The Legend of Zelda -16/52

     If you were to ask me what my first love in gaming was, it's Pokemon.  I hope at this point I've made that fact abundantly clear.  But if you were to ask me my second love, it's Kingdom Hearts.  But we’ll get back to that later.  But if you were to ask me my third love, that would be the Legend of Zelda.  I got into the Zelda series way later in life than I imagine most other fans did.  I was already probably 11 or 12 when I received my first Zelda game, Wind Waker, and while it would take me a few more years to really appreciate how great Wind Waker was, I was pretty instantly hooked on the Zelda formula.  Later that same year I would receive a promo disc from a close friend that allowed me to play Zelda 1, Zelda 2, Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask, and this disc cemented my lifelong love of the Zelda series.  But my biggest regret from that point was never beating the original, a game that I found incredibly fascinating yet incredibly confusing at the same time.  And now, over a decade later, my little blog series has finally given me an excuse to fulfill my biggest gaming regret.  This is the Legend of Zelda.

     Let's start with a disclaimer.  I was initially fully on board with playing this game like I would've as a kid in the 80s before I could just look up everything on the internet.  I even sat down and tried it for a few hours, figuring out my own way through the primitive Future Past Hyrule.  But as I was pretty slowly finding various things around the map, it dawned on me that I have 36 other games to beat this year and I really would like to get to them too.  So I opted for a guide, but only to show me dungeon locations and sword upgrades.  Everything else in the run was all me.  With that out of the way, let's get to it.

     It almost seems ludicrous to discuss the story of the Legend of Zelda.  It's one of the most important and iconic video games of all time.  But for those unaware, the Legend of Zelda puts you in the boots of a young adventurer named Link, exploring the largely abandoned, monster-infested land of Hyrule.  Your goal is to discover all eight of the dungeons, collecting various weapons, equipment, and tools to aid you along the way, as well we finding all eight shards of the all-powerful Triforce of Courage.  After doing so, you must find your way into the massive labyrinth of Death Mountain, battling your way through the evil monster army of the dark wizard Ganon until finally, you come face-to-face with Ganon himself.  Slay the beast, grab his Triforce of Power, rescue the princess, just all the classic fantasy tropes we know and love.  Simple, effective and a ton of fun.

     It was incredibly interesting to see the origins of one of my favorite game series.  I had previously played the first Zelda, of course, but young me got easily confused and frustrated by it and got into a cycle of playing it for ten minutes, dying a couple times, not finding anything and then just turning it off and playing Scooby-Doo: Night of 100 Frights for the thousandth time.  Really, it kind of reignited my love for Zelda, or at least my passion.  The last Zelda game I played was Ocarina of Time 3D and I don’t like Ocarina of Time, at all, so I was feeling pretty off with Zelda.  So really, playing through the original was exactly what I needed.  As well, it came at a point where Breath of the Wild was still a fresh point in my mind, being a game for months after I had actually beat it that I would return to just to wind down with some exploration.  Seeing the obvious thematic parallels between the original Zelda and Breath of the Wild only heightened my experience of the original.

     So, let’s talk about dungeons.  Dungeons are the staple of pretty much every Zelda game that isn’t Breath of the Wild and are more often the favorite part for a lot of Zelda players.  Dungeon design has been one of the most important parts of the series overall.  And you know what, they didn’t get it from this game.  None of the dungeons are necessarily bad, far from it.  The original Zelda has some really fun dungeons with a lot of cool secrets and shortcuts lying around.  And honestly, Death Mountain is probably one of my favorite dungeons in the series overall.  It’s just, for a series that would grow to pride itself on puzzle-solving, it’s off to see it missing in any capacity.  They feel more akin to a Coliseum rather than a massive underground temple, with room after room of the only notable obstacle being 5-7 of Ganon’s minions trying to kill you.  It creates for fun, combat-heavy challenges, but it just feels off considering everything Zelda has become.  Though, I will say that seeing the origins of a lot of the classic Zelda enemies and their functions in this game did put a smile on my face.  One enemy in particular, which has very recently grown a reputation for being exceptionally challenging and rewarding in future installments, is present in this game as an exceptionally easy overworld fight and that amuses me to no end.

     I don’t actually have anything super negative to say about the Legend of Zelda.  It’s almost boringly perfect when you get down to it.  So, instead, I’m just going to list off a couple nitpicks I had throughout the game.  One, I feel like it should’ve been made clearer that the whistle warps you between dungeons on the overworld.  There’s a lot of very unhelpful old men scattered throughout Hyrule and I kind of feel like one of them should tell you ‘hey, you can warp around the world with the power of song’.  Two, I feel like this game suffers more from the overstocked inventory problem than any other Zelda game.  So many of the game’s various items and weapons are just completely and totally useless except for this one area in the game where they are necessary.  The Spinner from Twilight Princess has nothing on the Raft is all I’m saying.  And finally, the final boss kind of sucks.  It’s kind of cool how Ganon goes invisible and teleports around, but I personally feel like the only thing that stops it from becoming a complete and total random number generation nightmare is the sheer size of Ganon’s sprite.  If he didn’t have such a huge hitbox, I could easily see that fight taking forever just from you getting a bad warp spot set.  These are really all minor things in the grand scheme of things and didn’t really hurt my playthrough, they’re just all little issues I had with it.

     I wasn't actually sure if I would like the original Zelda very much when I say down to play it.  Part of that was definitely skill.  Despite the fact that a large portion of my free time is devoted to video games, I'm not good at them, and the normal level of difficulty in older video games has been super off-putting to me previously.   More than that, though, I’ve pretty routinely been let down by games everyone loves.  For some reason, me and the popular opinion don’t tend to mesh and I think it’s that I usually let myself join the hype train which is just a setup for disappointment all around.  But all of these doubts were quickly silenced, to my relief, and filled with a sense of wonder about this beautifully, masterfully designed game that was way ahead of its time.  I hope you enjoyed this look at the original Legend of Zelda, it is absolutely a superb game that I highly recommend for pretty much anyone.  We’ll be back next time with another retro adventure game, though this one has a new, pretty coat of paint on it, Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap.

All gameplay screens and official art credit of https://www.zeldadungeon.net/ and Nintendo.  Map image credit of http://www.ign.com/.

Ethan's backlog: https://www.backloggery.com/edzoologist