I really feel obliged to answer to all your points, so here goes:

Khuutra, I am not holding two diametrically opposed ideas. I have a certain view of what a Zelda game should be, and you have your own. Other player's views also matter, so then we need to decide which one to choose. You say that most players disagree with me, but how many people is that really? The game journalists, and people on this and other forums? How much does that amount to? A few hundred thousand? ( ignoring the fact that you haven't personally heard all these people ). Already they don't represent all of the buyers of Zelda games, so we have to look at the sales.

The major argument in my favour is that the 1st Zelda was a massive success, so they should strive to replicate what made it such a success. It also happens to be the 2nd or 3rd best selling Zelda game, at a time when the population is smallest relative to the Zelda series existence. Finally, the latest Zelda, spirit tracks, sold only about half of it's predecessor, which is pretty bad, and it represents a lot of the things that has made the series worse, so people don't want that direction. So my opinioin seems to represent the majority's, and thus that's what Zelda should be.

Your extrapolation isn't actually based on anything except for recycled Malstromisms, which isn't actually an argument. Zelda games have never sold in direct relation to the total gamer population, or even the console userbase; if they did, then Wind Waker sold several times better than the original game. Zelda is a series with a certain degreee of absolute appeal,  and different games will appeal differently. In four months, Twilight Pricess will be the best-selling Zelda game of all time, and it's been ahead of the original game for something like two years.

You insist that they should strive to replicate what made the first Zelda game such a success, but why would they when it's not the biggest success in the series? Why, when that formula produced diminishing returns over the course of four games?

Zelda is a series which experiences natural and recurring zeniths and nadirs in its sales patterns, which is often down to unnecessary or unwanted sequels (Spirit Tracks) or games that people just didn't find as appealing as their predecessors (Adventures of Link, Link to the Past) or hardware limitations limiting the scope of the audience (Majora's Mask and probably Skyward Sword).

There's two things you need to understand, here, though.

The first is that you're still wrong in that nobody gets to dictate what Zelda should be, because dictating means that your opinion actually matters beyond your buying power. It doesn't, because people still buy the living shit out of the puzzle-dungeon 3D diatribes like Ocarina and Twilight Princess. But that's not the biggest reason - the biggest reason is that the Legend of Zelda, at its core, is about a young boy going on an adventure and exploring, and that's all it is. Hahaha, I'm kidding, see, that would be me dictating what Zelda is. But Zelda has always been a vehicle for experimentation in realizing traditional series motifs, and balking against change in Zelda is like balking against jumping in Mario. It's going to happen, and you need to be prepared for it. Change isn't bad in Zelda games when it still carries out certain concepts that make the series great.

Second and more, you are taking certain elements of Skyward Sword to be signals of doom when they aren't. Skyward Sword is going to be a high school drama in the same sense that Wind Waker was a buddy comedy about Link sailing around with pirates, or Ocarina was a gradeschool drama about Link growing up and coming back to see his friends. All of those things are true, but they're not the actual narratives of the game and they serve as character-building focuses for Link, not narrative structures for the game. Narrative structures for all but a very few Zelda games come down to this: some rat bastard took the princess, let's go kill him. All other character relationships serve only to highlight the fundamental relationship between hero, villain, and damsel, because that's the way it has always been.

And shit, what's not to like about how Skyward Sword is set up? Individual combat has been given more focus, and it looks like you need twitch-based reflexes as much as you do the ability to see where an enemy is holding its shield. The fight with the evil sorcerer is the hardest fight in the game seen so far and it doesn't have much directional horsing around at all, the guy is just fast and hits hard like a nightmare version of Dark Link from Ocarina of Time. Puzzle solving looks like the standard for the series since Link to the Past, which is interacting with the environment in ways that makes sense for the environment at hand. Oh, you have to turn a puzzle piece around to stick it in a hole - big freaking deal, there's only six orientations for the damn thing unless they move away from cubic designs. The overworld - haven't you seen how much they've avoided showing the overworld? How much they've steered us away from seeing the world below, dropping onl ythe barest hints of what we're going to see? They say that the exploration is like Wind Waker with more to see, free-roaming and enormous and with sidequests out your freaking nose.

Better combat than any other 3D Zelda, a giant world with lots of extra stuff to see, a centralized hub town with the best aspects of Majora's Mask, fun-to-use items with various applications (don't tell me you don't want to just scourge the Hell out of some lizard demons with the whip, you would be a liar), an art style that won't age, beautiful music, and they're levaing us the mystery, they're holding back so much of the game before release so there's so much to see

Christ, why not be excited? There's so much to be excited for. Fighting and flying and exploring and hardship and danger! It's shaping up to have everything, to be the best and hardest and most demanding of the 3D Zeldas. How can you balk at this game and not simultaneously rail at Ocarina and Majora and Wind Waker all at once?

I read this part a few times, but I still can't understand what you mean by it. Already it sounds like a made up word along the lines of "casual gamer", so I'm temtpted to dismiss it as absolute tripe, but I won't. Instead, I'd really like to know what it means, and why it sounds as though it's such a terrible thing.

No idea where this came from. By that reason, I could have said that in 1996, Zelda had an "absolute limit" of 6.5 million sales. Yet Ocarina of time sold more, and twilight princess seems on it's way to beat that number. There is no reason whatsoever to indicate that an "absolute limit" has been reached.

In raw numbers it might not, but that's where total population and how much markets where available come into play. Not only where the populations in America, Japan and EMEAA the smallest at that time ( since population grew ), but if you look at the sales of the 1st one vs Ocarina of time, we see minor growth in America only, a minor regression in Japan, and most of the growth comes from EMEAA, where the markets are more available then in the NES times. This means that Zelda sales are quasi stagnant when it comes to it's biggest sellers. And with growing population over time, that's not such a great thing. Also, back with LoZ, it was a bleeding social phenomenon, there was Zelda cornflakes and saturday morning TV shows! I don't see that anymore. Oh, and the frmula started to drift away around the time of A Link to the Past, focusing more on the puzzles.

I see nothing natural in sales, you make it sound as though it's a given there will be X amount of people buying a Zelda game. Which is prepostorous. Unappealing games selling less is the only major credible reason, hardware limitation to a point, but still very small ( Zelda SS will have at least a 27 million potential market base already, or a tad more ), while unwanted sequels only occur if the sequel is unappealing.

My opinion dictates what I buy or not. And that dictates how well a game will sell or not. And that dictates what a Zelda game should be or not. As for the rest, it'd be interesting to see how many of those people are new to Zelda, and how many buy for the puzzles or despite the puzzles. I can personally tel you I never bought a Zelda game thinking "Yeah, I want to ace those puzzles!"

Yeah, close enough.

Not sure what you mean by that, but not all experimentation is good, jsut like if they made the jumping in Mario feel wrong, I would be against it.

But the whole problem is that it doesn't. They only keep traditional Zelda things in the most superficial way.

First of all, OoT and WW were never either of those things, and no, it seems that the high scholl drama will be an actual narrative for the game, though probably still secondaty to sve the princess, it is holding a much higher importance here: he mentions specifically that you're in a boarding scholl, Zelda is a classmate, another classmate is competing with you over her and you will see him throughout the game, and that you seem to have to ( could be wrong here )  return to Skyloft just to chitchat with the villagers as part of the story and so forced to do it ( different interview ) as part of the story, unlike MM.

I don't know how you saw that, but I've seen nothing that needs twitch based reflexes. The enemies come at you by one or two at the most, never more, they aren't aggressive at all, and there's only ever one way to defeat them, jsut like a bloody puzzle. So no, combat has failed miserably.

I fail to see how having a bleeding eye on a door that you need to spin your sword to destroy it makes sense, why not just have door without locks? All this does is interrupt the fow of the game for no good reason. Same for that easy, yet annoying and so useless cube thing puzzle.

Wrong there, it's going to be puzzles as far as the eye can see ( if that Nintendo E3 rep is to be believed ).

Sadly, no. It's combat that is underdevelopped by the lack of challenging enemies, a world filled with puzzles, a centralised hub town that you seem to have to return to as part of the story, items which are either redundant ( slingshot, seriously, WTF? ) or even if they are awesome, will be limited to basic puzzle solving ( hope not ), an art style which IK guess is nice, but I vastly prefered TP's one, and the worst part is that they lied by teasing us with that precise art style, and what's the end result? Different. Music will most definitely be nice. But since the overworld will be filled with puzzles, it gives me little motivation to explore it. At all.

Phew, that was a long response.

But no, it doesn't look anywhere near the hardest 3D zelda game, and even if it turns out to be, that's still easy compared to the 2D ones. OoT's only major complaint was the water temple, the rest of the game was really good. MM had the incredibly annoying clock system, and WW had a huge, empty ocean that you had to go through, both things pervaded through the whole game.

You know, it's not as if I want to hate this game, I really would like to buy it and enjoy it, but everything it's doing is wrong. Everything that made the early games great is being spat on and destroyed, while focusing on crappy story and annoyong puzzles, and so transforming the game into something that's clearly not a Zelda game.

Christ, could you try to indicate in some way which segments you're replying to with which parts of your post? Scrolling up and down constantly makes the whole thing hard to read. Number them or something.

I'm not going to reply to segments individually, only make statements that apply to overarching parts of your post.

Diminishing returns for 2D Zelda: Even if you like to pretend that the "formula" of the game was deviated from starting with Link to the Past, that doesn't change the fact that the first nadir of 2D Zelda was Adventures of Link, not LttP. The appeal of AoL was the lowest of the first three 2D Zelda games; but the general trend of appeal in those games was downward, and Link's Awakening ended up being the very lowest of them.

Absolute appeal: Absolute appeal means that Zelda games do not increase in popularity based on population they can sell to, according to past sales trends. Sales are determined by the absolute appeal of the game in question. The absolute appeal of Ocarina of Time and Twilight Princess is higher than that of Legend of Zelda; Phantom Hourglass beats out every game in the series but those three. That's a fact.

Zeniths and nadirs: This doesn't really belong in a conversation about what Zelda "should" be, it's a component of a different discussion, and I retract it with apology. This is also the case for a discussion of regional appeal, though; Japan's buying habits are running counter to the west for Zelda (Twilight Princess sold poorly there but is the best-selling game in the series by a considerable margin in both the Americas and Europe), which is a point that bears addressing, but only in another discussion.

Dictation of Zelda: No, what you buy or do not buy does not determine how well the game will sell, and assuming it does is fallacious. More, even that wouldn't determine what Zelda should be, only what form of Zelda would sell best (and so far, it's a game in the style of Ocarina or TP). The two things are not the same. Your rejection of puzzles isn't the norm, but the norm being accpetance doesn't necessarily mean that Zelda should have dungeoneering as a focus; the simple fact is that it does.

Appeal of Skyward Sword: I'm not having this discussion with you. You're set enough in how you see the game that I'm not going to be able to change it by talking to you.

Narrative focus: In Ocarina of Time your rival Mido was jealous of how much the prettiest girl in the village, Saria, liked you. The first segment of the game centers around your quest to gain favor with the village elder and the girl, and you would return at several necessary parts throughout the game to revisit this place and further expand on your relationship with the girl and with the village itself, up to and including Mido. In Wind Waker you team up with the pirate Tetra to go find your sister. Much of your movement in the game is dictated by Tetra's instructions, and you will visit the pirates several necessary times over the course of the story to further plan out how to rescue your sister with their help.

When you said Ocarina and Wind Waker weren't like that, you simultaneously are wrong and also hit upon the point: while those descriptions can be used to accurately summarize the plot viewed from a certain perspective, they don't ultimately capture the overarching plot of the games. The same is going to be true of Skyward Sword, regardless of whether or not you need to come back to the main village in Skyloft or not; the "plot" in Zelda is only ever made up of how the relationships between characters dictate the actions that characters take toward each other, and that's true in every game from the Legend of Zelda all the way through Spirit Tracks. The most important relationships in the game are always, always going to be between Link, Zelda, and Ganon - or whoever's standing in for Ganon. Ultimately the plot will revolve around saving either the girl or the world, and pretending anything else is disengenuous - yes, even with Aonuma saying it, because Aonuma constantly makes misleading jokes about the direction of the game. Don't you remember when he said the next game (this one) would be about a Dancing Link?

What Zelda should be: It's obvious that you think the first game should be the model for all future Zelda games, but there's no particular reason for anyone else to agree with you, and no objective measure by which the original game can be considered inherently superior to its successors. Don't buy the game if you don't like it. That's perfectly fine, and God knows nobody can make you bu ythe game. But, at the same time, it would be doing yourself and everyone else a favor if you could manage to stave off the self-entitled line of thought that can be summarized as "Zelda should be what I want and if Nintendo isn't doing that then they're destroying Zelda". You think Zelda has never veered away from what I wanted in the games? Wrong. That happens more or less every time a new game is announced. But change in this series is inevitable, and I know that my expectations aren't going to be fulfilled every time (and they shouldn't be; not only are they transient and mercurial but they also wouldn't be particularly fun, sometimes) so it's better for me and everyone involved to see the games as they are, not according to some imaginary grading system whereby they're compared solely to games from the series's distant past.

That's all. I've said my peace. I'm done talking to you; the last word in this discussion is yours for the taking.

Your extrapolation isn't actually based on anything except for recycled Malstromisms, which isn't actually an argument. Zelda games have never sold in direct relation to the total gamer population, or even the console userbase; if they did, then Wind Waker sold several times better than the original game. Zelda is a series with a certain degreee of absolute appeal,  and different games will appeal differently. In four months, Twilight Pricess will be the best-selling Zelda game of all time, and it's been ahead of the original game for something like two years.

You insist that they should strive to replicate what made the first Zelda game such a success, but why would they when it's not the biggest success in the series? Why, when that formula produced diminishing returns over the course of four games?

Zelda is a series which experiences natural and recurring zeniths and nadirs in its sales patterns, which is often down to unnecessary or unwanted sequels (Spirit Tracks) or games that people just didn't find as appealing as their predecessors (Adventures of Link, Link to the Past) or hardware limitations limiting the scope of the audience (Majora's Mask and probably Skyward Sword).

There's two things you need to understand, here, though.

The first is that you're still wrong in that nobody gets to dictate what Zelda should be, because dictating means that your opinion actually matters beyond your buying power. It doesn't, because people still buy the living shit out of the puzzle-dungeon 3D diatribes like Ocarina and Twilight Princess. But that's not the biggest reason - the biggest reason is that the Legend of Zelda, at its core, is about a young boy going on an adventure and exploring, and that's all it is. Hahaha, I'm kidding, see, that would be me dictating what Zelda is. But Zelda has always been a vehicle for experimentation in realizing traditional series motifs, and balking against change in Zelda is like balking against jumping in Mario. It's going to happen, and you need to be prepared for it. Change isn't bad in Zelda games when it still carries out certain concepts that make the series great.

Second and more, you are taking certain elements of Skyward Sword to be signals of doom when they aren't. Skyward Sword is going to be a high school drama in the same sense that Wind Waker was a buddy comedy about Link sailing around with pirates, or Ocarina was a gradeschool drama about Link growing up and coming back to see his friends. All of those things are true, but they're not the actual narratives of the game and they serve as character-building focuses for Link, not narrative structures for the game. Narrative structures for all but a very few Zelda games come down to this: some rat bastard took the princess, let's go kill him. All other character relationships serve only to highlight the fundamental relationship between hero, villain, and damsel, because that's the way it has always been.

And shit, what's not to like about how Skyward Sword is set up? Individual combat has been given more focus, and it looks like you need twitch-based reflexes as much as you do the ability to see where an enemy is holding its shield. The fight with the evil sorcerer is the hardest fight in the game seen so far and it doesn't have much directional horsing around at all, the guy is just fast and hits hard like a nightmare version of Dark Link from Ocarina of Time. Puzzle solving looks like the standard for the series since Link to the Past, which is interacting with the environment in ways that makes sense for the environment at hand. Oh, you have to turn a puzzle piece around to stick it in a hole - big freaking deal, there's only six orientations for the damn thing unless they move away from cubic designs. The overworld - haven't you seen how much they've avoided showing the overworld? How much they've steered us away from seeing the world below, dropping onl ythe barest hints of what we're going to see? They say that the exploration is like Wind Waker with more to see, free-roaming and enormous and with sidequests out your freaking nose.

Better combat than any other 3D Zelda, a giant world with lots of extra stuff to see, a centralized hub town with the best aspects of Majora's Mask, fun-to-use items with various applications (don't tell me you don't want to just scourge the Hell out of some lizard demons with the whip, you would be a liar), an art style that won't age, beautiful music, and they're levaing us the mystery, they're holding back so much of the game before release so there's so much to see

Christ, why not be excited? There's so much to be excited for. Fighting and flying and exploring and hardship and danger! It's shaping up to have everything, to be the best and hardest and most demanding of the 3D Zeldas. How can you balk at this game and not simultaneously rail at Ocarina and Majora and Wind Waker all at once?

I do believe you are my new favorite member.