At last, my white whale of Zelda games has been conquered.

You can’t be a connected Zelda fan for too long without hearing about the infamous trio of games released under begrudging licence from Nintendo for the Philip CD-i, a failed early 90s multimedia console. They’re widely derided but not many people bother to play them, preferring to take at face value the sneering of reviewers and Youtubers and write them off pre-emptively. I try not to be so dismissive, and the nichest corners of a franchise are often the most interesting to me, so I’ve always wanted to try Zelda’s Adventure for myself. Especially as it’s even more overlooked than Animation Magic’s paired sidescrollers, with their meme-ified cartoon cutscenes.

Part of the problem with playing it is the real hardware and game are prohibitively expensive, and the CD-i is tricky to emulate. Support for this game in particular was broken in later updates of MESS. I believe I followed the terse instructions in this post, and with much tinkering and finagling was able to play it in tinycdi without the game softlocking on the first screen. This method unfortunately lacks support for savestates and crashes if you die, so the opening sections can be very frustrating to get through, requiring repetition to regain lost progress; if you do manage to save and quit in time though, you will retain all items and rubies. However you are able to map a fast forward button, which can greatly accelerate you through the console’s initial bootup, reduce load times between screens, and more easily navigate the slow cursor around the menus.

I was also aided in my monumental quest by a helpful overworld map by Dadaph (the dungeons weren’t complex enough to really require external maps) and the recently created but unquestionably essential and comprehensive written guide by Mundy. I used these extensively as a crutch, to help fight back against the game’s high difficulty, awkward design, and confusing progression.

Yes, it’s fair to say that many criticisms of this game are warranted. The template for the game’s structure is The Hyrule Fantasy, the original Zelda title: a top-down view of single-screen rooms, an overworld and a handful of dungeons, useful(?) tools to acquire, debatably helpful NPCs. It’s just all so messy; the hit detection is way off, there’s no music—ever—and sound effects play sparingly and at a remove from actions, your inventory is flooded with items and spells that have situational or even no use at all. The oddballs that populate the world are often of little help. The worst of it is the graphics, which are all made with the then-cutting-edge techniques of digitising photographs; let’s just say they haven’t aged well, and at worst can affect navigation and playability.

Despite the deeply flawed design and thorough jank, I find I have a soft spot for this train wreck of a game. That early FMV culture it emerged from, with its crunched live action cut scenes, bizarre and ugly pre-rendered sprites, copious amateur voiceover, and characters made from sloppily photoshopped “actors” is morbidly fascinating from a game history perspective. It’s cool to build up a vast arsenal of spells, even though most of them work the exact same way and the best strategy is invariably to stand in one place, swinging your basic wand and waiting for enemies to approach. I liked the boosts in power and defence each mystic sign gave me as I clawed my way up the food chain of monsters. Although clumsy, the universe of the game has a sense of mystery and worldbuilding to it thanks to the chatty villagers and dubiously menacing voiced bosses. Also, having Zelda as the playable hero is an immensely satisfying flip that Nintendo are still too cowardly/boring to do themselves in the now 35 year-old series.

I’m left to assume that the game’s female director and co-writer Anna Roth is to be thanked for that, and it was also nice to see other women’s names in the credits under art, production, and casting roles. Speaking of development, there are some illuminating and baffling anecdotes about the game’s production out there, such as a preview shared here in which the co-designer claims the game would contain 600 rooms, 300 hours of gameplay, and 160 NPCs. This interview (also containing fun tidbits, like how the staff included a model maker who constructed the buildings and interiors that were photographed and included in the game) talks about the testing process at Philips that ran for an exceptionally-long two years while the programmer had moved on, implying that problems discovered could not be easily fixed. This may explain the item cruft, the existence of purposeless areas and NPCs, or suggests a large amount of cut content. Although I’ve critiqued their work, I have no contempt for the developers, who were doing their best to make something new and interesting under all sorts of pressures on unsuitable hardware; I appreciate their work on this, and it’s a shame it didn’t all come together perfectly.

Whatever the case, I’m pleased I could get this working. It was worth it to me to play it for myself and having done so, develop a kind of liking for it. The kind that makes you grimace as much as smile. Zelda’s Adventure is… unique. It’s got a strong and consistent style to it, you can’t deny that. And I’ll be defending its dubious charms for the rest of my life, I’m sure. Oh and by the way, judging by Zelda’s outfit I’ve decided that it should fit into the timeline shortly after A Link to the Past. This is important.

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