| The Ghost of RubangB said: I think Twilight Princess is the perfection of the 3-D Zelda formula that Ocarina created. |
I do not mean to belittle the rest of your post (it was a very agreeable post) but this point in particular is interesting to me because it's related to something I was thinking about earlier.
In general, there are three schools of Zelda design:
The Old School, beginning with the first game and probably epitomized in Link's Awakening (or Link to the Past, depending on who you are asking)
The 3-D School, beginning with Ocarina of Time and epitomized in Twilight Princess. Lots of people are primairly familiar with this, but it's also interesting in that in Wind Waker, it also gave birth to
The DS School, arguably beginning with Wind Waker in some respects (exploration, art style, focus in terms of gameplay and storytelling) but finding its real genesis in Phantom Hourglass (how the game actually plays, the way one interacts with the game, how these interactions dictate the structure of the world). Spirit Tracks would be only the second "true" entry in this school.
It's interesting to me because each of these schools of design - even though one is very young, relatively speaking - have very different expectations attached to them and the games that are within them. The introduction of new schools, I think, is part of what makes these games so powerful, makes certian games stick out in the mind's eye more - the original, Ocarina, Phantom Hourglass, all of these will be remembered as the formative games that marked separate epochs for the series.
I hope Zelda Wii will mark something similar.
