LordTheNightKnight said:
Khuutra said:
First of all, I'd like to ask you to make a new topic if only because being taken to the wrong page when I click the "you've been quoted!" orange on my Recent Topics List is a pain in the ass.
Second of all, this is a pattern in our conversations: stop being so damn defensive. I have proven myself repeatedly to be on the level and (from time to time) different from the norm when it comes to my analyses or assumptions. If I'm unclear about thigns I apologize, but your defensiveness goes beyond htings I'm willing to take responsibility for.
Thirdly: the "mainstream" referred to by you and Malstrom is not the same thing as "lapsed gamers", an entirely different subset to which Malstrom describes himself as belonging to. When it comes to Zelda, he speaks for lapsed gamers, and he's been clear in that regard on several occassions. When he talks about the goofy-looking goblins in Skyward Sword, particularly the way their underwear shows, he's tlaking about his personal reaction to it to illustrate the point of silliness running counter to the tastes of lapsed Zelda fans (which may or may not be based in reality).
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1. I already stated this thread is glitchy, and we need a new one, so we are at least on that page.
2. I wasn't being defensive. I thought you were refering to him in a different context. That was a misunderstanding. When you clarified what you meant, I agreed.
3. That comment "I fully acknowledge that his ideas and game values are a valid metric for a certain subset" seems a lot more general than Zelda and lapsed gamers. Now that you clarified, I can properly respond.
I agree Zelda still has a lot of sales. But sales have had a lot more ups and downs after Ocarina than before. So at the very least it's clear sales could be steadier by following what worked with those games before rather than just fiddling around.
Or at least avoid fiddling around for the sake of fiddling around, and instead do it in a way that still feels like Zelda. Take Wind Waker: the saling could have worked, but the boring empty stretches should have been minimal instead of most of the map (realistic, but Zelda is fantasy), and the traveling should have been a lot more intutive instead of the wind changing system.
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You take defensive postures for Malstrom often enough.
"Sales have had a lot more up and downs after Ocarina than before".
Well, LtNK, I would hope that that would be reflexive. There were four Zelda games before Ocarina. Afterward, there have been nine. If you count only mainline console entries, there were three before and three after, with roughly equal zeniths and nadirs in terms of sales.
Referring to "what worked with those games before" is kind of avoiding the problem, because the series was in steady decline before Ocarina landed. AoL, LttP, LA - all of these games saw more or less steadily decreasing sales when compared to The Legend of Zelda. If the old formula is what makes Zelda games work, then Ocarina of Time adhered to that formula better than AoL, LttP, and LA - even better than LoZ itself. I reject that notion.
The thing about Zelda is that not only does it go through ups and downs in sales, but its zeniths and nadirs tend to be in line with different design concepts. The LoZ school - which mroe or less covered the first four games - either became diluted as the games continued to come out or became less appealing over time. Ocarina does not have the same kind of appeal as LoZ, but it still managed to otusell it. The Zelda audience saw a radical shift. Similarly, the audience that bought Phantom Hourglass - the best-selling handheld Zelda ever, and a sound thrasher of Link to the Past in terms of raw numbers - was not the same one that bought Ocarina. All three schools - LoZ, OoT, and PH - appeal to somewhat different audiences in almost completely different ways. There is a core Zelda buyer - that's people like me - who buy all the Zelda games and enjoy the vast majority of them because they see Zelda as being a series inherently about experimentation.
I am digressing.
The point here is that Ocarina came out after a considerable nadir in the sales of 2D Zelda games - even for Link's Awakening, which was much closer in spirit to the first game than were LttP and AoL. It is not apparent - much less objective - that returning to a formula that was already in decline would make the sales of the series steadier. You'll note that Majora's Mask is the outlier in comparison to AoL, but Wind Waker sold in line with LttP and Twilight Princess sold better than both versions of Link's Awakening combined (or the original game, even).
Steady sales across different schools of Zelda design probably isn't what Nintendo is going here. If it were, they would be holding steadfastly to old formulas when - I think you will agree - they are not doing that. They are experimenting because they are looking for the next Ocarina formula, the enormous shift that will rocket the series back up to the height of its niche.
Wind Waker was fine. By the time sailing got really bad, you were able to warp around. Also: sold in line with LttP on a much smaller userbase (I generally reject the userbase argument because I don't think Zelda's appeal is tied to absolute size of the userbase, but I'm willing to be a hypocrite to prove a point).
Zelda is a complicated series based around shifting dynamics with no singular appeal. I came up with the idea of there being three schools of Zelda design because it allows for easy categorization and condensation of what differentiates the differently-selling eras of the series. My big hope is that Skyward Sword will represent a fourth school of design, but we'll see.
