| RolStoppable said: I don't think the value propositions of Zelda limit it to a series that can never sell 10 million copies. Gameplay that is about a sense of growth is extremely popular and always will be. World of Warcraft is obviously a multiplayer example, so Zelda which is a singleplayer title can never reach the same heights, but there certainly is room for growth for the series as the fantasy setting of the series appeals to both genders, unlike Metroid (sci-fi fans are predominantly male). What you are implying in your posts is that the stagnant sales of Zelda are caused by a shift towards a more female playerbase over the years, in other words males are dropping out and females are picking up the slack. Now I don't believe that Zelda is an either-or-series and it's possible to appeal to both genders almost equally. A game in which you can die shouldn't be offputting to females, it's not like they don't like Super Mario Bros. after all. ALttP features two optional swords just like the first game, get your facts straight. ALttP also launched during the timeframe in which The Legend of Zelda faced the most fierce competition and with multiconsole ownership not being as prevalant as today as well as the Genesis and TG-16 having a headstart, it's not unreasonable to suggest that the playerbase interested in Zelda-like gameplay was split up among three consoles. You yourself are a victim of that, right? In the past decade, what competition did Zelda actually have on any video game system, aside from Okami? There is no real alternative to Zelda anymore, so everyone who wants something like it pretty much has to settle with Zelda and what remained of its core gameplay. In regards to The Wind Waker, I wasn't talking about the overworld, I was actually never specifically talking about overworlds. Zelda's world refers to the entire games and OoT's and MM's dungeons had some challenging fights where you could die. That element certainly was gone with TWW. So the requirement of the RAM expansion counts for nothing? Or that Majora's Mask was just a sidestory (even the working title was Zelda Gaiden) with Zelda only making a brief appearance? On top of that the shift to more oldschool values wasn't as pronounced as you make it out to be anyway. The instances in which you had to fight using your sword were rare, so the incentive to get a better sword wasn't big. Regular enemies were easy enough to defeat, minibosses most of the time required to use stuff other than the sword and the bosses were fought using transformations. Therefore it doesn't make much sense to call MM a return to more oldschool values, or more specifically to the values I proposed in my original post. Already now The Legend of Zelda is just a good game on a regular basis. Like Metroid, good games aren't enough for the standards of the series. Stellar is what they have to be. |
You've failed to make a cogent argument qualifying an objective lack in quality of current Zelda titles as compared to past ones, you've failed to qualify competition of comparable quality for Zelda in the 16-bit days (which would not explain why Wind Waker sold on par with LttP anyway), you've failed to refute the point that Zelda's sales never have been related to the installbase of the hardware, and you misinterpreted my point concerning the feminine shift.
Zelda is not shrinking, especially not compared to the 2D console days. You have yet to make a good argument to the contrary.
