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the_dengle said:

No, it sounds like Zelda U is entirely unrelated to this fabrication found on 2ch.

Seriously, explain this to me. You can play the first five dungeons in any order you choose -- but you can only progress in them by playing them all concurrently.

This is an outrageous contradiction!

Aside from not making any logical sense, it's awful game design. The sort of thing that sounds really great until you actually wonder how it would work. Imagine that you're playing Ocarina of Time, and you're in the Forest Dungeon. You get a couple of rooms in... and hit a wall. You are unable to progress. You don't know why, or what you have to do, because there's no handholding any more because nobody likes Navi. You actually need an item from the Water Temple to continue -- maybe eventually you figure this out. So you head to the Water Temple to get said item. But you can't get deep enough into the Water Temple to get that item, because there's a locked door that can only be opened by a switch in the Shadow Temple. I don't know how you figured that out, because there's no handholding or hints in this game, but you did. You went to the Shadow Temple, hit the switch, went back to the Water Temple, got the item, went back to the Forest Temple, progressed through a room... and hit another wall. Now you need something from the Fire Temple, but you can't get to that thing without first going to the Spirit Temple... and so on.

Maybe you're still thinking that sounds great. Well, you're wrong. It's a horrible, horrible idea.

Nobody seems to have any appreciation for the cleverness of the dungeon designs in Zelda games. You know when you're in the third dungeon in Skyward Sword, and you're using the item you got in the first dungeon in new ways that make for some really interesting puzzles, as well as adding to its combat applications against new enemies? That would all be scrapped if the dev team had to make it possible for you to play through the dungeons in any order. To say nothing of how the plot would be affected!

One last issue with the first quote -- Aonuma hated the Water Temple in Ocarina of Time. He went out of his way to "fix" it in the 3DS remake because he was so dissatisfied with how complicated it felt. There is no way he would use that dungeon as his inspiration for the entire overarching design of a new Zelda game.

This entire "rumor" reads like a fanfiction by someone who has played maybe two Zelda games in their entire life -- Ocarina of Time and Twilight Princess -- and who doesn't understand why you can't just slap a green tunic on Dark Souls and call it the best Zelda game ever.


First of all, I agree this rumour isn't going to be true.

Second of all, if Metroid Prime can have a hand holding hint system and be praised for being non-linear why can't a Zelda with five concurrent dungeons do this, too? It doesn't have to be complicated like the water temple to work, too, (which from my experience wasn't as bad as Twilight Princess. So many floors for a third dungeon).