Zelda Series

[Caim]

Eager to see how this will measure up to the Link's Awakening remake.

 

[H. P. Lovecraft's Cat]

Eager to see how this will measure up to the Link's Awakening remake.

It needs be far better. I don't think Link's Awakening is all that great.

 

[H. P. Lovecraft's Cat]

Package tracker is telling me EoW wont come in the mail until friday. I'm furious. I might try to crash my car into the mail truck when it delivers the game. If I preorder a game I expect the mother fucker to arrive ON REALESE DAY.

 

[ferratilis]

I started playing it like four days ago, on PC. For free.

 

[Caim]

Got mine in the mail today, let's take it for a spin.

 

[Ezekiel]

Didn't write this, but thought it was a good post. The Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom main campaigns were quite poor.

Eiji Aonuma speaking at the Game Awards 2023:

"It's interesting when I hear people say [they prefer the old entries] because I am wondering, 'Why do you want to go back to a type of game where you're more limited or more restricted in the types of things or ways you can play?' But I do understand that desire that we have for nostalgia, and so I can also understand it from that aspect."

https://www.ign.com/articles/zelda-...iew-nintendo-eiji-aonuma-hidemaro-fujibayashi

"That’s quite a clueless statement. It reeks of the same philosophy of the advent of 3D gaming and why anyone would prefer 2D when they can have 3D.

"Player agency has never been Zelda’s core appeal, a grand sense of adventure has. If they want to turn the franchise into a physics-based sandbox toy at the expense of marginalizing that sense of adventure, then attribute players’ desires for it to return to basic nostalgia (an incredibly reductionist viewpoint, IMO), then it’s obvious the game is in the hands of a current designer who holds no sense (or care) of the original spirit it was conceived in. I believe many fans of the franchise would be willing to sacrifice the freedom these sandboxes afford for that magical and wondrous feeling of progression through a more linear and structured framework, even if quite a bit more restrictive.

"Not everyone wants to play with a toy, they want to experience a journey. Unfortunately, that’s not the philosophy that Nintendo builds their games upon anymore."

 

[HansDampf]

I hate the nostalgia strawman.

 

[H. P. Lovecraft's Cat]

Echoes of Wisdom is a joy so far. Feels alot better to play than Link's Awakening (shitty framerate aside) and the combat is cool. Zelda fights like a necromancer. I might actually bother to finish this one unlike the last two games.

 

[H. P. Lovecraft's Cat]

Feels alot better to play than Link's Awakening (shitty framerate aside)

Wait what? Instead of fixing the framerate issues they managed to make them even worse? It's not a fuckin da Vinci, a game looking like that shouldn't suffer from framerate drops to begin with. Unbelievable this shit wasn't addressed

The switch is a dinosaur. I wasn't surprised.

 

[NwNgger]

Feels alot better to play than Link's Awakening (shitty framerate aside)

Wait what? Instead of fixing the framerate issues they managed to make them even worse? It's not a fuckin da Vinci, a game looking like that shouldn't suffer from framerate drops to begin with. Unbelievable this shit wasn't addressed

The Switch is based on 15 year old tablets and Japan is infamous for it's incompetence in coding. Expecting good performance from a Japanese game is like expecting an Indian to not shit in the street.

 

[Caim]

The world map's pretty funky, it's like a weird mix of A Link to the Past and Breath of the Wild.

 

[Talby]

Lots of thoughts after playing for a few hours. The world map is fucking me up. It's like visiting your old neighbourhood you grew up in, but 20 years later when it's familiar but a bunch of stuff is different and/or gone. Some familiar faces are still there, but it's mostly new ones, and your childhood home has been demolished and replaced with an apartment block. You can't go home again.

The change of pace to combat is refreshing. You don't always have access to a basic sword attack or instant damage spell, so you're relying on summons most of the time. The early ones like bats are trash but pretty quickly you get much more useful ones like Wolfos and some of the more powerful Moblins. It's kinda cool hanging back throwing shit at an enemy's back while your sword and board Moblin tanks them. You're limited by your little "Tri" summon points, but once you get a few under your belt you'll feel like a Diablo II Necro summoning things left and right while you sit back and laugh.

The puzzles are enjoyable, the game clearly takes inspiration from TotK and even has one ability directly ripped from it, (the ultrahand being able to pick up and move stuff) but summoning things to solve small puzzle dungeons is fun. I haven't done any of the main dungeons yet apart from the one in the tutorial because I've just been exploring.

The UI is bad, selecting echoes works the same as selecting an item to attach to your arrow in TotK, and you very quickly have a huge selection of echoes, so scrolling through to find a specific one is more of a chore than it should be. You should at least be able to select favourites, although you can sort by most used/last used.

There's too much junk found in treasure chests, I have a ton of random ingredients but don't even know how to mix them yet. Not that it matters because health is a non-issue in this game when you can plop a bed down anywhere and rest to regain all your hearts.

 

[H. P. Lovecraft's Cat]

the game clearly takes inspiration from TotK and even has one ability directly ripped from it, (the ultrahand being able to pick up and move stuff)

The worst shit in the game so far. The more time passes, the more I begin to believe that TotK is asshole cancer.

 

[The Decline]

Feels alot better to play than Link's Awakening (shitty framerate aside)

Wait what? Instead of fixing the framerate issues they managed to make them even worse? It's not a fuckin da Vinci, a game looking like that shouldn't suffer from framerate drops to begin with. Unbelievable this shit wasn't addressed

You need to overclock it to fix that.

 

[pakoito]

I'm playing in Yuzu and thought the slowdowns were caused by the emu. If it runs like that in real hardware, I wonder if someone will come up with a patch soonish.

Also, the reviewers agree with my review from last page. The first few hours are great, but novelty wears off and the game is not tight enough to compete with old 2D Zeldas.

 

[H. P. Lovecraft's Cat]

They gotta come up with a more intuitive way to sort echoes. Once those things start piling up it becomes a pain in the ass using them, and I don't even think I've collected half of them yet.

It's becoming a bigger problem here than in TotK I think.

 

[-M-]

Zelda 2 Enhanced PC remake

This is absolutely not the best way to play Zelda 2, nor is it really Zelda 2 at all.

Played through this recently and thought it does a good job of what it set out to do, which is turning Zelda 2 into every other Zelda game while trying (and mostly succeeding) to keep the aesthetics and mechanics in line with the original. There are some nice options for picking different Link sprites, variety of music tracks, and randomization options I'll never touch. The boss fights (which were severely lacking in the original) are slightly tweaked and there is now an epilogue at the end of the 2nd quest that culminates in a pretty decent 3-stage battle. The new content blends in well for the most part. Basically every town now has a mini-dungeon for you to visit for some side quest (you go into the mountains to rescue a fairy, or an abandoned well to restart water flow, etc.) - these all take just a few minutes to complete. Heart and magic containers are now found in thirds, so you won't get a health upgrade until midway through the first palace now if you've found the others. Also The fairy spell has been completely reworked (in a rather humorous way).

The early game is actually slightly more difficult now as you have to go through multiple dark rooms without the candle (the original had a single cave with a single enemy in it). Speaking of, the candle mechanics are also altered; no candle is pitch black, candle is slight illumination but you have to light a wall torch to fully light up a room. It's not really utilized much but is kinda neat to see (should have been utilized more in 2nd quest at least).

The downside is all the new upgrades make the endgame a joke. Stats go up to level 9 now (I think they maxed at 8 before?). You get upgrades that effectively give you a permanent shield spell, a permanent semi-reflect spell (you can block nearly anything but they don't bounce back), and a permanent semi-fire spell (you can kill anything but you don't shoot fireballs). Also you get magic regeneration (slow, but noticeable). Extra lives dolls are now a permanent buff (a decent change considering how they worked in the original).

All said though, it's a solid effort and worth checking out.

I do find it funny that the guy doesn't make you rip data from a rom (like the decompilations), he just gives you everything for free in a single download. Also he keeps all the info on Discord which kowtowed to Nintendo earlier this year and nuked two Switch emulator communities. Seems risky to me (also Ryujinx got Nintendoed today so RIP Switch emulation).

 

[Ezekiel]

Father, mother and daughter.

Liked it better when it was implied that the Gerudo were a harem, one male breeding with many women and another male born only every... what was it, hundred years? Presumably Ganondorf would have been that male in Ocarina of Time. The women leaving Gerudo Town to find Hylian men yet somehow keep their dark complexion through generations beginning in Breath of the Wild is lame. Well, there are a few lighter-skinned Gerudo now.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

Didn't write this, but thought it was a good post. The Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom main campaigns were quite poor.

Eiji Aonuma speaking at the Game Awards 2023:

"It's interesting when I hear people say [they prefer the old entries] because I am wondering, 'Why do you want to go back to a type of game where you're more limited or more restricted in the types of things or ways you can play?' But I do understand that desire that we have for nostalgia, and so I can also understand it from that aspect."

https://www.ign.com/articles/zelda-...iew-nintendo-eiji-aonuma-hidemaro-fujibayashi

"That’s quite a clueless statement. It reeks of the same philosophy of the advent of 3D gaming and why anyone would prefer 2D when they can have 3D.

"Player agency has never been Zelda’s core appeal, a grand sense of adventure has. If they want to turn the franchise into a physics-based sandbox toy at the expense of marginalizing that sense of adventure, then attribute players’ desires for it to return to basic nostalgia (an incredibly reductionist viewpoint, IMO), then it’s obvious the game is in the hands of a current designer who holds no sense (or care) of the original spirit it was conceived in. I believe many fans of the franchise would be willing to sacrifice the freedom these sandboxes afford for that magical and wondrous feeling of progression through a more linear and structured framework, even if quite a bit more restrictive.

"Not everyone wants to play with a toy, they want to experience a journey. Unfortunately, that’s not the philosophy that Nintendo builds their games upon anymore."

It's funny, my nostalgia is the opposite. I have nostalgia of games where I were not limited and not restricted to how solve and overcome obstacles. So for me games like BotW are a kind of return to the good old days. Maybe it's because that when I was a kid I was playing games on a PC and not on a console.

 

[Butter]

Did anyone play the 3DS versions of OoT or MM? I remember being interested until I saw this:



Just awful. Fire the designers who thought adding phases to the boss fights was a good idea.

 

[Caim]

Father, mother and daughter.

Liked it better when it was implied that the Gerudo were a harem, one male breeding with many women and another male born only every... what was it, hundred years? Presumably Ganondorf would have been that male in Ocarina of Time. The women leaving Gerudo Town to find Hylian men yet somehow keep their dark complexion through generations beginning in Breath of the Wild is lame. Well, there are a few lighter-skinned Gerudo now.

The fact that only one child every hundred years is a man implies that they're some kind of magical species, which is not out of the norm in this setting. We know from Ocarina of Time that the Gerudo come around to find "boyfriends" (they don't mention whether these are real relationships or that a hapless man is dragged off to be violently milked dry by several dozen tall, buff, dark-skinned women), so they don't need to engage in kiloptolemys of incest to keep the population going. Plus, having that would require a long-lived king who manages to keep knocking up Gerudo until his son comes of age so that he can knock up all of his half-sisters who are also his cousins.

But the girl raises even more questions. Rhondson and Hudson meet and marry during the events of Breath of the Wild, which means that the girl could not have been born prior to the end of the game. Mattison would be somewhere between six and ten years old, which implies that quite a few years have passed between the first and second games, making Link the oldest he's ever been (but given the minimal changes between the looks of all of the returning cast I reckon it has not been THAT long) in a mainline Zelda game.

 

[e-mailio estevez]

Did anyone play the 3DS versions of OoT or MM? I remember being interested until I saw this:



Just awful. Fire the designers who thought adding phases to the boss fights was a good idea.

The 3DS versions nerfed a lot of the fun elements out of MM, and added unfun phases for every single boss in the game. Carrying extra momentum when dashing into water in Deku form, or being able to swim fast without expending magic in Zora are big ones. I don't feel that the graphical 'upgrades' are large enough benefits to make either of the 3DS ports a better experience than the original games. Nerrel has a good video going into this, but it was something I felt even playing them for the first time.

Although I did like the 3DS XL as a platform and its head-tracking 3D effect in general, and did at least enjoy that aspect of it.

 

[Ezekiel]

making Link the oldest he's ever been

Want Link to be a child again, before he got the stupid earring. Boy leaving home, going on journey, fighting monsters, meeting sexy giant fairies, more magical somehow.

Found the last Breath of the Wild memory. Recognized the location in the picture, but took a while to find the spot. Only need three more orbs for max hearts. Two stamina wheels are enough. No guide, looked up nothing.

I can't believe there are 900 seeds. I have 279. Jesus. Just maxed out the weapon limit.

 

[pakoito]

I've been playing a bit more of Echoes of Wisdom and I'm considering dropping. The Lanyaru Temple Dungeon and the preceding climb was just not fun. It was a linear gauntlet and the puzzles were terribly mid. In general, the lack of interesting collectables and the constant menuing makes exploration boring. The still world portals are formulaic and samey, even if they're meant to flex your creative solutions they are so short it feels like you spend more time in the 4+ cutscenes you need for each.

Are the remaining 3 dungeons any better?

 

[Goratg]

Yeah, I’m also finding Echoes much less enjoyable after exploring the map and getting to the second set of dungeons.