Let's go through this the hard way, then. For the record, yes, I did read the article the first time around. Thanks for the insults, by the way - funny how you say I talk like a politician but you're the one resorting to ad hominems.
A quick reminder: the author's thesis is, and I quote:
modern Zeldas are broken at their core. By modern I mean the console Zeldas Ocarina forward (though Link to the Past is not innocent), and by core I mean their central structure and mechanics.
Keep this in mind for future reference. Zelda's structure and mechanics are broken.
Players are constantly reminded that they're shackled to a mechanistic land. There is no illusion of freedom because the gears that keep the player and Hyrule in lockstep are imminently legible. You read the landscape all too easily; you know what it's asking of you. One of the greatest offenders occurred early on with A Link to the Past: most bomb-able walls became visible. What had been a potential site of mystery in the original Legend of Zelda (every rockface) became just another job for your trusty keyring. Insert here. Go on about your business.
Lack of mystery is not bad game design, which is why I dismissed this point initially. Entertaining it, though, I would argue that being able to see where things are hidden is actually better than hiding them. My guess is that most players never finished the original Zelda without a strategy guide because the only way to do so was to make very specific interpretations of extremely vague dialogue given in-game, and to essentially use every item on every portion of the screen. That is not fun, that is tedious. There is value in mystery, but a lack of direction is not the same thing. A mystery is "how do I do X?", not "here is a list of all possible actions in all possible game locations - perform each of them."
It's only gotten worse over the years. Skyward Sword, with its segregated, recycled areas and puzzly overworld dungeons, is not an outlier; it is the culmination of years of reducing the world to a series of bottlenecks, to a kiddie theme park (this is not an exaggeration: Lanayru Desert has a roller-coaster). But a world is not one predetermined sequence after another, and a world is not a puzzle with a single solution. A world is more than a space, more than a place; it is something to inhabit and be inhabited by. What you infuse a space with to make it habitable, to make it memorable (since memory is profoundly spatial), gives the place its character, its soul.
Here we see more of the sentimentality that I was talking about. The lamentation for the fact that Zelda games are not about worlds has nothing to do with game mechanics and everything to do with personal preference. Not all games are or should be about creating worlds for the player to explore, nor should they be. This does not make Zelda a bad game.
That said, this does pertain to structure - and from what I've heard, the removal of the overworld from Skyward Sword was a big problem for some players. On the one hand, getting rid of it makes the game a lot more direct and does indeed put the focus on puzzles, but it also reduces the game to a series of challenges. This is a definite design consideration and worth reflecting on.
If Zelda is to reclaim any of the spirit that Miyamoto first invested in its world, it needs to do a few things. It needs to make most of the map accessible from the beginning. No artificial barriers to clumsily guide Link along a set course. Players know that game; they know when they're being played. Link must be allowed to enter areas he's not ready for. He must be allowed to be defeated, not blocked, by the world and its inhabitants.
The author posits that artificial barriers are "clumsy" (which demands exactly what qualifies as an artificial barrier, but never mind that), and that Zelda should effectively go open-world (or at least open-ended), but provides no real reason why the current world design and progression in Zelda does not work - because he can't. It isn't broken, he just doesn't like it - and that's fine, but it has nothing to do with Zelda being "broken." This does pertain to structure, again, but not mechanics. Here we also see the beginning of the difficulty argument, which I'll get to shortly.
This world, dangerous, demanding exploration, must also be mysterious. This means: illegible, at least at first. Zelda needs new unstated rules, ones that must be relearned, even by Zelda veterans like myself. How can you truly explore if you know how everything works already? How can you ever be surprised if every ‘secret' is conspicuously marked as such? Hyrule needs space to breathe, fields of purposeless grandeur (like Shadow of the Colossus), where secrets could be anywhere because they're not obviously right there. What is an adventure if not a journey through an unknown landscape? It's not a retread across familiar ground, the car ride to work, the province of sleepwalkers.
I fully agree that Zelda needs to do new things. As I said, I'd love to see a new Zelda game that breaks from convention. But this, too, has nothing to do whatsoever with mechanics or any fundamental flaw with the series.
Zelda has felt like work since Ocarina, overstuffed with tasks, jobs, trials. And not just in the plodding opening sequences or all the requests by the feckless citizens of Hyrule. Even the sacrosanct Zelda dungeons, holiest of design holies, have fallen victim to this. So many things to do, so little pleasure in doing them. Dungeons suffer further in their over-reliance on environmental puzzles. Even calling them ‘puzzles' does a disservice to all the fine puzzles in gaming. Most Zelda puzzles are tiresome and dull, but the problem isn't just puzzle quality or lack of ingenuity; it's using them as the structuring principle of a 30+ hour game. They determine the very flow of Link's dungeoneering and make the whole plunge into the dark seem more like a modest exercise, a mock trial in which you needn't break a sweat. Some claim the result is balanced, tastefully paced, well-appointed. So why do Zelda's dungeons often feel so pedestrian and domesticated, with about the same rhythm and urgency as the music we call ‘adult contemporary'?
The author proposes this question, but short of the complaint about challenge, doesn't really answer it. If I was talking real game design and writing this piece, I'd offer up a level design document of a Zelda dungeon complete with a breakdown of the challenges and puzzles, or at least a detailed moment-to-moment description of a scenario, which is what a question like this warrants. Difficulty, however, is not really in itself an issue with game structure or mechanics in Zelda, as I'll get to.
A game that relies on puzzles, and Zelda in particular, is sometimes considered a ‘thinking man's game'. Which is funny, because I haven't had to think about much of anything in Zelda for years. This embarrassing prejudice against facility with a controller certainly isn't doing Zelda any favors. We get instead a salad bar of limp riddles and the vague sensation that it's good for us (kid-tested, mother-approved). Where is the joy in movement, the miracle of motion onscreen? We mostly just fumble with our keyring and call it a day.
Here we come to difficulty, and the implication that higher difficulty would make Zelda more interesting. This is true, and I wholeheartedly agree. But, and here's the kicker: this still isn't mechanics. The mechanics in Zelda are still identical. If you aren't very good at the game, you'll have a very tense, challenging, and exhilarating experience... but most players are pretty good (being lifelong gamers and Zelda fans), so it's not. This isn't an issue of the mechanics or anything fundamentally wrong with Zelda on a structural or systemic level, though. It's just a matter of game balance, which is not the same thing (although an important thing all the same, and one which I really think Nintendo needs to make up for with multiple difficulty levels).
Let's consider difficulty in a Zelda game using the Forest Temple from Ocarina of Time as an example. The typical dungeon layout concerns an introductory challenge (a small navigational puzzle, and maybe some light combat against familiar enemies) in order to warm the player up. From there, the player is presented with, alternatingly, combat and puzzles in a fairly measured sequence. In the Forest Temple, we see this in the wolves present at the beginning (fought in the Lost Woods earlier), a middle room which requires the player flip a switch (a familiar puzzle), and another room full of light combat.
From there, the player enters a central room where a few other rooms are accessible. The player will eventually be funneled into one particular path due to locked doors and other obstacles, but initially there is a portion of exploration and familiarizing (common to most other Zelda dungeons). After a few more light combat challenges and more complex navigational challenges (such as multi-step switch-flipping puzzles), the player ends up in a new situation: a puzzle requiring the player to shoot Poes as they appear in paintings, one after the other, before they disappear. Then, the player is called upon to fight said Poe. This new challenge and new enemy have both a learning phase and an execution phase, after which they are repeated a few times with the terms of the execution made a bit more difficult. This same dungeon will later introduce Stalfos (a common late-game enemy, initially very intimidating) and also has a mini-boss, a few more unique puzzle mechanics and situations, and a final boss which is, again, unique. The Stalfos, Poe battles and the final boss are all challenging, but the rest of the combat is generally pretty easy to get through.
This is not all that different from most other Zelda dungeons. Structurally, they are basically beat-for-beat the same in terms of pacing and overall flow. The only key problem is that the actual level of difficulty of newer games tends to be quite low. Attrition can still be a factor, but stocking up on healing items can usually mitigate this problem. If enemies did more damage in newer Zelda games, you'd have the exact same game structure and mechanics, but the difficulty would make certain situations more risky.
Earlier Zelda games were basically arena fights and combat gauntlets (with occasional platforming challenges), but attrition was a bigger problem and generally contributed to the trhill of things. There is a structural difference here, but only really because there were no puzzles included in the gameplay as of yet - the actual pacing as far as encounters tends to be fairly similar, with a mix of tough and weak enemies at set intervals, mini-bosses in the harder dungeons and full-on bosses at the end. As a designer, I'm not sure exactly what compelled Nintendo to make their combat easier over time (bad playtesters? hitting a wider and less experienced audience?) but while it does affect the overall tension and fun of the game, none of that difficulty has anything to do with structure or mechanics.
Skyward Sword would seem to respond to this – it's even got sword in the title. But what a terrible, terrible response it is. I must give credit to Aonuma and his team for trying something new. But instead of dynamic, 1-to-1 motion controlled battles, we get fights that have been turned into puzzles. True, you can't flail and succeed, but the supposed precision required actually just makes for a game of Simon Says. You go that way, I go this; you signal horizontal, I comply. Each motion is discrete, requested. (And that's when the prickly Wii motion-plus actually works.) It creates a moment-to-moment pacing problem, inserting pauses, start-stop-repeat, and thus you rarely chain moves together with any sort of fluidity. Enemies are patient, almost polite, and usually allow for individual encounters, yet in a game about mastering a sword, you never even duel. When the mobs do finally come at the end, there is no finesse to be had. You will hack, and you will slash.
This is, so far, the only piece of this article that actually pertains to game mechanics. For what it's worth, the author is spot on. Skyward Sword's combat is novel, but it grows tiresome once you realize how to respond to the different enemies and their attack/defense patterns, because there are only a handful. Furthermore, the lack of aggression most enemies displays reduces combat to pattern-matching rather than execution. Part of this, I imagine, is the Wii's limited precision in controls, but part of it can also be blamed on trying to reduce combat to Simon Says. Good game design is about working within the confines of the hardware, and the Wii, even with MotionPlus, is not up to the task of proper 1:1 sword-fighting. Just like the crappy "blow into the mic" bits in the DS Zelda games, just because you're working within what the platform is capable of doesn't make a mechanic fun.
The author goes on and laments the lack of progression in Skyward Sword's combat. I fully admit that I have not played Skyward Sword (I've watched a fair chunk of gameplay) so I don't know if this is true or not (the game has an upgrade system so I assume you can unlock new attacks and techniques, like in Twilight Princess), but if not then that is a definite step back.
Zelda has struggled with lucid, integrated gameplay since transitioning to 3D. Ocarina is lauded for taking Zelda into the third dimension, but I remain unconvinced. Modern Zeldas are translations of their 2D forbearers; they've never been fundamentally reconceived in 3D from the ground up. In choosing what elements made Zelda fundamentally Zelda, Nintendo chose poorly. They took the puzzles instead of the action, the conventions instead of the world, the items instead of the spirit. They never adequately considered the pacing differences inherent to 3D, the consequences of constantly looking around and recentering the screen, the changed expectations that attend a more recognizable world (not a compressed 2D gamespace). Unlike Mario, Zelda never convincingly made the jump. It's no wonder Link still can't.
This starts to sound a bit more design-relevant but doesn't really get there. We have:
1) Suggestion that action is as a mode of interaction more compelling than puzzle-solving. Not really worth responding to because it's pure preference and kind of outside the scope of the discussion anyway.
2) "World" and "conventions" are too ill-defined to really respond to. I'm just not sure what he means - by world, I imagine it's the structure being referred to, but conventions? What conventions? Not explained.
3) Items instead of the spirit? Again, not very specific in meaning here, but I'm going to assume he means the game's items were literally adapted, instead of re-imagined for the 3D game space. In this case, I agree, but only partially - for instance, items like the bow and boomerang have been given new functionality that takes advantage of 3D space. For instance, the boomerang has a full 3D arc that can grab items behind and/or above objects, something impossible in 2D gameplay, and other things like the Mirror Shield require the player to direct light to targets in full 3D space. Bombs? Even they had their nature changed - the player can now throw them in an arc, under and over objects or terrain. I only really go into this because, while the author doesn't explore it, it could have been relevant to his argument if he could have demonstrated that these things did not work.
Zelda needs to be harder. Much harder.[...]
I already touched on the difficulty here. He has good points, but again, difficulty is not mechanics. There is some suggestion about controls being "incoherent" but this is never expanded upon, which would be nice because a discussion of controls in Zelda would be interesting. I've found in general that movement in the newer 3D Zelda games has been especially floaty - no sense of acceleration, and there isn't enough variance between full run and walking. I much prefer the "weightier" movement of the Nintendo 64 games.
Another way to say this: modern Zeldas do not respect the player. Many gamers express this as too much handholding and blame the Nintendo helpline reps who accompany you through Hyrule. No doubt, Navi, Midna, and Fi intrude, remind, and overexplain, all naggy and mothersome. At least Midna, one of the only strong characters the series has yet to produce, is cheeky when she chastises you. Yet even if these more obvious guiding hands were eliminated from Zelda, respect for the player would not be restored. Each game is one giant guiding hand, and even when its condescension is not spelled out very slowly via text scrawl, its gated world, blatant signaling (this goes there), and countless safety nets make sure the player gets the message.
This starts to get more into design as well, but this still doesn't really speak to why Zelda might be mechanically or systemically broken. The games make sure players know what's going on and why. This might make them easier, or maybe come off as condescending, but this is a presentation issue and not a mechanical one, just as a lack of clear objectives even when the game tries to introduce them (such as in the older Zelda games, especially Zelda II) is also poor presentation. Presentation is part of design, but again - not mechanics and certainly not on any fundamental level as far as rules and interactions go.
Plot in modern Zeldas is another culprit in the Case of the Sluggish Pacing. It only thinly veils the mechanics being explored, and it bends the adventure in ways that feel forced and unnatural. Especially when the needy denizens of Hyrule get involved. At this point, I fear speaking to anyone without a golden triangle on her hand. When did everyone become so inane and needy? The original Zelda had no villages or houses; the only remaining residents were hidden away in caves, the clearest indication that Hyrule had already fallen to the enemy. They were cryptic, terse, mercenary and only rarely asked anything of you (one letter to be delivered to an old woman, one grumbly Moblin to be fed). Link was a student of Hyrule and its people, learning how everything worked, how the world could be saved. He was not the people's personal benefactor slash errand boy. This makes the player feel awkwardly like both the center of the universe and an indentured servant. Myself, I need neither additional chores nor reinforcement for my solipsism.
I agree with the author here - and I really do want to stress, I don't disagree with the sentiment of the article, only its particularities - but once again, plot and presentation are not mechanics.
For all the talk of golden triangles and lost girls and pig thieves, this onscreen shift between the first two games makes visible the essential Zelda story. It's the movement from the world you know to the one beyond, from country to city, from country to world, ongoing still, ever incomplete. It never gets old because it speaks to the inexhaustible experience of growing older, the perpetual Katamari Damacy scale shift of a life in time. Modern Zeldas don't need to lean on tired plots to tell this story. The player could experience it firsthand if offered a compelling, expansive Hyrule, the kind of world that seems to expand the more you explore it.
Same story as above - I agree about this, and it is a design and structural issue, although I have to wonder what the criteria is for an expansive game world. Zelda can and frequently does explode in size and offer the player a good deal of freedom (usually when the overworld becomes accessible) and raises the stakes accordingly. The Wind Waker offered an entire ocean with dozens of islands to explore! Again, maybe this is more an issue with Skyward Sword but while I totally echo the sentiment that story in Zelda should be player-driven, the particularities of the argument are a bit sketchy for me.
The rest of the piece is an outro so I won't go into that, as nothing relevant is said there.
To review: aside from the discussion on combat in Skyward Sword, and fleeting hints, nothing in the article actually pertains to the thesis presented, at least as far as mechanics go, which was my initial qualm. There are a lot of very prescient sentiments, and as I've repeated many times over, I do agree with plenty of them. But, insofar as being an analysis of game mechanics or making efforts to actually deconstruct Zelda to find what is "broken" about it? No, there's very little here - a lot of stuff that at best comes down to personal preference regarding game design and narrative structure, but little demonstrably wrong about existing Zelda games on a mechanical or systemic level.
I think the Kotaku article would have been a lot more effective (at least for me, in my infinitestimally critical-bitch capacity) if it had started out by saying something like "Zelda's focus on structured storytelling conflicts with the strengths of mechanics, and its increasing mechanics-driven presentation has degraded the sense of mystery that made the series famous." That right there would have been accurate to the article and probably quite true. However, the author brought up the bit about the game mechanics and structure itself being somehow fundamentally broken, and that's why I examined the article through that lens. It's not really surprising it doesn't stand up that way, because I'm sure the author was never actually writing it with that in mind - either because it was a simple oversight, or because the author genuinely does not understand what game mechanics actually are.
That is what I was objecting to when I gave my reply. I realize in hindsight I was probably a bit crass, and to be totally fair - in re-reading more closely I did come across some stuff I missed the first time, especially near the end, where I began to glaze over regarding the world structure and its relation to narrative. I'll also repeat that the article is well-written, well-intentioned and generally on the nose (a rare exception for Kotaku). It's a good piece of journalism, and for that I think it deserves praise, because we don't get enough of it. It's just not really a good design and mechanics discussion, which it sets out to be.
Still: even after the insults, thanks for calling me out. It forced me to elaborate and clarify, and as such was a productive mental exercise.
