| the_dengle said: It's not the 5 1/2 minutes here. It's the 5 1/2 minutes here, and the 5 minutes there, and the 10 minutes over there, and the 5 minutes on the side... it adds up, as it was intended to add up. The game is not still amazing, it holds up extremely poorly today, and it is outclassed by almost every one of its successors, including Zelda II. I haven't gotten around to Phantom Hourglass or Spirit Tracks yet. But every Zelda game I've played is much better than the first -- including Majora's Mask, a game I don't personally enjoy very much. I have no objection to dungeons having more difficult enemy encounter in them, which is why the sparesly populated overworld seen recently doesn't bother me. I don't want to be stopped every 15 feet by another enemy in the overworld, save that stuff for the dungeons. But the dungeons should also be where the adventure elements shine, as they always have been. And you are still talking about puzzles. So, for your benefit I will walk you through a single dungeon in a modern 3D Zelda game, and explain what is a puzzle and what is not. I'll pick something straightforward as opposed to, for instance, the Water Temple. How about the Earth Temple from Skyward Sword? In the first room, you are attacked by a couple of fire keese while leaping across rocks that sink into the lava, and a red chuchu waits for you on the other platform. There is a chest hidden above eye level which you can find pretty easily by observing your surroundings -- a patch of dirt can be dug up to reveal a gust of wind. This chest contains 20 rupees, a minor reward for paying attention. Continuing on, you leap across more rocks to a platform guarded by several fire keese. A dig spot on this platform contains not a reward, but a trap -- another red chuchu. An NPC here provides a little optional dialogue, and then leaves. Back to the center of the room, across a couple more platforms. This time, though, the platforms are rising and falling with geysers of lava. They lead you to a long platform with two conspicuous contraptions on it. These are new objects, not like anything seen previously in the game. They each look like a gear with a taut rope connecting it to a bar. How do you interact with this thing? You whap it with your sword, and the rope snaps. A drawbridge is shown partially lowering toward you, but it stops short. You go cut the other rope. The bridge lowers further, but still not all the way. But that's all of the ropes, so you look around for more. After a moment of observation (or perhaps immediately upon landing on this platform, it will vary), you spot a third mechanism on the wall by the top of the bridge, well out of the reach of your sword. As you have used your Beetle to snap ropes in the previous dungeon, you whip it out here as well and break the third rope, lowering the bridge completely. Whew! Let's call this the end of the first room, even though it technically continues across the bridge. Upon inspecting our actions in this room, we were attacked by about ten weak enemies and introduced to two new elements. Did we solve any puzzles? No... no puzzles here. Puzzles are usually about pattern recognition (a la Tetris) or simple reasoning skills (Professor Layton). They shouldn't be reliant on context. The solutions to the challenges presented in this room were very straightforward or even obvious (enemy encounters included), but as this is the first room, their purpose was to introduce the player to these ideas, not to challenge you with them. Zelda 1 does the same kind of things. The first dungeon contains a room with three Gels (the weakest enemy in the game), a single block, and a gated door. Its purpose is to teach the player that blocks can be pushed, and that this can trigger unexpected resuts (such as a door opening). The game doesn't tell you this, and it isn't immediately obvious just by observing the block. You must explore the room by interacting with the block to learn this. It's not a puzzle, it's adventure gameplay. Back to the Earth Temple, then you fight your first Lizalfos and then you shoot bomb flowers with your slingshot and ride a big ball around in the lava and fight two Lizalfos at once and get bombs and use them on walls and it's all great, and none of that is a puzzle. Yeah I skipped the rest, I'm lazy and this is way too long. Sliding blocks around on ice to depress a switch, that's a puzzle. It teaches you nothing about the game world or how you can interact with it. It requires no knowledge of the context of the situation. Observing your surroundings and noticing a path on your map blocked by an ordinary-looking wall in the dungeon and tossing a bomb at that wall is not a puzzle. It requires more than pattern recognition, it requires an understanding of the capabilities of the player character and his arsenal and (most importantly!) a sense of curiosity, a desire to ask what if, to pick something out of your inventory and point it at something suspicious-looking and click. This is an adventure game, and it is what Zelda has been since day 1. So stop asking for Aonuma to surgically remove the adventure from this action-adventure game. There are more than enough pure action games these days. Zelda provides a unique experience because it is one of the only remaining franchises that respects this amazing combination of gameplay ideas. |
No it's not 5 minutes here and five minutes there. Those five minutes are the largest amount of time you'll be pushing blocks in any dungeon in zelda 1 by far.
I don't care if you don't consider those things puzzles. I do and I want them out of Zelda because they weren't like that in the first one. They aren't fun. It's mundane and it limits the dungeon design. You don't need context sensitive item puzzles to have an adventure feel in a dungeon. Like Aonuma said in his quote where he suggested that puzzles wouldn't be in the next Zelda, it should be about taking the experiences you've had playing the game, and using them to explore further. That shouldn't be tied to items. This old games are great at encouraging exploration, and they don't resort to this stupid dungeon gimmicks that's zelda has been resorting to. I don't think that the block pushing in Zelda 1 are the highlight of those games either, but recent Zelda games take that to an unbearable level. There's nothing wrong with encouraging curiosity, but those puzzles don't encourage curiosity. There's no curiosity to be found in the expected.
The dungeons are for trials. The adventure is for adventuring. You are obviously supposed to be exploring the dungeon, but the dungeon are supposed to challenge your skill. Again, the souls games do a fantastic job of being so close to exactly what Zelda dungeons should be. A trial. You go adventuring, you find a dungeon, you are tested vigorously, youre awarded, and then you are relieved that you're out of the dungeon. It shouldn't be a fun little stroll where you are snapping ropes with Beatles.
