26th April 2013, 12:37 PM
You're just restating your claim that it was "completely random with no hints" even though I told you exactly what the hints were. If you got stuck, that's fine, but you didn't need a guide online to get through that. Why would you think to dash into a bookshelf to knock down a book on top of it? Why wouldn't you? Does the game need to have a fairy guide say something like "There is a BOOK up there, if only we had some way to RAM into the shelf we might be able to get the BOOK to fall down!" Excuses? EXCUSES? I just listed my entire train of thought, and apparently that is an excuse now. Oh well.
Light arrows were as easy for me to find as the level 4 sword. The hint as to what you needed to do was fairly clear there, though it was a long process to "unlock" every step along the way. The fat fairy hidden behind the pyramid door? That might have been tough if you forgot about the bomb shop, I must confess. However, if you kept checking back up on that bomb shop through the game, you would have seen the "big bomb" for sale. The pyramid crack you'd been struggling to break open was sure to spring to mind once you had it. Why would you check the bomb shop? The owner states repeatedly that you SHOULD check back as his/her stock may change. Once you get IN that crack, you should have been instantly reminded of the lightworld upgrade waterfall. Remember that? You tossed the boomerang in there and got a magical one in return so long as you were honest. Since this waterfall works the same way (you select an item to throw in from your inventory), you should be trying to toss all sorts of different items in there. There is a glyph you see in the pyramid after the first time you fight Ganon that tells you you "need the silver arrows". Well, what better place to look for them than the pyramid itself? Why wouldn't you try those arrows? I mean, yes, it isn't spelled out for you, but all the clues are there for anyone with clarity of thought to figure out.
Oh and as for the ice rod, that IS spelled out for you, as long as you talked to Sahasrala after beating the first dungeon. That old man specifically says "head to a cave by Lake Hylia, there is an item there you need." When you look for this ice cave, there are signs indicating where you are. Actually getting the ice rod isn't that complicated a puzzle. You can see the chest from one side of the cave, and all you need are bombs to open the other side. I got the ice rod on my first time through long before I even got to the dark world, much less before fighting that double headed elemental rock snake.
I was joking about ya there, but really, all you need is a clear head and a sense of adventure and you can find everything you need. The only things I ever needed a guide to find were two pieces of heart I was missing. As it turned out, I just hadn't examined my surroundings enough to realize that a few places in Death Mountain could be reached by making some leaps of faith. Your examples are exactly the point I was making before. I would actually champion those as examples of EXCELLENT puzzle and exploration design, not "randomly placed things with no hints" at all. I vehemently disagree with all of these examples, and that's not just me "making excuses" for them. I really DID solve them all with exactly that train of thought, I really did NOT use a guide nor just explore randomly and "retroactively" append a solution after the fact. These are nothing like that annoying bridling the snake puzzle from King's Quest II.
Zelda 1, I would agree with you. You basically have to experiment with randomly pushing rocks, bombing walls, and burning bushes to find pretty much all the hidden stuff on the overworld. There are notable exceptions where you piece the clues together yourself, like maps with suspicious "dark spots" and very conspicuous rocks in the middle of a field, but yes, it did depend much more on the "explore everything" side than the "subtle clues" side. Zelda 1 probably has the worst puzzle design of the whole series. I love it, but it is much more of an action game than otherwise. Zelda 2 actually has some puzzles that are better designed than the very basic ones from Zelda 1, and Zelda 2 is certainly more of an action game than a puzzle game.
Link's Awakening does have excellent puzzle design. I've played that game about a dozen or so times at this point, and it really is amazing in about everything it does. It deserves a lot of credit, as I've said in the past. However the "combining items" gimic isn't enough in recent years to keep it ahead of Link to the Past, for me anyway (plus, it was underutilized, and I would love to see a future Zelda game expand on that a lot more, such as this new overhead Zelda coming out). The original release kept the hints very cryptic, but more than that, had more than enough puzzles that didn't need dialog based hints. Many were purely hints as provided by architecture and things that "stand out" from established "rules" of the world. The "hint" of Eagle Tower wasn't much of one at all (you knew you had to knock down 4 pillars, but that's something I figured out by destroying one before I'd even read the hint), but the main puzzle was finding out exactly how to GET the metal sphere to each of the pillars so you could break them. It was certainly very well done and required a lot of thinking, spatially and based on limitations of where your character could move (such as noticing you could throw the sphere over certain walls, but Link couldn't actually cross those walls). It took me a long time to solve that tower, a week or two in fact back when I had a child's patience for that sort of thing, but when all was said and done I never once thought to myself "this puzzle is unfair". Actually, the next dungeon after that took me about as long to solve now that I think about it. That one actually did confuse me because it took an accident to figure out that those "push blocks" that generate paths could be controlled by the directional pad after being pushed. THAT should have had some sort of hint that I could do that. Once I had that "rule" down it was only a matter of solving some more spatial puzzles involving pushing that block to cover the lava up.
It is odd, the one puzzle that Nintendo saw fit to "simplify" in the LTTP rerelease is one you never complained about, the ice temple's block puzzle. That one was tough, I can admit. It took me some time to figure it out on my own, but it WAS doable, and it was entirely a spatially based puzzle that was possible for anyone to noodle through, given enough time and concentration.
I never had an issue with sword length. The first sword was short, but upgrades gave it some length. It was also a wide swing. I tended to stun someone before hitting them with the sword, or charging up a spin slash which had a wider attack range. I've played some interesting games with far shorter swords swing animations and much smaller "time windows" where the swing registers as a "hit", so maybe that plays into why I find the swing to be just fine. But yes, Link in LA does swing a much larger distance.
As for art, well, I guess I just have to disagree there. LA is a very nice looking game, don't get me wrong, but LTTP is also lovely to look at.
Light arrows were as easy for me to find as the level 4 sword. The hint as to what you needed to do was fairly clear there, though it was a long process to "unlock" every step along the way. The fat fairy hidden behind the pyramid door? That might have been tough if you forgot about the bomb shop, I must confess. However, if you kept checking back up on that bomb shop through the game, you would have seen the "big bomb" for sale. The pyramid crack you'd been struggling to break open was sure to spring to mind once you had it. Why would you check the bomb shop? The owner states repeatedly that you SHOULD check back as his/her stock may change. Once you get IN that crack, you should have been instantly reminded of the lightworld upgrade waterfall. Remember that? You tossed the boomerang in there and got a magical one in return so long as you were honest. Since this waterfall works the same way (you select an item to throw in from your inventory), you should be trying to toss all sorts of different items in there. There is a glyph you see in the pyramid after the first time you fight Ganon that tells you you "need the silver arrows". Well, what better place to look for them than the pyramid itself? Why wouldn't you try those arrows? I mean, yes, it isn't spelled out for you, but all the clues are there for anyone with clarity of thought to figure out.
Oh and as for the ice rod, that IS spelled out for you, as long as you talked to Sahasrala after beating the first dungeon. That old man specifically says "head to a cave by Lake Hylia, there is an item there you need." When you look for this ice cave, there are signs indicating where you are. Actually getting the ice rod isn't that complicated a puzzle. You can see the chest from one side of the cave, and all you need are bombs to open the other side. I got the ice rod on my first time through long before I even got to the dark world, much less before fighting that double headed elemental rock snake.
I was joking about ya there, but really, all you need is a clear head and a sense of adventure and you can find everything you need. The only things I ever needed a guide to find were two pieces of heart I was missing. As it turned out, I just hadn't examined my surroundings enough to realize that a few places in Death Mountain could be reached by making some leaps of faith. Your examples are exactly the point I was making before. I would actually champion those as examples of EXCELLENT puzzle and exploration design, not "randomly placed things with no hints" at all. I vehemently disagree with all of these examples, and that's not just me "making excuses" for them. I really DID solve them all with exactly that train of thought, I really did NOT use a guide nor just explore randomly and "retroactively" append a solution after the fact. These are nothing like that annoying bridling the snake puzzle from King's Quest II.
Zelda 1, I would agree with you. You basically have to experiment with randomly pushing rocks, bombing walls, and burning bushes to find pretty much all the hidden stuff on the overworld. There are notable exceptions where you piece the clues together yourself, like maps with suspicious "dark spots" and very conspicuous rocks in the middle of a field, but yes, it did depend much more on the "explore everything" side than the "subtle clues" side. Zelda 1 probably has the worst puzzle design of the whole series. I love it, but it is much more of an action game than otherwise. Zelda 2 actually has some puzzles that are better designed than the very basic ones from Zelda 1, and Zelda 2 is certainly more of an action game than a puzzle game.
Link's Awakening does have excellent puzzle design. I've played that game about a dozen or so times at this point, and it really is amazing in about everything it does. It deserves a lot of credit, as I've said in the past. However the "combining items" gimic isn't enough in recent years to keep it ahead of Link to the Past, for me anyway (plus, it was underutilized, and I would love to see a future Zelda game expand on that a lot more, such as this new overhead Zelda coming out). The original release kept the hints very cryptic, but more than that, had more than enough puzzles that didn't need dialog based hints. Many were purely hints as provided by architecture and things that "stand out" from established "rules" of the world. The "hint" of Eagle Tower wasn't much of one at all (you knew you had to knock down 4 pillars, but that's something I figured out by destroying one before I'd even read the hint), but the main puzzle was finding out exactly how to GET the metal sphere to each of the pillars so you could break them. It was certainly very well done and required a lot of thinking, spatially and based on limitations of where your character could move (such as noticing you could throw the sphere over certain walls, but Link couldn't actually cross those walls). It took me a long time to solve that tower, a week or two in fact back when I had a child's patience for that sort of thing, but when all was said and done I never once thought to myself "this puzzle is unfair". Actually, the next dungeon after that took me about as long to solve now that I think about it. That one actually did confuse me because it took an accident to figure out that those "push blocks" that generate paths could be controlled by the directional pad after being pushed. THAT should have had some sort of hint that I could do that. Once I had that "rule" down it was only a matter of solving some more spatial puzzles involving pushing that block to cover the lava up.
It is odd, the one puzzle that Nintendo saw fit to "simplify" in the LTTP rerelease is one you never complained about, the ice temple's block puzzle. That one was tough, I can admit. It took me some time to figure it out on my own, but it WAS doable, and it was entirely a spatially based puzzle that was possible for anyone to noodle through, given enough time and concentration.
I never had an issue with sword length. The first sword was short, but upgrades gave it some length. It was also a wide swing. I tended to stun someone before hitting them with the sword, or charging up a spin slash which had a wider attack range. I've played some interesting games with far shorter swords swing animations and much smaller "time windows" where the swing registers as a "hit", so maybe that plays into why I find the swing to be just fine. But yes, Link in LA does swing a much larger distance.
As for art, well, I guess I just have to disagree there. LA is a very nice looking game, don't get me wrong, but LTTP is also lovely to look at.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)