| mZuzek said: It's one more element that adds variety to the gameplay, and figuring out how to solve them is awesome. I get that it's not for everyone, but it has been in Zelda since forever, and that's a fact. The original Zelda relied heavily on puzzles, although they might be overlooked just because they were bad puzzles. It expected you to just burn random grass in order to find important dungeons, inside of which you had to try to push any block around to try and open a door, or bomb every wall hoping that it'll open some secret room before you run out of bombs. Those things one could say are not puzzles, but I think they are puzzles, just bad ones. What definitely are puzzles though, are the lost woods and the riddles like "eastmost penninsula is the secret" or the meat thing. The only Zelda that didn't heavily feature puzzles was Zelda 2, and it being Zelda 2 you already know where I'm going with this. But it still had some. ...but the one thing I believe has made Zelda so remarkably amazing and consistent over 30+ years is variety. Zelda is a game that is hard to simply define by a genre - for the longest time, it's been mostly its own thing, completely different from other games. In fact, whenever a game came out and was similar to Zelda (like Okami), it would usually be called a "Zelda clone" and not an "adventure game". That's because Zelda is unique, and the main reason why it's hard to just put it under some random gaming category is because it has variety. It has combat, it has action, it has exploration and adventure, it has compelling storylines and characters, and it has puzzles and riddles that challenge your brain too. I believe that any game is at their best when they manage to avoid simply falling into a "default" category or genre. |
Burning a bush is not a puzzle. By definition, it is not a puzzle. Pushing a block one tile to open a secret door is not a puzzle, either. Again, by the definition of what a puzzle. A puzzle is a problem where all of the elements needed to solve the problem are presented to the participent in tandem with a clear set of rules, and the only missing element is the participent's mental ability to figure it out how to execute it. Think of a jigsaw puzzle. What makes it a puzzle is that you have all the peices. The puzzle comes from figuring where the peices go. In a crossword puzzle, you have all of the words in front of you. The puzzle is in finding all of the words.
Nothing in Zelda 1 is a "bad puzzle," because they are catagorically all not puzzles. When you see a wall in Zelda 1 and you can bomb it to reveal a secret room, that isn't a puzzle. You weren't presented with enough information, aka clear rules, and the challenge wasn't in executing or figuring out how to execute it. Burning bushes in Zelda 1 isn't a puzzle either. It's just a secret. You may have legitimate greivances over how obtuse those secrets are, a deliberate design decision because the game is a timepiece meant to be played with a guide like Nintendo Power, but those greivances don't make those elements any more of a puzzle, or anymore relevant to what I was talking about.
The same is true for the cryptic hints you're given. They aren't puzzles. "Eastmost penninsula is the secret" isn't a puzzle, it's a hint. "Grumble Grumble" isn't a puzzle, it's a hint. The Lost Woods aren't a puzzle, either. Not in Zelda 1, anyway. In Zelda 1, a shop keeper gives you the directions explicitely. There is no way to figure out the directions otherwise. Not a puzzle. In OoT, you figure out the Lost Woods by listening to the music by the openings, something you can figure out intuitively. That's a puzzle. In BotW, you follow the direction of the flames. That's a puzzle.
Zelda is an action adventure game. That's its genre. It's incredibly easy to define its genre. Variety for variety's sake alone, which is exactly what puzzles in adventure games are, is destracting and incoherent. You can be a clone in an established genre. Zelda is as unique in its genre as many other games are in their own. Assassin's Creed has clones and it's an open world adventure game. Devil May Cry has clones and God of War has different clones, but they're both hack-n-slash action games. Zelda is no more unique than other popular series.
Also, side note - Zelda has like no riddles. A riddle is a question or statement intentionally phrased in a way that requires inginuity in finding its answer or meaning - typically presented as a game or challenge. Zelda doesn't do that, like ever. Certainly not enough to be considered a staple of the series. I guess "Grumble Grumble" or the the way you get the Song of Storms in OoT are riddles, but I think it's pretty obvious that the former is an example of technical limitations limiting character limits on text, rather than an intentional riddle. The latter is pretty explicitely a riddle, but like I said, neither the game nor the franchise has a wealth of problems like that.
Zelda has enough distinct about it to not need puzzles to be unique. This might seem crazy, but Zelda having an overworld-dungeon structure at all is unique by itself. Most open worlds, and by most I really mean virtually all of them, don't have complex dungeons at all. And to be clear, when I say dungeon, I mean any interior area where the the challenge presented is getting from point A to point B. Open world games rarely do that. Zelda does, consistently. It's paced in a way that modern games simply aren't as a result. It doesn't need puzzles to accomplish or enhance that. Puzzles, in contrast, works actively against that pacing. Avoiding traps in a dungeon makes thematic sense. Getting lost in the labyinthine structure of a dungeon makes thematic sense. Overcoming difficult obstacles in a dungeon makes thematic sense.
I won't even argue that certain puzzles, like the one in OoT's Water Temple, can't make thematic sense when their sole purpose is in enhancing one of these very specific elements. With the Water Temple, that core dungeon puzzle of changing the water levels is necessary for that temple's labrinthine nature to function and be interesting, so its existence is fine and even encouraged. It's not superfluous and it makes thematic sense. 99% of puzzles in Zelda games do not funtion under this design philosophy though, meaning 99% of puzzles in these games are superfluous and alien to the experience. They feel shoehorned in because they literally are. They completely break your forward momentum to solve a stupid little problem that has nothing to do with your goals or setting outside of set dressing just to fill some unecessary "puzzle" quota because game designers are too aftaid that their game isn't fun enough to stay interesting without those distractions.
