Some Zelda Things
26th September 2025, 8:11 AM
Zelda 2: The "Dark Souls" of Zelda games. Yes I know, I may as well have said "This game has a little something for everyone" or "It really makes you FEEL like Link", but keep reading if you would. The game involves leveling by picking specific stats to increase over the game, enemies that force you to learn their patterns in order to best defeat them, numerous creative out of the box solutions to problems (like turning into a fairy to pass through a locked door's keyhole and skip finding the key), and very obscure secrets. Further, the game's got heavy punishment for mistakes but managing to make it all the way back through the palace can be rewarding. It's only a shame the game has a total of two checkpoints, one at the very start, and the other at the entrance to the vast final palace. All in all, much more action focused than most Zelda games, but well done.
Capcom making Minish Cap makes sense after they had impressed Nintendo so much with the GBC Oracle games and the Four Sword bonus mode in the GBA port of Link to the Past. Personally, I can feel a shift in design focus, with a bit more story (with some actual twists here and there) and very clearly they started with a story and worked in the gameplay second, contrary to Miyamoto's method. The story isn't something on the level of Planescape Torment or anything, for any of Capcom's Zelda games, but it's got enough little twists here and there to keep one curious enough to push forward.
Link's Awakening isn't my favorite Zelda game any more, but it's still up there. The dungeons, to me, are all memorable, but I've played this game in all it's forms many many times at this point. I also like how creative they got, breaking out of the typical "video gamey" tropes to some extent. There's the pot themed one, the mural themed one, the crystal and slime themed one, the tower where you "don't trouble yourself with going up the stairs and instead bring the upstairs downstairs"... Also one lava temple... Well they had to have a few "normal" ones. In any case, it's interesting you bring up not wanting to use a button to pull up the shield, when Link's Awakening started that trend and the Oracle games did the same. It makes combat a bit more strategic, which I appreciate at times. However, I'll say the Switch remake made gameplay dramatically faster in the game as I didn't have to constantly pause in order to switch items all the time. Once you don't have to do that any more, it's hard to go back.
Link to the Past is still one I regard VERY highly. It spends time as my absolute favorite in the series, depending on my mood. At other times, I go back to the very simplistic but very short Zelda 1. I do absolutely love both Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask, but here's my thinking there. On replays, I like trying new things, doing things in different orders or finding a harder path. LTTP allows for this, while also being a more complex game than Zelda 1. It isn't AS open as the first game, but it's more open than what would follow. In fact, until Breath of the Wild broke the trend, the Zelda series at least in the main entries kept getting more and more prescriptive and limiting.
The biggest sin Skyward Sword commits is that for all it's side quests in Skyloft, it never really allows you to do even a single thing out of order. There's even a glitch in earlier revisions that will flat out break progression if you go back and go to another location before you're "supposed" to. Fi, that talking sword spirit, was nothing but an annoyance. People complain about Navi, but the worst she had was a squeaky voice. Fi meanwhile can't be ignored. She just won't shut up. Every single temple you enter, she's there popping up and telling you in detail EXACTLY how to solve the puzzle you JUST encountered. Navi you can ignore, but you can't ignore Fi, no sirFibob. I'd hoped the Switch remaster would provide a "silent mode" for the character, but nothing doing. They barely touched the gameplay at all. In fact, while previous Zelda games let you "save" at any point (even if you continued at a checkpoint), in Skyward Sword you could ONLY ever save at save points. Also, they introduced the annoying "Stamina bar" for... realism I guess? What game do you think you are, Skyward Sword? It's like Quake II adding upward aim drift to the machine gun. C'mon cut that out.
I go on this side tangent on Skyward Sword only to explain why I hold it in lower regard than the other Zelda games. Even the dungeons suffer from that design choice. I appreciate that they redefined what a "dungeon" could be, turning whole outdoor areas into spaces that act, effectively, as "dungeons" in their own right. I don't appreciate how this went even further than Twilight Princess in that you literally have no choice in what order to even enter ANY of the rooms in.
Now go back to Link to the Past. While there's a prescribed order to take on the dungeons in, this can be broken. How intentional is this? It depends on how the sequence is broken, but there's enough there to get really creative without any outright glitches involved, and it allows a player to actually get lost in the spaces presented.
Link Between Worlds came along later as a return to form. They took what was only relative openness in LTTP and made it so open the dungeons really could be taken on in literally any order. While I wasn't a fan of the "shop" for getting special items (I'd have had separate "lesser" dungeons for acquiring the items throughout the game), I did appreciate a return to the older form. Further, there was no longer a little companion solving all my puzzles for me. I much prefer how both Link to the Past and the very first black and white edition of Link's Awakening handled hints. They were riddles in themselves, more or less. THIS is my favorite way of giving me a dungeon hint. Anyway, the downside of how open the design was is that every single dungeon was on a totally flat difficulty curve, and that difficulty was low. Only the very last dungeon really ups the challenge. There was a habit Nintendo had, whenever they remastered one of their classics, to "fix" difficult puzzles in dungeons, like the Ice Temple in LTTP or the "Water Temples" in both OOT and MM, but rather than provide additional hints, they just flat out remove the puzzle element entirely and it's now just like any other temple. With this game, it seemed they at least realized it was ok to keep puzzles intact.
Breath of the Wild was a major shift. Firstly, they did away with the cute little "spirit companion" that Nintendo had felt the need to jam into every single one of their mainline titles since Super Mario Sunshine and Fludd. Ever notice that? Even Luigi's Mansion jammed in a little ghost dog companion. Peach had her umbrella, Paper Mario had all kinds of little buckets or stickers or whatever, Link had been getting more and more overt puzzle solving companions ever since Navi and Tatl. Heck even Donkey Kong is now carrying around some lost child version of the woman his daddy used to regularly abduct. I've got NO clue how that timeline works at this point, but I get why they did that because it'd be a LOT harder to animate having a grown woman clinging to his back the whole game. Anyway, Breath of the Wild will OCCASIONALLY have Zelda beam messages into your head, like in Link to the Past actually, but beyond that the game makes a point that you are on you OWN and that the game trusts you to be able to figure out where to go and what to do on your own. If Link Between Worlds was a shift away from Skyward Sword style "linearity", Breath of the Wild was a full embracing of letting players enjoy the game on their own terms, and that extended to the emergent gameplay you could get out of numerous systems interacting with each other. Use fire arrows to start a grassfire that the wind will sweep right into a pile of explosives laying next to a moblin camp. Boom. It was the saving grace, when so many "camps" were just copies of each other more or less.
But, what brings replaying that game down in my estimation are the primary dungeons. Namely, the game is littered with over a hundred mini-dungeons. They're fine as they are, and they are even "ranked" in varying difficulty so you know going in roughly what to expect. Since they're shorter challenges, I have no complaints there. In fact, I love that while those puzzles clearly have an intended solution, the game fully embraces totally sequence breaking them. You have to connect a circuit pad to open some doors? Drop that metal sword you brought in and link the circuit with that. You need to play a game of Logical to get a marble to the end? Just flip the whole puzzle over, ignore it, and move the marble easily along the flat backside. Gordian knot solutions abound! This I love! But then, there's the "main" dungeons, and this is where the game loses me. The four beasts and the final palace don't really have much in the way of puzzles at all. Don't get me wrong, it's really creative that you can change the shape of the dungeons, but they don't do much of anything with it. They're SO intent on making the puzzle design open and going against the mistakes made in Skyward Sword that there's not really much to the dungeons, nothing to get "lost" in.
Anyway, I just rambled on for a bit there.
Capcom making Minish Cap makes sense after they had impressed Nintendo so much with the GBC Oracle games and the Four Sword bonus mode in the GBA port of Link to the Past. Personally, I can feel a shift in design focus, with a bit more story (with some actual twists here and there) and very clearly they started with a story and worked in the gameplay second, contrary to Miyamoto's method. The story isn't something on the level of Planescape Torment or anything, for any of Capcom's Zelda games, but it's got enough little twists here and there to keep one curious enough to push forward.
Link's Awakening isn't my favorite Zelda game any more, but it's still up there. The dungeons, to me, are all memorable, but I've played this game in all it's forms many many times at this point. I also like how creative they got, breaking out of the typical "video gamey" tropes to some extent. There's the pot themed one, the mural themed one, the crystal and slime themed one, the tower where you "don't trouble yourself with going up the stairs and instead bring the upstairs downstairs"... Also one lava temple... Well they had to have a few "normal" ones. In any case, it's interesting you bring up not wanting to use a button to pull up the shield, when Link's Awakening started that trend and the Oracle games did the same. It makes combat a bit more strategic, which I appreciate at times. However, I'll say the Switch remake made gameplay dramatically faster in the game as I didn't have to constantly pause in order to switch items all the time. Once you don't have to do that any more, it's hard to go back.
Link to the Past is still one I regard VERY highly. It spends time as my absolute favorite in the series, depending on my mood. At other times, I go back to the very simplistic but very short Zelda 1. I do absolutely love both Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask, but here's my thinking there. On replays, I like trying new things, doing things in different orders or finding a harder path. LTTP allows for this, while also being a more complex game than Zelda 1. It isn't AS open as the first game, but it's more open than what would follow. In fact, until Breath of the Wild broke the trend, the Zelda series at least in the main entries kept getting more and more prescriptive and limiting.
The biggest sin Skyward Sword commits is that for all it's side quests in Skyloft, it never really allows you to do even a single thing out of order. There's even a glitch in earlier revisions that will flat out break progression if you go back and go to another location before you're "supposed" to. Fi, that talking sword spirit, was nothing but an annoyance. People complain about Navi, but the worst she had was a squeaky voice. Fi meanwhile can't be ignored. She just won't shut up. Every single temple you enter, she's there popping up and telling you in detail EXACTLY how to solve the puzzle you JUST encountered. Navi you can ignore, but you can't ignore Fi, no sirFibob. I'd hoped the Switch remaster would provide a "silent mode" for the character, but nothing doing. They barely touched the gameplay at all. In fact, while previous Zelda games let you "save" at any point (even if you continued at a checkpoint), in Skyward Sword you could ONLY ever save at save points. Also, they introduced the annoying "Stamina bar" for... realism I guess? What game do you think you are, Skyward Sword? It's like Quake II adding upward aim drift to the machine gun. C'mon cut that out.
I go on this side tangent on Skyward Sword only to explain why I hold it in lower regard than the other Zelda games. Even the dungeons suffer from that design choice. I appreciate that they redefined what a "dungeon" could be, turning whole outdoor areas into spaces that act, effectively, as "dungeons" in their own right. I don't appreciate how this went even further than Twilight Princess in that you literally have no choice in what order to even enter ANY of the rooms in.
Now go back to Link to the Past. While there's a prescribed order to take on the dungeons in, this can be broken. How intentional is this? It depends on how the sequence is broken, but there's enough there to get really creative without any outright glitches involved, and it allows a player to actually get lost in the spaces presented.
Link Between Worlds came along later as a return to form. They took what was only relative openness in LTTP and made it so open the dungeons really could be taken on in literally any order. While I wasn't a fan of the "shop" for getting special items (I'd have had separate "lesser" dungeons for acquiring the items throughout the game), I did appreciate a return to the older form. Further, there was no longer a little companion solving all my puzzles for me. I much prefer how both Link to the Past and the very first black and white edition of Link's Awakening handled hints. They were riddles in themselves, more or less. THIS is my favorite way of giving me a dungeon hint. Anyway, the downside of how open the design was is that every single dungeon was on a totally flat difficulty curve, and that difficulty was low. Only the very last dungeon really ups the challenge. There was a habit Nintendo had, whenever they remastered one of their classics, to "fix" difficult puzzles in dungeons, like the Ice Temple in LTTP or the "Water Temples" in both OOT and MM, but rather than provide additional hints, they just flat out remove the puzzle element entirely and it's now just like any other temple. With this game, it seemed they at least realized it was ok to keep puzzles intact.
Breath of the Wild was a major shift. Firstly, they did away with the cute little "spirit companion" that Nintendo had felt the need to jam into every single one of their mainline titles since Super Mario Sunshine and Fludd. Ever notice that? Even Luigi's Mansion jammed in a little ghost dog companion. Peach had her umbrella, Paper Mario had all kinds of little buckets or stickers or whatever, Link had been getting more and more overt puzzle solving companions ever since Navi and Tatl. Heck even Donkey Kong is now carrying around some lost child version of the woman his daddy used to regularly abduct. I've got NO clue how that timeline works at this point, but I get why they did that because it'd be a LOT harder to animate having a grown woman clinging to his back the whole game. Anyway, Breath of the Wild will OCCASIONALLY have Zelda beam messages into your head, like in Link to the Past actually, but beyond that the game makes a point that you are on you OWN and that the game trusts you to be able to figure out where to go and what to do on your own. If Link Between Worlds was a shift away from Skyward Sword style "linearity", Breath of the Wild was a full embracing of letting players enjoy the game on their own terms, and that extended to the emergent gameplay you could get out of numerous systems interacting with each other. Use fire arrows to start a grassfire that the wind will sweep right into a pile of explosives laying next to a moblin camp. Boom. It was the saving grace, when so many "camps" were just copies of each other more or less.
But, what brings replaying that game down in my estimation are the primary dungeons. Namely, the game is littered with over a hundred mini-dungeons. They're fine as they are, and they are even "ranked" in varying difficulty so you know going in roughly what to expect. Since they're shorter challenges, I have no complaints there. In fact, I love that while those puzzles clearly have an intended solution, the game fully embraces totally sequence breaking them. You have to connect a circuit pad to open some doors? Drop that metal sword you brought in and link the circuit with that. You need to play a game of Logical to get a marble to the end? Just flip the whole puzzle over, ignore it, and move the marble easily along the flat backside. Gordian knot solutions abound! This I love! But then, there's the "main" dungeons, and this is where the game loses me. The four beasts and the final palace don't really have much in the way of puzzles at all. Don't get me wrong, it's really creative that you can change the shape of the dungeons, but they don't do much of anything with it. They're SO intent on making the puzzle design open and going against the mistakes made in Skyward Sword that there's not really much to the dungeons, nothing to get "lost" in.
Anyway, I just rambled on for a bit there.
"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)