Is Mario a Zelda?
https://youtu.be/hpWYajgHx0o
I beat Link Between Worlds today, I think I did 3 dungeons & the final castle. Like all Zelda games its pretty good. I'm a big fan of Link to the Past so I saw all the changes.
The dungeon design and use of 3D space really impressed me, it's been a while since I've liked a Zelda dungeon that much. Although I guess there haven't really been any hard-core dungeons since then (though the TotK pyramid was cool). I think the best part was when you go outside the walls of the dungeons, it completely breaks all the inherited rules of LttP but feels like a mind bending moment.
One thing I didn't like was the amount of chests. So many of them just contained rupees. I think I ended the game with 4000+ rupees which is way too much. It became disappointing to open a chest and just get money. I guess its because all the gear is rented/bought from Ravio so there's less to find.
I think that's one thing that LttP had, which was just an excess of items which were hidden all over the world. The design of LBW feels more purposeful but it becomes less wonderful. The game teaches you not to expect unique rewards from random caves.
Also, a random thought I had, when will be the next time we see a young Impa? She seems to be appearing more and more, but always old, though I guess she was half young in Skyward.
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@“beets”#p147267 when will be the next time we see a young Impa?
The Zelda Nioh-like starring Sheik and Impa that Team Ninja are not actually working on and which only exists in my head.
I‘ve dipped back into TotK here and there over the last couple weeks. I like a lot of the moment to moment gameplay. Exploring the depths is tense. The wind temple was pretty cool. Navigating the environment and discovering shrines is, or should be, the game’s bread and butter.
Basically I'm mashing through any narrative bits. They tend to be so long that I get the vibe from just the character animations and barks. I'll probably still watch the tear cut scenes.
I find the multi-tiered currency economy of upgrades horrendous game design. It's clearly meant to reward not just exploration, but doing various things within the world as a kind of open-ended progression system. But collecting food and other exploration supplies to collect zonaite to trade for EITHER zonaite devices OR crystalline charges to increase the battery OR the ability to auto build things is clumsy and obtuse. It's a worse version of the great fairy armor upgrade system. Even korok collecting is better!!! They've yet to crack how to give the player a sense of progression that feels good in these new open world Zeldas.
One of the ways TotK feels fundamentally different from BotW (for better or worse, ymmv) are Link's powers. BotW powers gave the player a way to spawn in unique interactive elements: bombs and ice blocks. The new powers feel like an extension of the other BotW power, stasis. It's a more direct way to interact with the world. In a way this makes the world itself feel more alive, but in another it feels flimsier. It somewhat breaks the illusion of autonomy present in BotW, where the world felt unsurmountable. It was a place in which to survive, and eventually conquer in the same way a human "conquers" a cliff face or mountain top. In TotK the devs left piles of junk around to build with, you can warp through solid mass, you can reverse the flow of time. The player is expected to bend the world to their will. While both are power trips, the vibes are totally different.
@“connrrr”#p147275 Impah is named as such because she is a static one-note character whose sole purpose is to Impahrt the quest so…. Maybe when miyamoto retires… the young impahs we did get felt like a loophole. I’m partial to the plus size impah from the oracle games she was cool.
@“treefroggy”#p153367 This is so cute. The cuts back to Link are hilarious
Some of these are more obvious ones I've always known, but for example the Zelda II overworld I was very surprised to hear!
https://youtu.be/F6wzxq49ERQ?si=bABLQMU4xRaKcHdC
Zelda II was featured in The Year of FDS last week.
https://youtu.be/n54_-HpgGZg
the GBA version of A Link to the Past was added to Switch Online today, and I never played that version so thought I’d give it a shot.
Do these guys make anyone else feel uncomfortable???
were they not in the original? gba is the only version of lttp I’ve played. those guys were definitely a significant part of the atmosphere for me
I think they were… they just creep me the heck out!
Honestly I don’t know if there’s any significant differences between the SNES and GBA versions. Here’s a list, it’s mostly minor things, except there’s a new dungeon that appears at the end if you beat the Four Swords Adventure.
I put this with the voice removal hack on my Everdrive when I got it because I grew up with the SNES version and can’t get behind the Wind Waker (ok they’re from Ocarina but I still don’t like them in this anachronistic context) barks. I’ve played it up to I think the fourth dark world dungeon and other than the audio being a little different and the GBA’s aspect ratio forcing a rearranged hud I can’t remember any of the other differences. Yes there was always something a little sinister about those dudes.
That game made an audio-only appearance on a show that aired here called Train 48, an improvised dramedy that took place on a commuter train (and was based on an Australian show called Going Home). Randy, played by Paul Sun-Hyung Lee of Kim’s Convenience, plays it on his SP with all of Link’s yelps audible when Liz, played by Krista Sutton, sits down across from him and asks what he’s doing. When he says “playing Zelda” without looking up she admits she doesn’t know what that is.
Just had a nice jaunt through A Link to the Past. I explored it a bunch as a kid and beat it in the past, but this was the first time in a while I really tried to see everything, so I used a guide and made sure to collect all the secrets. I ended up doing it all in about 9 1/2 hours, it was a very different experience playing it this way. Seeing all the dungeons back-to-back, some of them still hold up as great but a few of them are questionable or have really dubious solutions. Rushing between dungeons without spending much time in the overworld is really not the ideal way to play it. For pacing, you’re supposed to hang out and explore areas you’ve already been to, rather than just knowing when to go back and forth between the light and dark world to get stuff done. It’s too big of a game to beat so fast, you lose something by just looking at someone else’s map or a list of steps to take when you get stuck in a dungeon.
I think it’s still #2 on my list of Zelda games, but it’s not as solid of a lock as it once was. To be honest, I think there’s a good chance Echoes of Wisdom could be up there. Part of me wants to jump into Link Between Worlds before Echoes comes out, but I don’t want to get oversaturated on Hyrule.
Zelda Ranking
- Link’s Awakening
- A Link to the Past
- Cadence of Hyrule
- Breath of The Wild
- Ocarina of Time
- The Adventure of Link
- Tears of the Kingdom
- The Skyward Sword
Anyway, they should make an entire game where you play as Bunny Link. I also hope we see more of Kiki the monkey someday. I also appreciate that the Zelda fairies are allowed to be voluptuous now, and it’s not a “curse” that a man needs to save them from.
Anyway this guy really came out ahead:
the best part of totk was that song from the trailer.
Who’s echoing their wisdom today? Just started it up and chilling hard.