New Zelda for the Wii

[Erik Aston]

Who cares about the story and characters? The story and character elements have only been increasing from Majora >> Wind Waker >> TP, and these are the games people are increasingly displeased with. Solution = more and bigger? Huh?????

Another thing which doesn't matter is 1:1 swordplay. How does that freshen the adventuring and puzzle-solving elements at the core of Zelda?

Here's what I'm thinking...

The camera sits somewhere between the above camera of classic Zelda, and the behind camera of current 3D Zeldas... You'll see why this is the best...

The first item you get is the sword. To attack enemies, you point at them and press A. Hold A and draw a quick circle around yourself to do a spin attack.

Within the first three dungeons of the game, you traverse through most parts of Hyrule. In the process, you collect practically all of the normal items: Arrows, fire arrows, bombs, bombchu, boomerang, hookshot. You can use the pointer to precision-throw bombs, to draw bombchu and boomerang paths, and to aim with the arrows and hookshot. However, this all leads up to getting the marquee item: a magic wand.

The first wand power is simply to attack. You can switch between the sword and wand on "A". With the wand, you can hit far away enemies, as well as far away objects. (Towards the end of the game, this could be combined with your sword to have that Oni Link style infinitely long sword.)

You add to this another wand which can pick up, move and manipulate small objects, including grunt enemies.

The third wand summons three spirits of dead heroes (or something), each of which can use a few of your items. You can switch between them simply by clicking on them. This way you can control 4 characters at once and have to figure out how to use them all to advance.

The moves with all of these powers would be very simple to learn--mostly point and click--but the fact that they are at least kinda new, combined with a slightly different camera viewpoint, means when you first see Hyrule there is no element of "I'll have to come back here when I have the hookshot." Instead, you won't even see the puzzles the first time you pass them, or at best see them and end up totally confused.

For example, there could be a treasure chest on a distant housetop, but you can only get on one roof, and there's a stack of boards outside that house. Each jump between roofs is slightly too far, and the hookshot doesn't work. With the second wand, you can use the boards to bridge the gap between roofs.

Then later, you could have the same scenario, except that you need to hookshot onto the first roof, and from there you can't see the boards. You'd have to send a spirit dude onto the roof, and then build a path in front of him.

Maybe these aren't all the best ideas or best examples, but one would hope that Nintendo thinks along the lines of using just motion/pointer oriented items (whether old or new) to create fresh puzzles. A movie-like story, 1:1 sword-fighting, or a change in setting are just obvious, and IMO ultimately distracting and unimportant additions.