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.
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Figured I owed you a better post after the one you wrote.
First paragraph: Sales of Zelda throughout the past two and a half decades indicate that its appeal is limited. You can try to claim abstractions all you want; data shows otherwise.
Second paragraph: I am not implying, you are inferring. And no, I am saying nothing of the sort. I don't know what the composition of the Zelda fanbase was like in 1986, but there are more Zelda players now than ever, so we have every reason to believe that its appeal now is higher than its appeal then, which means that Twilight Princess is succeeding where Legend of Zelda failed.
Third paragraph: right you are concerning sword numbers. However, Link to the Past did not face any competition as significant as games like Fable or the Elder Scrolls, and you have no data to support the idea that multiconsole ownership was more prevalent in the 16-bit days than now.
Moving on from that, the problem of competition dictating sales reveals a potentially appalling truth: it's safe to say that Gamecube and Wind Waker faced more competition than did the SNES and LttP. It is hard or impossible to argue otherwise. By your logic, the fact that Wind Waker sold basically the same as LttP would mean that Wind Waker was the game with gargantuanly more appeal. But, of course, that's not true; Zelda's appeal translates more or less absolutely into sales, so their appeal level is about the same (just like the original's appeal is lower than Ocarina's).
I was not a victim of the phenomenon you're referring to; I didn't play LttP until 2002, remember? And my father never owned the Legend of Zelda.
Nowadays competition Zelda faces is actually quite fierce: free-roaming games with emergent gameplay are more prevalent than ever, with titles like Fable, the Elder Scrolls, inFAMOUS (and its ilk), and even GTA standing head and shoulders above any previous generation's games that appealed to those values. Okami is a Zelda clone, but if you fail to acknowledge other games with the kind of appeal that you're talking about then you are being unnecessarily narrow in your summation of the competition field, as it were.
There is no "core gameplay" of Zelda, no single concept that sums up the spirit of the games. You will find disparate groups that agree on different things about it, but there is no core gameplay point that translates universally into the series' appeal. Pretending otherwise is nothing more than conceit.
Fourth paragraph: Fighting multiple darknuts in Wind Waker was harder than anything from either Ocarina of Time or Majora's Mask and I defy you to point me to any confrontation in either of those games that even came close.
Fifth paragraph: I acknowledged those points in Majora's Mask, but its return to the values yo uactually outlined were real, concrete, and palpable. The point is that they weren't enough to save it from the bottom of the console Zelda barrel in terms of sales.
Final paragraph: I said it before. You don't speak for buyers, and your idea of what constitutes a good game versus a great one has little or nothign to do with how the market reacts to Zelda games.
In speaking solely for the nostalgiacore, you fail to understand or even acknowledge the values that have made Zelda more popular over time rather than less, and a dogged adherence to one perspective has lead to something even worse:
You are beginning with a conclusion ("Zelda is failing!") and building an argument to support it. The facts do not support you. It's fine to be dissatisfied with the way Zelda is going, but don't pretend that this is a failing on the part of the series. Its job is to please players, not to please a player, and on average it's pleasing more players than it's ever pleased before. Decrying this point isn't going to make it untrue.
WHO IS JESUS REALLY?
