@shadow-wolf I think the difference with Wind Waker is, while it is short for a Zelda game due to its time constraints and large amount of planned content that didn't make it into the game, it still has a solid 7 dungeons. Dungeons always feel like story content, and they are definitely main quest content which gives the game a decent runtime where you feel like the time you're spending on them is worthwhile because you're trying to figure out the puzzles and thinking, not just traveling from point A to point B.
And please, @Dezzy, the only thing Breath of the Wild did to alleviate the problem in Twilight Princess which you misremember was gut all of the items that any Zelda game would have. Every item in TP was used in subsequent dungeons' puzzles, and the ball and chain is a weapon, you can use it in combat. Even then, there's nothing wrong with using an item for its intended purpose. The City in the Sky is different to anything else in Zelda because they created a full new item for the end of the game. There's plenty to screw around with between the bomb arrows, hawkeye, ball & chain, and all the items that you can use on horseback, not to mention a whole transformation for Link that most Zelda games lack.
Item versatility with regards to battle was the problem in Skyward Sword and Breath of the Wild, things like the beetle and runes are too slow and leave you too vulnerable to effectively use in combat. The damage dealt by magnesis, statis, or bombs in Breath was especially underpowered compared to the grindy enemy health pools.
Oh yeah, the mountains of gear you accumulate in Zelda titles that are only useful a handful of times throughout the entire game.
I'd prefer any future Zelda games to eliminate the need to rely on unique gear entirely, like in BotW. If that's not possible, though, then allowing you to rent and return what you need to complete a dungeon, like in ALBW, is a perfectly acceptable alternative.
@Tsurii Definitely agree. The BotW approach is very freeing, and I'd love to see them build on that foundation. I can't tell you how much I appreciate being able to discover whatever I want at my own pace instead of running around Hyrule, scanning walls like a madman looking for the next spot to fire my hookshot at.
And ALBW definitely pioneered that sense of non-linearity that BotW fully embraced. It also has some FANTASTIC puzzles thanks to the wall-merging ability. Definitely the best of the 2D games.
@Dezzy You literally can't complete the game without using the Spinner, Dominion Rod, and Double Clawshot after the Arbiter's Grounds, Temple of Time, and City in the Sky.
Which, if you understand Zelda, is good. There are no shortage of other open world games to play that don't require any intelligent gameplay at all, not even the minimum that was called upon in Breath of the Wild.
@Dezzy The Spinner is needed for switches in the Temple of Time and to ascend the broken staircase to Ganondorf in Hyrule Castle. The Dominion Rod is used on the ancient statues hidden all over Hyrule both to get collectables and for the quest to unlock the City in the Sky. The Double Clawshot is used in Hyrule Castle and in the Star mini game. The Ball & Chain is useful for hitting things with a Ball & Chain. All have at least a couple metroidvania puzzles in various places around the overworld.
@Haru17, I gotta agree with @Dezzy here. Maybe you're right about the ball and chain, but the spinner was a pretty gimmicky item. After its temple, you only used it like once in Hyrule Castle, and honestly that use didn't feel organic at all (it felt more like the developers were like "Oh yeah we gave them this item, forgot about that. Let's make them use it here so it makes it appear somewhat useful." Then again, as you know, I wasn't a fan of the game my first time through, so maybe my second play through would be better.
Speaking of my 2nd playthrough, I forgot how epic that chase sequence with that King monster on pig who took Colin was! That was great!
@Ralizah@Tsurii BotW approach for items is definitely my preference. No more going through 3 dungeons knowing already that you'll first get a slingshot, then bombs, then arrows, etc. It got pretty unrewarding when you already knew what you were going to get. BotW almost respected that you played Zelda games before and you don't need to put in tens of hours just to get an item you've used in prior games.
The main room of Hyrule Castle has a bunch of chandeliers you can hang from and move between with the Double Clawshot. It's also used in part of that broken staircase.
I would like the return of items like the hookshot, beetle ect in the next game. I didn't like having all of the runes from the start, but I can see how it was needed because of the shrines.
However I don't see shrines becoming a staple of an "open air" zelda game, I think it was just their way of having some dungeon-like gameplay spread across the world as well as promoting exploration. For the next game they are going to need to either shrink the world or add more variety, and depending on which they pick we might see shrines return.
I think they could reintroduce unique equipment again but instead of being an item that only works in a dungeon and a few other places they could just provide an interesting alternative.
Traversing similar landscapes can feel repetitive at times and adding dungeon items could have helped change things up. For example the hookshot could pull you up part of a wall so you don't have to climb the whole time while also being used to pull enemies off cliffs. The beetle could also come back and be used to scout an area, carry bombs or maybe pick up small enemies.
I think Cryonis was almost following this concept, in my opinion it's the worst rune but it provides a new way to traverse rivers and lakes and helped add variety to exploration.
Clearly Nintendo wanted to emulate Skyrim's '100+ dungeons' tagline that helped it make a freaking billion dollars because they like money, but they just didn't have the production pipeline set up to make the majority of that new, visually interesting, or even dungeons at all. Half of the shrines were just boss and treasure rooms.
Let's hope the Zelda team ditch shrines, because they sucked, and return to competency to make 6-10 meaty next gen dungeons. The explorable world would be a lot more interesting if there was less of it, no filler, hundreds more points of interest that are actually unique, and if you could actually discover a Zelda dungeon behind a mountain like everyone wanted when they first revealed the game without a title because they had no strong ideas for its identity besides just 'Skyrim Too: Korok Boogaloo' GAH!
But really the dungeons will still suck like A Link Between Worlds' if there isn't a dungeon order because the whole point of Zelda is building a gradually growing toolset of items and abilities that can be called upon at any time to traverse obstacles. And if you don't build on those obstacles to have the game calling upon more and more of your inventiveness and range of action the whole damn thing just plays flat like Breath of the Wild's shrines that just ask you to do the same actions with the same items and never introduce new puzzle elements or functions to those items to diversify the experience GAH!
You couldn't make an open world game on NES any more than you could a 3D game, open world games don't have loading screens every few tiles. You've clearly bought into Breath of the Wild's marketing taglines though. Apparently you've also remained ignorant of the open world industry for the past decade, so let me remind you: there are infinitely more listless open world games on Playstation and Xbox. They're generally a much better choice if you can't stand a game actually asking you to think through puzzles that are actually different and challenging (not pushing buttons faster but actually challenging) instead of just killing Bokoblins like so many Far Cry goons.
That's the game Breath of the Wild is, it's built after so many western open world games that generally have a focus on story or something else to keep you interested. But bloody Mario Odyssey has a more interesting and subversive take on damsel princesses than Zelda: Wooly World.
I didn't have a point.
I don't like the story for Breath of the Wild much at all. Mostly because almost nothing actually happens. If you're gonna have a story based on flashbacks, you need to have a hell of a lot of them and they need to be incredibly relevant to what's going on in the present, which a lot of them weren't. They were just generic padding for Zelda's character. And Zelda being stuck in the castle has almost no importance for the story at all. They could've easily done it so they trapped Ganon in the castle with magic and then Zelda just went and hibernated with Link. Pretty much everything would've still worked the same but they could've done story events in the present rather than flashbacks.
If you wanna talk about subverting expectations, not that you need to do that for a good story, a pretty damn good twist would've been that Zelda had been dead for 100 years and it'd been her ghost communicating with Link, like with King Rhoam, the 4 heroes...and Bruce Willis.
Yeah and sorry to inform you but you absolutely COULD make a 3D game on the NES too. It'd just be awful. I think a lot of people have that misconception but there is no such thing as a 3D-capable computer compared to a non-3D capable one. The difference between 2D and 3D is entirely contained in the mathematics, not in the technology.
The only thing you get is specific hardware features that makes some of the 3D parts run quicker. That's what something like that FX-chip with the SNES is doing. It's not making it 3D-capable. It was already 3D capable. It's adding certain hardware functions that mean you can render 3D quick enough to actually play.
@subpopz No, it isn't open world because it's top-down and because its open world uses loading screens. Witcher, AC, and other games don't have to use as many loading screens because they don't have dungeons. The distinguishing factor between Zelda 1 and modern open world games are, of course, the fact that it's a 2D game made before open world games were even coined and the fact that its overworld has to be loaded in every few steps.
@Dezzy Alright, I agree with what you're saying. Not everything needs to subvert expectations, but I feel narratively formulaic series like Mario and Zelda desperately, desperately do (which is why I appreciated the ending of Odyssey for as much story as Mario games typically have). A really good twist for Zelda, I think, would be to have Zelda not infantilized and damsel'd but instead have an active roll in the game world as its occurring. A resistance leader, an emissary, a wartime queen, Sheik — something! Breath of the Wild's story didn't have to have a good characterization of Zelda if the game didn't focus on her (see Twilight Princess), but since she was like 70% of the maybe hour of cutscenes, she really needed to be more interesting than Frog Girl.
I think I'd feel a lot more favorably toward Breath of the Wild if it wasn't just an open world game divergent from the Zelda series but one that also told an interesting story. It's a good game to me — not a great Zelda game but a good general game — but my love for it is just at zero. The discourse around the game about player agency and 'best Zelda ever,' sometimes from people who've never finished another Zelda ever, is not helping that at all. And at the core there's NoA's broken promises of dungeon, their lie about it being 'the ultimate Zelda game,' and the lack of any quality 3D Zelda-genre game for a decade now and the low likelihood that anyone will put in the work to make a level-based metroidvania game that long, unique, and inventive in the coming decade.
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Topic: Which Zelda game has the best (x)?
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