: This is about OoT ruining/saving the fanbase, not the franchise.

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I believe SS has all of those things, I just don't think it executes them well at all. But I've never felt ANY 3D Zelda game has, so I'm not upset about it.

Knowing that the past was actually very advanced and that all these advancements were lost to time doesn't make you wonder? It sure makes me wonder more about the world. What happened to all of this advancement? What was the world like before the humans were lifted into the sky? I think the desert in general was one of the only places they did successfully convey some sort of narrative. To me, the game mechanic used there didn't just feel like it was there for the sake of being there (unlike assembling a key in Eldin or arbitrarily seeking out Kikwi in Faron). The timeshift crystals to me had more of a context - that they were embedded into the inner workings of that world. I think for the most part, this illusion (that this wasn't just another game tool) was pretty successful.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time has magical sand that lets you rewind time. That is just a game mechanic as well, but it is integrated well into the story. I don't view it as the developers simply wanting to make the game more forgiving. I see that the Prince has this special sand that lets him do these amazing things. Similarly, I think the mechanics employed in the desert in SS do something similar, though admittedly not as successful.

Perhaps you saw right through it, but I thought it added a neat context to puzzles that Zelda typically doesn't provide ANY explanation for. This switch will make the plants grow around it. They could've easily have said that these were just "life crystals," bringing to life plants and machinery in a certain radius. With the context they provide, however, I got the feeling that I was looking into a window of an older time. This is very apparent when riding the boat around the Sand Sea. These crystals simply aren't ordinary crystals, they are a window into a time where things were different. They are allowing you to see the world as it existed long ago.

For instance, the Dark World in LttP is just a game mechanic to have the player solve puzzles...but in that game, it's also the crux of the story. Ganon has used the Triforce to create a twisted version of Hyrule that is all his own. Yes, Nintendo probably just said "Why don't we just have a bizarro Hyrule that the player is going back and forth between?" but since the events in the game storywise go along WITH that idea, then the player is less aware of these puppet strings that Nintendo is controlling the game with. Do the timeshift crystals do this as successfully? Admittedly I don't think they do, but I never felt like it felt nearly as arbitrary as other concepts not only in SS, but in other Zelda games as well.

While I do agree that Nintendo relies heavily on these game tools that have no rhyme or reason (other than to give the player game mechanics, especially in regards to something like the Spinner that conveniently fits into several places in TP) I don't think that the timeshift crystals are the best example. I felt that it was a concept that helped added a little bit of logic to what yes, is otherwise just another game tool. I thought what they did was enough for me to buy into it as a "world concept" and not just another game mechanic.

@Simbabbad

Yeah, I knew that reference to the timeline wasn't great on my part. It wasn't meant to be so much of a "Nintendo doesn't care about the timeline" gripe. I meant it more to imply that referencing other Zelda games or other Hyrulian (Hylian? I can't remember) tropes and things along those lines does not, as Pogue suggested, imply that there's something more. It's just background filler since none of it goes anywhere. It implies subtext and content, but there's none to actually be had.

@Simbabbad I guess you're right, I didn't understand that it was 5 games in a row that had disappointed you. Personally I tend to move away from a franchise after 2 or 3 disappointments in a row.

I just thought that the concepts in the desert worked great and fit thematically into the game because the whole story is about going down to the surface and seeing basically an abandoned world. Having a more Futuristic past just accentuated how much that the world had fallen in the thousands of years (possibly) that passed between the human migration to the sky and Link's arrival to the surface. Whether or not it's robots or aliens or whatever they want to do, there has to be something leftover from all those years ago right? I mean it's not like there wasn't a civilization down there before.

No, it's not the most developed thing in the world, but I thought they showed just as much as they needed to to convey the idea they were getting across. It adds some history to make the world feel truly abandoned.

@Kal-El814

Zelda being a game truly holds it back in many respects. Absolutely dick happens until you trigger it. There are no moments that happen randomly, you just go switch to switch triggering the events that finally lead up to the conclusion. Ocarina of Time is a major offender in this case. Beginning of the game you go into the tree to try and save it, which you fail at, so you go to the next location you are told to go to (Hyrule Castle). There you hear that the Great Sandman has come to take over Hyrule! And that you need to float through two full dungeons in order to collect these things to open up a door to stop him! The Great Sandman does absolutely dick throughout this time, and only once you return back after completing your two dungeons do events move forward. Then you learn that you let the Sandman into the place he wanted and 7 years of darkness fall on the land! The people kind of mention bad things that happened awhile ago, but then the entire second half of the game NOTHING ACTUALLY HAPPENS. You just go down the list, hitting the switches the game requires, in the order it requires while the big bad Sandman sits in his Tower doing absolutely dick. Then you fight him and you win.

Wind Waker at least has Ganondorf kind of moving around, but still falls into the same "switch and go" tactic. Twilight Princess had Zant come after you once or twice but then ultimately is the same thing with nothing happening until you hit that certain point to trigger it. Skyward Sword also hasn't escaped this.

Majora's Mask, however, did escape this and is a huge reason why I enjoy the game so much. Because it tossed you into this game, had hardly any "switches" (four dungeons) but constantly had the Moon and/or the time limit in your face to remind you. You couldn't dick around in the Great Bay Temple playing ice princess, because the Moon was going to crash. You couldn't hide in a Deku Flower for hours on end because Skull Kid was still dropping the moon. Also, a huge thing I forgot to mention, is the NPCs actually knew what the fuck was going on. Maybe not to the extent of the player, but they knew the moon was coming, they had opinions on it, and each day as it inched closer they started thinking a little and little different most of the time just accepting death. Ocarina of Time had NPCs talking about this evil event 7 years ago and apparently lived in peace since, Wind Waker no-one knew what was going on, Twilight Princess had a handful of "freedom fighters" and a bunch of people who didn't even talk, and Skyward Sword has an impressive 4 people who even know Zelda is missing (not sure on exact number, but it's tiny).

The push to make Zelda more "epic" has forced this to keep going because, like most FPS games, the best way to get "epic" is to script it. So the games keep getting more and more linear, more "focused" and it's seriously starting to bug the shit out of me. Also, Nintendo can't seem to keep shit straight. The beginning of Twilight Princess drags on and on and on until you finally break through the wall and then by the end of the game everything you started for is completely forgotten and you are fighting some "epic" fight that made hardly any sense.

It's epic for the sake of epic. They don't plan anything out. We all know this. They talk about how the gameplay is worked on first, then they build the game around that. The gameplay hasn't really moved forward (though, WM+ for SS is pretty awesome) and the story is stuck using some outdated formula with some high school kid's fantasy writing pushing things forward. "I'm going to create this super villain that is like totally badass and then he's gonna like beat you up and stuff and then like OMG GANONDORF WOULD BE AWESOME IF YOU FOUGHT HIM SWORD TO SWORD!!!"

@missypissy

Yeah that's a pretty fair assessment. I think between the switch to a 3D world and a desire for a more "epic" feel have fundamentally changed the series. Someone else, Simba I think, mentioned or implied that while Zelda's have gotten larger, they're just kind of stretched out and not truly "bigger" games. That's a pretty good point. LttP and LA aren't large games, but they both feel as big as OoT or WW in the most significant ways, at least to me.

LA also avoids a lot of the tropes you mentioned too. You're trying to wake something up, so it makes sense that the Wind Fish is in the same place for most of the adventure. Earlier Zeldas flirted with that too; you couldn't access the places where Ganon was without doing/collecting something first. The doing/collecting has stayed in place from a gameplay perspective, but the story doesn't always justify the "checkpoints" as effectively.

I think 3D Zelda games are definitely bigger than the old 2D games. As much as I love the feeling of exploration in the older games (and miss it in Skyward Sword so far), the overworld maps weren't super huge and there really wasn't that much required content in between the dungeons. It was basically time to explore for heart pieces and such. Now you take something like Skyward Sword and just to get to the next dungeon can take an hour or two of new, unique gameplay.

In a way, I wish that they weren't so long, because a lot of that length seems artificial... I'm perfectly content with the length of LTTP.

I'm almost more interested to see what they are going to do with Zelda 3DS than I am with Zelda U. The time and budget constraint could end up being a good thing if they go back to the roots of the series.

Concerns me a bit that some people here want/expect Zelda to turn into Skyrim. Not gonna happen any time soon.

So far, Skyward Sword has obliterated any Zeldas I have ever played before it. It doesn't hurt that my kids can't take my eyes off of it and they clap and cheer every time I destroy a boss, but that's Nintendo in a nutshell. I almost want to bow to them after I'm done.

Some of us don't want Zelda to turn into Skyrom, we just want it to be more organic and stop relying on certain tropes that don't necessarily define the series.

@carlosrox

I don't think it has anything to do with Skyrim. I just think it's fair to expect the character development and interaction of Majora's Mask, which came out 11 years ago, to be a standard in Zelda games. Well, frankly, after 11 years it should far exceed what was done in MM. It's very disappointing that this aspect has diminished significantly over the 3 console games released since.

It's not about being Skyrim; it's about Zelda games not taking huge steps backward from previous Zelda games.

@TheBigG753

I don't really agree. Majora's Mask's main thing was sidequests and NPC interaction. The game was structured around a unique 3-day element that allowed for a fresh take on the story and character sequences since everything could be neatly constructed into 3 organized game days. It really wouldn't be possible to do something exactly like this again without taking a similar directorial stance on the structure the entire game is built around.

And interestingly enough, MM's sidequests came from the natural build off the central idea of a 3-day time loop, the same type of growth that fuels all Zelda games (i.e. gameplay premise first, then story etc second). Once the devs realized they could cut down severely on development time by reusing character models, they structured the game to take advantage of that and the characters grew from there.

It doesn't sound like you want Zelda to take all the innovations of its predecessors and build on them. It sounds like you want a sequel to Majora's Mask.

I agree with the sentiment that the series' villains need to be more active and menacing in general if these games are aiming to be as story-driven as they want. But aside from that, most of your complaints seem to boil down to standard video game time-logic issues, i.e. "Why is Link playing this minigame when the world is in danger from this villain?" Honestly, it's not something that's ever bothered me about the series, and it's not really better in Majora's Mask since you can always just play the ocarina to warp back (you're not going to get caught off-guard by the moon suddenly squishing you).

Each Zelda game has its own strengths, and while it'd be nice if they could piece together a Frankenstein's Monster of the best parts of every series..."The unhinged exploration of Zelda 1! The pacing and tight overworld of LttP! The impactful storyline of LA! The scope and breadth of OoT! The NPC interaction of MM! The plot depth of TWW! The size of TP!" ...that's really more of wishful fan thinking than a feasible request. The games in this series each shoot to do their own thing, and expecting each new one to top every older games' best aspects is a little unrealistic. And this is my favorite series ever, I expect the best from it.

I've said it before, but MM's sidequest and NPC focus came at the expense of a smaller main quest. The world is smaller, outside of sub-dungeons there were only four dungeons total (the next-lowest number is Zelda 2 and TWW at 7), the NPCs and many enemy models are recycled from OoT, the item set is probably the worst in the series and mostly borrowed from OoT (even semi-useless stuff like Deku Nuts, Sticks, and Magic Beans) with the rest being are really limited (Picto Box, Powder Keg, Lens of Truth, SIX bottles?). The transformation masks help offset this somewhat, but still.

I'm not trying to pick on MM--I love the game and it's one of my favorites of all time, really. But I think expecting every console game Zelda to contain that level of interaction which MM was built around is just too demanding, even for as venerable a series as this.

@TriforceBun

Why does a game have to be centered around a time-loop gimmick to have good side quests and meaningful characters? Why does it have to be one or the other? It's just apologizing for the developers to suggest that something good has to be at the expense of something else.

No one's saying that what defined Majora's Mask has to define all other Zelda games. But there comes a point where a sequel does something really well, and that should become a standard. I'd argue that Majora's Mask's main thing was the time element, and everything else just came out of it. We all know MM had a cramped development cycle and couldn't be Ocarina of Time 2. So? It showed us something else that the series could build off of, they just chose not to. Beyond that, it's just something that feels dated now. It's different from just having a Zelda game that doesn't have sailing or time manipulation or flying. NPC interaction isn't a gimmick that was added in MM like Sailing in WW or turning into a wolf in TP. It's something that's always been there, but MM finally did it better than it's been done before. MM did it the way it should be done. Why should we be content with going backwards from that?

You make it sound like the Zelda developers are a bunch of no-talent hacks and are incapable of doing anything besides focusing on one area and that's it. I don't think it's too much to ask for, at all. Do you want the next Zelda game to be a step-backward from the sword combat of SS? I sure don't, but imagine defending the next Zelda game for having dumbed-down combat because the developers wanted to focus more on exploration?

Every Zelda has become a "Great, but..." experience. It has nothing to do with it being too demanding; it has everything to do with EAD not thinking it's important.

I have no problem saying that I would have no qualms if the next Zelda game had no new gimmicks attached to it. No time manipulation, no sailing, no wolf transformation, no flying. I really don't think Zelda needs a gimmick to sell each game, especially considering that the sailing wasn't the best part of Wind Waker, the wolf wasn't the best part of Twilight Princess, and flying isn't the best part of Skyward Sword. In a lot of ways, these held back each game. I would absolutely prefer Zelda to just maximize its strengths for a change, and not eschew something that works well for a new gameplay device. I'm perfectly comfortable saying that, and I don't think it's unreasonable at all.

@TheBigG753

I agree. I think the best thing for the series would be to remove all of unnecessary fluff and gimmicks... especially the transportation gimmicks. If the overworld is too big for Link to traverse on foot (with allowance for some warp points or whatever), then it isn't a very well designed overworld.

Super Mario 3D Land was about making a 3D Mario that also returned to the roots of the series in a lot of ways, and it was a brilliant mix. Why not try the same thing with Zelda? Going back to what makes a series fun isn't a devolution... it's smart. If people want Skyrim, they can play Skyrim.

Of course, Aonuma doesn't even like classic Zelda, so that will never happen so long as he is Mr. Producer.

TriforceBun said:

@TheBigG753

Each Zelda game has its own strengths, and while it'd be nice if they could piece together a Frankenstein's Monster of the best parts of every series..."The unhinged exploration of Zelda 1! The pacing and tight overworld of LttP! The impactful storyline of LA! The scope and breadth of OoT! The NPC interaction of MM! The plot depth of TWW! The size of TP!" ...that's really more of wishful fan thinking than a feasible request. The games in this series each shoot to do their own thing, and expecting each new one to top every older games' best aspects is a little unrealistic. And this is my favorite series ever, I expect the best from it.
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Goddammit! I was thinking of creating an *exact* thread with this topic . A 'Create your own Zelda' thread if you will. But I was at work when I thought of it and didn't want to wast too much time putting it together. Now it'll just seem unoriginal, boo .

But yeah, the the discussions here in recent weeks havee shown that we all value different parts of different Zelda games, and itd be interesting to see what kind of monsters people would create. Yours sounds pretty close to mine .

@Shadowlink

Pretty neat idea. If you build it, we will come.