Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Commentary on Zelda Series

In this post, I want to draw some attention to an article by Tevis Thompson about the Zelda series or the evolution of RPGs then its worth the read or skim:

http://tevisthompson.com/saving-zelda/

If you can't tell yet, WORG is meant to be an open world action RPG, which is the sort of game I like, which is why I mostly agree with this article.

I do not especially agree that Zelda should be 'harder', because the difficulty of modern games has been dictated by the modern player: We want easy games. I am annoyed by it too sometimes, but it is something we have to come to terms with for big titles like Zelda.

But what I got most out of his article was from this paragraph:

Modern Zeldas are translations of their 2D forbearers; they’ve never been fundamentally reconceived in 3D from the ground up. In choosing what elements made Zelda fundamentally Zelda, Nintendo chose poorly. They took the puzzles instead of the action, the conventions instead of the world, the items instead of the spirit.

You may feel insulted by his article because in your opinion, the fundemental Zelda is puzzles. Telon notes, Zelda I and II were devoid of puzzles. This is where a contention may created between old and new fans of the series, because older Zelda fans like myself see Zelda fundementally as an action open-world RPG with endless secrets and interests... But that just isn't the direction the series went.

Although Zelda is doing well financially still, I agree with the article that it would be doing better and be a higher quality game if it had stuck to its original fundementals. But that is difficult to tell...

Also arguably the technology/design saavy just was not there to make OoT more action centric like we see in action RPG's today... Which in my opinion explains the direction that Zelda has taken as a 'puzzle' and 'fetch quest' game.

Lss