Ah, Zelda. I’ve been playing them since Ocarina, of course. The three “big” entry point games for those of my generation are the original, Link to the Past, and Ocarina of Time. Unfortunately in the style of Nintendo at the moment, everything seems to be jamming on the nostalgia button HARD. Obviously this game leans very very heavily on LttP, which predates my own entry point. In fact I played LttP a few years after Ocarina, but it’s not “my” Zelda game, if you get me.
Consequently I don’t have the blind rush of giddy nostalgia juices for this game. Looking objectively at it though, I can say that it’s a very good game and I enjoyed it. I just feel weird playing it, because it’s so heavily based on a game I don’t have such a personal connection to, and indeed have only played once. There’s some lipservice to other games in the canon, but they’re a bit tacked on and feel out of place. Basically what I’m saying is it feels like the wrong way to do nostalgia.
Anyways the few improvements to the LttP formula, like having main character counterparts in the Dark World, having individualised Sages, shaking up the item acquisition and dungeoning, are very good decisions. Generally it’s good at giving you the things you need and want but still being challenging. Well, I say challenging because some rooms, tasks, and dungeons were tricky moment-to-moment but overall it’s an easy game.
It might just be my super skills, but I never died, and I always had boatloads of rupees. I never got lost or stuck, because there’s lots to do, which is a good thing. Not a good thing is the balance, although I have said the same about other Zelda games, and maybe Hero mode would have suited me better. It’s just that the things people have been saying about the risk and reward of the item system ring false to me, because I rented everything straight away, never died to have them taken, and just sunk rupees steadily into buying the items so I could upgrade them. Not very risky, and the rupees kept flowing in so when I’d bought everything it went straight to 9999 and I’m like “what now?”. So I bought a golden bee.
Anyway I had a great time finding all the things, collecting stuff and getting mightier. I liked interacting with NPCs, but ultimately that was pretty shallow and although the writing was good, it wasn’t a more personable experience than your standard Zelda game, and worse than several of them. I liked the Sages being people from the world that you’d met, but that’s ripped straight from Ocarina and like that game (and to a lesser extent, Wind Waker) they are removed from the world by the plot, making it a more dull place.
I didn’t want to get this game at first because it seemed like just another Zelda game, and that’s not what I wanted. But my lovely wife bought it for me, and so I had to play it. At which point I realised that playing just another Zelda game was something I could get behind. Especially when it’s as fun, addictive, and accessible as this one. Not exactly groundbreaking but it had some cool new features that will apparently inform the future direction of the series. I think they could stand to shake up more aspects of the experience (after all, Majora’s Mask is one of my faves) but this installment is perfectly solid. Yep.
