Game Discussion of The Week: The Legend of Zelda series

So, I voted "Bad", and I'm going to blame everyone if they put any blame on me!

To me The Legend of Zelda series is one of those awkward cases of a beloved series that currently has more mediocre-to-bad than mediocre-to-good games. Because I played only the 3D ones extensively, I have a very negative view on it, but from looking at random footage and somewhat vague memories the 2D games seem to be much better in general (excluding CD-i games).

My criticism that's valid at least for Ocarina of Time, Wind Waker and Twilight Princess (which happen to be the 3 most liked ones) are:
- Action games with bad action: if you, as developer, put a sword and a shield in players' hands, why not buckle up and actually develop things such as acceptable enemy moves and patterns, level design, and make the boss fights actual fights?
- Frequent basal intelligence-requiring puzzles: the series often relies on making players try to solve puzzles to progress, but the puzzles themselves never require much thought and ocasionally are solved by walking around like an idiot to "pull a lever" a couple of rooms in the direction you came from.
- Bosses are light-puzzles mixed with light-action: most bosses require you to figure out an often ultra-obvious weak spot, exploit it, then whack the boss a bunch of times and go back to exploiting weaknesses.

Now, while I'm saying this there may those who still think TLoZ does everything it does best, at least as a whole, but the problem starts when multiple other developers develop games in the exact same genre, a few times doing the same things, but just doing them better. The most evident is the (Dank) Souls series, which did sword & shield fighting just fine but also does that story-NPC interaction and exploration well. Then there's Dragon's Dogma, a game in which you can just make Link or Zelda as playable characters because many of their iconic skills are there, and even a lot of what happens in TLoZ, even bosses with Achilles' heels, but more often than not in the right doses for those things to work right. And that's not getting into games that are just TLoZ gameplay done right...

In a way Zelda is like Sonic, constant promises of better times ahead, a fanbase that can't recognize quality, but with more elitism and less deviantArt.

Oh geez, you're right. I'll fix that right away.

That's a real quote from you and I can prove it if necessary.

What, you don't trust me?

In any case, I've sent the transcript to Guilion. He'll be logging on any minute now. He'll back me up. He knows. Just you watch.



Yup. Won't be long, now.

spidershinobi action in Zelda is fine. People don't get to fully enjoy it because they always play with more than 3 to 6 hearts. Instead they pack 20 hearts and like 4 bottles with fairies, of course they won't feel the action. On the other hand I've seen dudes that can defeat Ganon with a Deku Stick, those guys never complaint.

So in order to enjoy a game you need to purposely limit your own use of game features and even make sure you're using sub-optimal equipment.